["Caylee Anthony" - Google News]

I make no bones about it -- I find the nature of much of the current coverage of the Caylee Anthony case kind of obscene.

Cindy and George Anthony, little Caylee's grandparents, have made spectacles of themselves. The media has gladly covered each instance. Casey Anthony, Caylee's mother, is probably the kind of narcissistic, likely even psychopathic personality who, in a way, even enjoys the attention being paid to her every movement.

What I also find obscene, I think, is the obsessive chewing over every tiny, meaningless detail of the circus surrounding the case (parsing the actual details that may point to what really happened is a necessary evil). I find it obscene that people insert themselves into the story -- by going to the Anthonys' home -- surely making it a point to do so when the cameras are around -- by starting fights in the street. To some degree, even the searches for the child end up being unseemly affairs. I get the sense that some of those people don't want to find the little girl to bring peace to anyone; they want to be the one who finds the body and gets an interview on national TV.

That's the part of stories like this that disgusts me -- how they always end up drawing a huge number of attention whores into the mix. People who have no real interest in the case, just in getting their own names out there.

You can't always lump journalists into that bunch -- they have jobs to do. Bloggers -- I don't know. If you're being paid to blog, you're essentially functioning as a professional journalist, and doing your job. If you're just Joe or Jane Blow who has no monetary interest in publishing stories or worse, you only post mawkish and paranoiac rantings about the case on some message board somewhere, you might really just be an attention whore with a morbid streak.

And then there are the production companies. Or the bounty hunters. Everyone trying to get some piece of a pie. The pie in this case being the dead body of a 3-year-old girl. Now, tell me, if you think about that for a second -- really think about it -- don't you find that kind of obscene?

Don't mistake what I'm saying, here -- this story must be covered. Public attention to the case, I am convinced, will ultimately be crucial to cracking the mystery. What I'm talking about is the nature of some of that attention.

I've seen it happen before -- anyone with an interest in true crime has seen the feeding frenzy in effect. When 18-year-old Natalee Holloway vanished from the island of Aruba in 2005, the chumming was immediate; all the major media sharks came barrelling in, and the bloggers followed in train. I now feel embarrassed to admit being one of those bloggers. The first time a blog of mine ever saw more than a thousand readers in one hour was after I posted several entries about the Holloway disappearance.

Eventually, there were other stories to cover, and I was glad for that, because I realized that we were not going to find out what happened to Natalee any time soon. I also realized I didn't want to always be a part of that circus by posting something about every single burp or fart bleated into the ether by anyone associated with the story.

We've been at that covering the burps and farts stage in the story of this missing toddler for a few weeks now. I'm convinced that this type of reportage doesn't really do the central person in the story -- Caylee Anthony, not her mother Casey -- any service.

I have no choice but to post about major developments in the investigation into Caylee's disappearance. It would be irresponsible for me to just drop it; it's my job, now. However, you need to note how I worded that -- major developments. Those are the only kinds of updates I'm doing on the Anthony case from here on out.

There are other crime stories to cover. There are other missing people whom you really need to know about. As one guy working this site by my lonesome I'll never be able to cover them all, but I will work hard to always equalize the coverage I do publish here.

That doesn't mean I won't delve deeply into one story or another, and try and give you the best inside view possible. It does mean that I won't always follow fashion just to try and get search engine traffic. It does mean that I feel the whole circus surrounding the search for Caylee is the kind of thing that's perfectly suited for fleshing out a book about the case some day in the future. At the moment, though, it just feels like an excuse to waste a few words on developments that in the end, might have no real relevance whatsoever to the central mystery: what happened to that little girl? How was the month between her disappearance and the reporting of that disappearance used by her mother to add layers of concealment, to mask Caylee's true fate?

I'll still post about Caylee Anthony -- but only if it looks as though the news truly matters, and may truly point us towards an answer.