ICYDK, Clara Harris was recently convicted of killing her husband by running over him with her car three times, while her step-daughter was in the car. Often times when this case was broguht up on The View and on The Tonight Show, the audience would start laughing!

As a victim of my ex-wife's infidelity, I didn't find this case funny at all, and I can't see why anyone else would. A woman cold-bloodedly murdered her husband. The fact that he was unfaithful doesn't justify running him over three times.

I don't mean to sound sexist (I'm not kidding!), but if a man had done the same thing to a woman, no one would be laughing.

"The View" I can understand. They laugh uproariously there whenever a male is injured or embarassed in some way, but "The Tonight Show"....?

Actually I think Leno's jokes about the whole thing got the biggest laughs.

Because, Brian, there is this little thing called a double standard. Become a hermit the pendulum hath swung. (Don't believe me ask any divorced guy, and also believe your own eyes.)

No emoticon on purpose.

I lost a LOT of respect for Barbara Walters when her and the rest of women from The View were on the Tonight Show. She mentioned that she thought Clara Harris should have got off on probation. I thought she deserved AT LEAST ten more years than she actually got.

You had respect for Barbara Walters? Why? Shes no different then Dan Rather or Sam Donaldson or Peter Jennings or Brian Gumble or Ed Bradley or Bernard Shaw or etc etc. They are so transparently mindless they're actually interchangable. They have no personality other then the communistic multicultural left wing garbage they vomit out every night.
Honestly, next time you're watching CNN imagine if Barbara Walters was the news reader. Ask yourself if she would be saying anything different in any different way. If you try you can actually SEE other reporters faces superimposed over each other. Or get two TVs, turn one to ABC and the other to CBS or NBC, Turn down the volume on one and listen to one reporter do the audio for two stations. Try it, its so Orwellian its actually funny.

Left Wing garbage? Actually I think ABC News for all it's problems, deserves credit for TRYING to stay objective as journalists should. Granted it doesn't work very well, but an A+ for effort, you know?

Frankly the only place to get REAL news is the Jim Lerher News Hour.

BTW, how does one define Left Wing garbe you Right Wing Nazi freak (the point I'm making is, generalizations are bad, so stop doing it Adam).

Can we at least agree that most t.v. journalists usually say things without understanding them, sometimes at all?

Such as this lovely quote from an ABC affiliate about the Mars Pathfinder mission: "NASA is gearing up to explore the third rock from the Sun this week."

Or this one: "U.S. Satellite Pictures -- National and Regional View the clouds in the sky from the other side, satellites located thousands of feet above the Earth." How do the airplanes avoid them?

Or when Matt Lauer said that the toilets in Australia flush the opposite direction.

If you could be wun ovew by a twuck, what twuck would it be?

Webber, I used to believe like you that the news media should always try to remain objective, now I'm not so sure. Here me out.

If you lived in England you could either subscribe to a liberal paper or a conservative paper, these are major papers not nitch underground stuff the The Nation or the Libmaugh letter. Here in America we believe that the news should always be unbias, but that is not possible. By deciding what is newsworthy (Clinton's Oral sex preferences, stories of accadental gun deaths) and what is not ($500 that the Bush administration gave to the Taliban in 2001, the guy who stopped a school shooting with a handgun he had in his car) they are exercising an opinion.

Fox news is the most explicitly political news program on the air in America, with a decidedly right wing stand. That said they do cover stories that others don't and say stuff that others don't. Rather than condem them for it, why not ask for a liberal alternative to it. I mean something that is as liberal as Fox news is conservative. Put Michael Moore on opposite Bill O'Reily, not Phil Donahue or Larry King (who even IF they are liberal individuals bend over backwards to show that they give the conservative viewpoint an equel say to the detriment of the truth)

The problem, Brian, is that reducing everything to simplistic ideological partisanship reduces the quality of debate. All it means is that all news coverage will look like Crossfire - lots of blustering and lots of talking, but very little said. Moreover, I hardly see how the media should attempt to reduce everything to either "liberal" or "conservative" - it's detrimental to the diversity of viewpoints.

