Blame the media

This New York Times writer blames the media for the crowd that trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death in a frenzy to get to the marked-down Christmas sale merchandise. As much as I like to blame the media for lots of stuff, I think this is a stretch. The writer, David Carr, postulates that media coverage of the deals worked the shoppers into such a lather over buying "stuff" that they would literally kill for it.

He misses a bigger point. Black Friday and the holiday shopping mania is the result of turning a religious celebration into a commercial fetish. Carr doesn't mention the contamination of Christmas by the secular, and that makes him as guilty as the rest of the media.