Blonde Star Mothers

Monday night. Quarter past seven in LA. Aaron Brown's doing Katrina. Joe Scarborough's doing Katrina. Jim Lehrer's doing North Korea. And on Fox, Greta's doing Taylor Behl, the student missing from Virginia Commonwealth University. "Did you follow the Natalee Holloway story?" she asks Taylor's mother in an EXCLUSIVE interview. "No," she replies, "not really." (I'm doing this from memory here; I don't have a transcript.)

My hand wants to change the channel, to go back to Lehrer, or maybe CNN, but the lizard part of my brain won't let it. I wonder what Greta is thinking. Her Aruban coverage did huge numbers. How could Taylor's mom have missed it? "To the extent that you did watch it," Greta asks, regrouping, "can you identify with how the mother of another missing girl felt?" But Taylor's mom is not buying. "I kind of haven't let myself feel anything while this is going on," she says. It's her way of getting through this. It's also not emotional television.

I wonder whether Greta will try to splice this to a different narrative, to ask Taylor's mom if she identifies with the New Orleans mothers who've lost their kids, or maybe with Cindy Sheehan. But she doesn't. I go back to Lehrer.