Apr 6, 2005

The Blotter : The O'Hannity Factor: how Terri Schiavo became big news

The O'Hannity Factor: how Terri Schiavo became big news

The anatomy of a made story

by Steve Perry, with additional reporting by Molly Priesmeyer

No right-to-die case has ever attracted the kind of media saturation coverage that the Terri Schiavo case received. Not even Karen Ann Quinlan, the first such story to hit national media (in 1975), and certainly not Nancy Cruzan, Christine Busalacchi (an early-1990s Missouri case in which then-Governor John Ashcroft intervened), Lucio Bretano, or Michael Martin. Why? The press has tended to plead zeitgeist, to claim that this was an issue whose time had come. But the real answer would appear to lie in the efforts of Fox News and the Bush family and the pack tendencies of the media at large."

Continued.......

No comments: