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A great article written by a citizen of Newtown that confirms Tammy's description of “media porn” on the coverage.

From American Thinker: I have been a resident of Newtown for over 30 years, save for a few years in the 1990s. I attended high school here. My oldest went through the school system here and my youngest is still at the high school. It's a quiet town that, although it's grown in population since my first arrival in 1981, still manages to retain that small New England town feel.

Newtown is a town where teenagers always say, “It's so boring here!” and some resort to hanging out in the shopping center parking lot for lack of anything “better” to do on a Friday night. People buy the weekly newspaper to see if their children or their neighbor's children have been featured in the Schools or Sports sections. We have a $2 movie house in what was, until recently, our town hall. We have a 100-foot flagpole in the middle of Main Street. The Rotary Club holds pancake breakfasts and the Methodist Church hosts regular spaghetti suppers. We have a community theater, a literary magazine, and a skateboard park. We have an annual Christmas Tree lighting and an annual Labor Day Parade. Newtown is also a place where people will drop produce off on their neighbors' doorstep because their own gardens are so abundant.

In short, we were a relatively unremarkable town with unremakable people — at least, to the outside world. Even our most notorious moment, the murder of Helle Crafts by her husband Richard — the “woodchipper murder” — back in 1984 had fallen into the dustbins of our memories.

The shooting at Sandy Hook School last week that resulted in the deaths of so many children, school staff members and — lest we forget — the shooter's mother, has shaken our community to its very core and made Sandy Hook and Newtown household words around the world. My children are older and attended a different elementary school, so I don't know any of the families directly involved. But like any small town, even if you don't know someone personally, you know someone who does. And so it is with me. A friend of mine is a Sandy Hook Elementary secretary. People I know have friends and neighbors affected. Also, my own mother works at the before and after school program there and, with the grace of God, left the school just minutes before all hell broke loose.

I cannot tell you how surreal it was to be working from home last Friday afternoon and receive a robocall from the school superintendent about a lockdown because of a shooting at “one of our schools.” How surreal it is to have friends from around the country emailing and Facebooking you to ask if your children are involved and frantically looking for information. Fielding phonecalls from your ex-husband who lives in another state and your daughter who is in college to find out if their daughter/sister is safe. Hearing the rumors about what happened — and then learning an even worse truth.

What is even more surreal is the aftermath and the media hordes that have, to put it bluntly, invaded us. Seeing Diane Sawyer, with her perpetual “concerned” look and tone, reporting “live,” along with Matt Lauer, Anderson Cooper and others. Seeing the local landmarks you know and love splashed all over the television not for their own sakes, but because Newtown and Sandy Hook are the “words du jour.”

continue reading http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/newtown_the_latest_example_of_media_overkill.html