Public Eye
February 23, 2007 10:21 AM

More Anna! More!

By
Brian Montopoli
Topics
In The News
(AP Photo/Lou Toman, Pool)
Tired of Anna Nicole Smith coverage? Richard Huff, New York Daily News TV editor, sure isn't.

"Thanks to a dead Playboy Playmate, daytime television has come alive again. Really," he writes. "Not since they cut out the bulk of the fights on 'Jerry Springer' has watching TV in daytime been so fun - and supremely prurient."

He argues that "[t]he Florida hearing over who got Anna Nicole's rapidly decomposing body had all the elements of good TV" – though he notes that by "good" he doesn't mean, you know, good. More like entertaining.

Anyway, Huff presumably wants all the journo-scolds – you know, those of us who think the news should be somewhat more newsy – to give it a rest.

"Anna Nicole Smith, in life, was a laughingstock in some circles," he writes. "So it's fitting that the hearing over who got her rotting corpse had more laughs than an episode of CBS' 'How I Met Your Mother.'"

Update: Over at Couric & Co, Andrew Cohen shares his Anna Nicole-related dreams, and he's not exactly on the same page as Huff. Cohen wants the media to focus on the Miami competency hearing for Jose Padilla, the alleged terror conspirator, instead of the Anna Nicole saga. He writes:

"In my dream, all the cable television channels showed continuous updates of the proceedings in Miami and those proceedings, despite being in federal court, were televised to the world. Instead of the jackass of a judge presiding over the Smith hearing in state court in Broward County, millions of people instead followed the decorous proceedings inside the austere courtroom of U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke, who has bravely refused to be intimidated by the Justice Department into steamrolling Padilla into a conviction."

More Cohen:

"I dream on. Instead of ersatz analysts spending their precious minutes of air-time speculating about who gave which drugs and when to Smith, or which of the half-dozen potential fathers is the true father of her poor, doomed baby girl, I see thoughtful legal scholars debating the merits of the government's tactics and strategies toward detainees."

As Cohen himself wrote: Dream on.
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