That's your angle? Really?

Dear Mainstream Media,

Can you please stop with the ridiculous bullshit?

I just read this story which had the simply awesome headline ‘Mom Kills Baby over Farmville’:

“A Jacksonville mother charged with shaking her baby to death has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

Alexandra V. Tobias, 22, was arrested after the January death of 3-month-old Dylan Lee Edmondson. She told investigators she became angry because the baby was crying while she was playing a computer game called FarmVille on the Facebook social-networking website.

Tobias entered her plea Wednesday before Circuit Judge Adrian G. Soud. A second-degree murder charge is punishable by up to life in prison.

Prosecutor Richard Mantei said Tobias’ sentence could be less because of state guidelines that call for 25 to 50 years. Soud offered no promises on what he’ll order during a sentencing hearing scheduled for December.

Tobias told investigators that she shook the baby, smoked a cigarette to compose herself and then shook him again. She said the baby may have hit his head during the shaking.”

Okay, let me be absolutely clear here. I fucking hate Farmville, and this woman is obviously a complete and total monster who deserves to be locked up for the rest of her life. But why was Farmville even mentioned? It hardly seems pertinent does it?

If this Alexandra bitch had been watching TV, would you have titled this something like “Mom Kills Baby over TV Show”?

No, you wouldn’t. For some reason a woman killing her baby isn’t ‘spicy’ enough for you, is it? So you’ve show-horned in a social media/gaming reference to cash in on a moral panic.

You see, I’m a gamer. I love videogames, and it really pisses me off when you write bullshit like this trying to infer that a stupid browser game about farming somehow drove this psycho to murder.

I remember reading a new story a few years ago about a husband who snapped and stabbed his wife to death because she put the mustard jar on the wrong side of his plate. In that story, the emphasis was on what a completely unbalanced, violent fuck the husband was…and amazingly, no newspaper tried to work the angle that mustard consumption somehow drove him to murder.

You know, I bet this Alexandra psycho was probably drinking a soft-drink at the time, or was smoking a cigarette or had some music playing in the background…why didn’t you mention that?

Basically, quit with the bullshit, lazy journalism and trying to get more exposure by riding the coat-tails of the latest bullshit moral panic.

For fuck’s sake, over 80 million people play Farmville, so even if this woman actually did kill her baby because of Farmville, that means Farmville causes murderous feelings in 0.00000125% of people who play it. That’s hardly a compelling statistic.

Anyway, not that it matters much. Newspapers will be dead within the next few years, and as far as I’m concerned, you lying manipulative bastards are getting exactly what you deserve.