Peter Krupa

I used to get quite a few giggles out of Diario Extra, Costa Rica’s yellowest tabloid and, coincidentally, also the newspaper with the highest circulation in the country at over 350,000 (this in a country of 3.5 million). Oh, they’re wacky alright. Today’s front page features a picture of a deceased stabbing victim, which is more or less par for the course.

The paper really jumped the shark last July when it ran a front-page photo of a crackhead eating a live cat. Nice.

I guess I still chuckle at Diario Extra, but no longer in that “oh-this-poor-underdeveloped-country” kind of way. That’s because I now have cable, and I can turn on Fox News or CNN and watch the idiocy that passes for “news” in the United States - ie, car chases, shootings in strange little towns, terrifying tales of chemicals that might probably but not really but could - could - give you cancer, and horrible, horrible sexual things that were in all likelihood done to the pretty 18-year-old blond girl in this grainy photograph taken during happier times.

One time - I’m not making this up - CNN featured, in its killer storm coverage, a live ticker keeping a real-time count of how many lightning bolts had struck the ground. Scary shit.

That is to say, the more you look, the more it looks the same, and one can only imagine what the 24-hour news cycle would be like without the FCC.