Late Night Surfing

I was surfing the web tonight and I found a whole bunch of sites dedicated to the Kobe Bryant issue. A couple of them named the victim, some of them actually put her address, email, messenger ID up --- some put the information of other people involved up, and all of it called "public information" --- some even put up pictures (how credible they are, I don't know, they all look like someone different to me --- so I'm calling BS on them)

I find two things horribly appalling with this kind of information. Number one is that it is really a lowest common denominator thing, in other words, it appeals to the natural curiousity in us all but in a very very DARK way

On some of the message boards, the discussion just got really bizarre with people speculating about presumed white-black interracial sex fantasies, about which race is better, about who deserves what they got, just really dark stuff

It's sad. No one wanted to talk about facts ... but then when I think about it, we know very few if ANY FACTS, other than Kobe was charged with third degree sex assault.

So it made me think, is the media or are these websites fairly disseminating information? I mean, what do we really know at this point at all? Call me ignoramus numero uno, but I can't say that I know much --- and this is after what two weeks straight of so-called NEW news coverage

Two members of the media have really made me think, why? in terms of what they reported. Tom Leykis who reported the victim's name. Matt Drudge who reported that the case is controversial because it "probably" involves anal sex. How does it improve our understanding at all? To me, these acts only add to the sensationalism and detract from the process of finding of fact that the "criminal justice" process is supposed to do

Yeah, that's how I spent my night, looking at car wrecks --- and like most people who view carwrecks you go OOH, but then just drive-by. I don't know how to improve this situation --- maybe that's what we've become in this early part of the 21st century, and its a bit weird and sad