Aruba, Jamaica ooo I wanna take you

Bob Costas – the man who has become Larry King’s most frequent guest host – reportedly refused to anchor a show last week because the program was focused on Natalee Holloway, the American teenager who recently went missing in Aruba. And while producers insist this will be an isolated incident, a larger problem seems to be brewing.

The real issue here isn’t that Mr. Costas is a poor newsman, hard to work with, demanding or arrogant. He may well be, but this episode isn’t indicative of any of those things. Rather, the problem presented by this situation is far more serious: Mr. Costas actually has standards.

The divide between what qualifies as “breaking news” on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC and that which actually appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times is ever-growing. While the television media has flocked to Aruba to share the story of an attractive, blonde female in distress, the traditional media has wisely stayed focused on the big picture. Ms. Holloway doesn’t influence the economy, national security or much of anything else. Her disappearance, crude as it may be to say, is, at best, a human interest story. But human interest stories aren’t supposed to be dragged out for months on end. People are killed every day, people go missing every day and crime strikes US citizens abroad every day. Simply put, in the grand scheme of things about which credible news outlets should care, this story doesn’t even qualify for page D32 status.

Of course, the bigger problem here is that the cable news networks are good at covering this stuff. Greta Van Susteren has been getting record ratings with her coverage of Ms. Holloway. Geraldo is cashing in too. And Chris Pixley gladly filled in for Mr. Costas on Larry King Live. People gobble this stuff up. In a world of reality television, this is the ultimate – there is the sex angle, the foreign angle, the mystery angle, the family angle and, yes, the crime angle. If the story wasn’t being reported by news networks, Dick Wolfe would doubtlessly be salivating over the plot line.

Truthfully, it is a sad statement. Stories like this lead to the general degradation of the news media overall. Trouble at the United Nations takes a backseat every time there is a riveting car chase to cover live, an attractive female missing or a middle class child found dead.

How bad is it? Well, Mr. Costas won’t have a job for long if he continues to exercise judgment as excellent as that he displayed last week.