It took six days before the local media owned up to their completely unnecessary sensationalizing of the ‘07 Bonnie and Clyde story, but when the Inquirer did so, courtesy of an editorial from columnist Monica Yant Kinney, they hit the nail on the head:

“This story would be nothing without the photos,” a local TV reporter mentions as we wait, pathetically, in the lobby of the Criminal Justice Center for a glimpse of the parents who created celebrity train-wreck Jocelyn Kirsch.

Indeed, for a week now, Kirsch’s surgically-enhanced mug has enjoyed an almost uninterrupted stay on philly.com’s home page, thanks in no small part to a library of alternately salacious and stupid pictures of her that the media has uncovered. And the deluge of self-congratulatory schadenfreude from the local papers is exhausting.

It’s not that what Kirsch and her boyfriend, Edward Anderton, did was wrong. It’s reprehensible that they scammed their friends and neighbors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the cult of celebrity that the local media has formed around her is exhausting. A search for her last name on philly.com, sorted by date, yields 4 solid pages of stories. In an average week, that’s more coverage than the floundering Eagles get. It’s bad enough that even a page of the newspaper gets dedicated to the daily misadventures of Hollywood starlets without having a local girl’s trash splattered over the front page.

Yes, I suppose it’s deliciously ironic that most of her cheating ways were calls for attention, and getting caught got her all the wrong kinds, but it’s time to stop paying attention to these people. It’s this fascination with people that do horrible things that inspired the Omaha mall shooter to leave “now I’ll be famous” as his final words. If we start focusing on fixing the root of the problems instead of on drooling over the results, we’re sure to form a better world.

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