Whale overkill?

I like whales as much as the next person, but enough is enough!

This story was even making the national news programs recently. You know, the mother whale and her calf that ventured miles up the Sacramento river delta all the way to the state capital?

For the past two and a half weeks, this has been the lead story on Sacramento television newscasts. More than that, this so-called "human interest" story dominated a good fifteen minutes of these programs. Well, apparently mom and baby leviathan made it back to the Pacific Ocean through San Francisco Bay...and now all is well in whale land.

One can only assume that the overkill coverage of this story can be attributed, in part, to slow news days. Possibly. But even after almost three weeks of continuing coverage, it dominated the top of the news on the ABC affiliate yesterday. The second story offering was the return of the remains of a Stockton resident from Iraq. What are these news directors thinking? How absurd placing the whale story ahead of the soldier's (and his family's) story.

The whales, named Delta and Dawn by the media, were indeed a story of survival and human interest. But after the better part of a month...we've had enough. If anything, especially now that they've found their way "home", this story might be used to close a newscast, ie, "By the way...those wayward whales are back where they belong...in the Pacific Ocean..."

Most often, Sacramento news is dominated by shootings and other heinous crimes. Despite being the capital of the most populous state with a budget and commerce that ranks it somewhere around seventh in the world, that's right, in the world...crime is usually the news of the day. So maybe the whales gave us a break from the police blotter stuff. Maybe the whales took our minds off all the nasty stuff in the news. Maybe the whale story gave us an excuse to be even more apathetic about what is going on in the world around us!