A BETTER IDEA FOR A MEREDITH VIERA INTERVIEW

Today DWT contributor Kevin Laffey was moved to send a letter to the staff of NBC-TV's Today Show. He and I thought some people here might want to reflect on what he had to say-- and why.
Kevin's letter:

Dear Today Show Staff,

While the exclusive Paris Hilton interview may have gone to Larry King, you were able to hit your own new low today by exploiting the death of Jessie Davis and her unborn child. It may have been with disgust that I watched Meredith Vieira interview Bobby Cutts’ ex-girlfriend Nikki Giavasis in the 12th minute of her 15 minutes of fame, but it was disbelief and nausea that I felt as Ned Davis and Meredith emoted together in a hushed, private moment for just a few million mourning viewers only two days after the discovery of his daughter’s body. Mr. Davis should not have been on TV and NBC should have had the ethics and good taste to resist temptation to land that “exclusive”. It was tawdry and cheap yellow journalism or, more to the point, infotainment. Journalism had nothing to do with it.

When was the last time the Today Show, or NBC News overall, had the compassion and courage enough to interview the parents of a child killed from the collateral damage caused by US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan? Maybe then an American public lulled by entertainment news will begin to wake up to the fact that there is a war going on that we are all responsible for and that there are faceless deaths of those as innocent as Jessie Davis and her child happening every day, if not every hour, that are the result of our reckless engagement.

Granted, the tens of thousands of Middle Eastern civilians may not look or speak like us nor be as delicious a news item as a murder in an adulterous, mixed race, Midwestern affair, but the impact of those deaths on our world is exponentially greater than that one grisly crime will turn out to be not just “Today”, but for generations to come.

Shame on you. Shame on us.

Sincerely,

Kevin Laffey