Oh, and:

They have no personality other then the communistic multicultural left wing garbage they vomit out every night.

You're not expecting us to take a ridiculous statement like that seriously?

What the heck is meant by "communistic multicultural left wing"? Talk about doublespeak.

The only thing that was remotely funny about the case was the defense's claim that her running over the guy (3 times) was an accident.

Well, it is an accident to run over the guy three times - it should have worked the first time!

<i>All it means is that all news coverage will look like Crossfire - lots of blustering and lots of talking, but very little said.</i>

But what's the alternative, bland cash driven news organizations that ignore stories unfavorable to both democrats or republicans. I'm not talking about every show being like crossfire and having people from both sides slug it out over the news and what it means. I'm also not condeming Fox News for being the conservative news source, although I do condem them for denying it and saying they are "fair and balanced". I'm saying that someone should abandon the pretence of objectivity and be the liberal alternate to Fox. The problem with everyone trying to be objective is that political figures have taken to what in sports terms is called "working the ref." which means if you argue all close calls that the ref makes aginst your team perhaps next time their is a close call aginst your team he will give you a bit more slack in the interest of being fair. Similary by repeating the big lie and crying "Liberal media, liberal media" every time anything that remotely makes the coverservatives look bad happens the media now goes out of their way to not make the conservatives look bad, in the interest of "fairness"

I read an artical saying that American traffic to the websites of British news organizations has gone up because many Americans are turning to british news to hear things about America and the world that the US mainstream press will not cover. I know that that a lot of that sort of thing started after the 2000 election when the British press was breaking stories about the recount that CNN, Faux News and M$NBC wouldn't cover for fear of being accused of "Helping Al Gore steal the election".

Fitzie: That is true. It's pretty obvious talking to all my non-American firends that M$NBC, Faux Nuisance, and CNN (can't think of a good joke to go with that one) would NEVER fly across the pond.

But if you think the nationals are bad, holy crud have you how freakin' sedated LOCAL newscasters have become? T'Pol on Enterprise has more personality than these people!

For the record, I watch NBC News, and its because ABc and CBS's anchor-people are full of c-r-a-p!

BF: Jim Lerher News Hour on PBS my friend. Great news program. Problem is, because there's no editorializing (the second O'Reilly, or Lester Holt or Dan Rather inject an opinion of some kind,e ven off-handedly, it becomes an Editorial, not a Report) on the program, it can get a bit dull, so you have to really psyche yourself up for the program. Start about a half-hour before it's scheduled start.

The BBC has a decidedly liberal slant and half of the people they interview are m0rons who you want to throttle and demand they answer the question. Sometimes they miss obvious questions. (For example an Italian researcher said his research was going to conclusively show that depleted uranium shell in Kosovo cause an increase in some disease. I was screaming to ask him if he knew what the research would show then why is he bothering to do it.) Generally, however, it is better than the dreck on American radio. (If you ignore their assumption I care about cricket.)

I thought Clara Harris got exactly what she deserved. It wasn't first-degree murder...but it was murder. I don't care if the family supports her; I'm sorry, but murder is murder.

And as someone astutely pointed out, if it was a man doing this to a woman (or a lower-class woman doing this to a lower-class man), nobody would bat an eye at life imprisonment.

The Oxygen channel has a series titled Snapped, which details women who murder their spouses. One episode focused on Clara Harris. It said that she hired an outfit to videotape her husband's comings and goings to and from his extracurricular activities. But, she was caught in the act of running down her husband by the outfit she had hired. Which was the final nail in her coffin.

Jay Leno still thinks the Clara Harris case is funny, as he had a short skit based on it the other night. (No, I don't watch Leno, but I caught the skit while surfing.) I still don't think this case is funny at all; it's about as funny as the Scott Peterson case. And, who laughed at that?

Update - Ms. Harris was released from prison this past May 11, after serving 15 years in prison; she served 3/4 of her 20 year sentence. More here.