\o7A\f7UGUST can be a giddy month for the press: Space yawns, little happens, a disproportionate amount of experience goes on vacation.
The holidays can be similar, but traditionally there's sentimentality and nowadays -- thanks to Fox News and the religious right -- the war on Christmas to fall back on when you just have to print or air something.
August lacks those cultural props, and so weird things can happen.
It would be comforting to believe that this vacuum -- or perhaps collective heatstroke -- explains the JonBenet Ramsey madness that has consumed so much of the news media over the past two weeks. Unfortunately, this month has produced plenty of distressing, tragic and significant news. That makes the explanation for this sorry frenzy all the more disturbing, because it involves notions that already have corrupted the cable news operations and, now, threaten to spread more widely.
Poor, sad little JonBenet Ramsey.
With her golden pre-Raphaelite hair and glisteningly inappropriate makeup, she has smiled from millions of television screens over these past few days, at this point more an icon than a real child. Forever 6 years old and now 10 years dead, she is the diminutive patron saint of all the lost and mysteriously murdered white girls who have fueled cable news' descent into tabloid journalism. Without her, there could have been no Laci Peterson or Natalee Holloway.
Nor would there have been a moment quite like the one that occurred last Tuesday when Larry King -- who hosts CNN's highest-rated prime-time show -- paused during an interview with JonBenet's dead mother's sister, looked into the camera and asked:
"Do you think there's a media frenzy?"
You can't make this stuff up.
A few minutes later, as cable passed the prime-time baton from one host to another, Fox's Greta Van Susteren, CNN's Anderson Cooper and CNN Headline's Nancy Grace simultaneously launched their programs with -- you guessed it -- JonBenet Ramsey. It was the perfect tabloid trifecta.
\o7T\f7HE ostensible occasion for all this journalistic necrophilia was a brief Los Angeles court appearance in which the latest "suspect" in the Ramsey killing waived his right to contest extradition to Colorado. One suspects, in fact, that at least part of cable news' fascination with this latest event has to do with the creepy, made-for-television appearance of John Mark Karr, the fugitive from child pornography charges who oozed out of his Bangkok hovel and into our collective consciousness a little more than a week ago. If you called Central Casting and said, "Send us over a child molester," you'd send him back as too obvious. (Just as an aside, do you think nobody would have remembered \o7this\f7 guy if he'd been hanging around the Ramsey house that Christmas?)
