Quoting Washington Post/CNN media "critic" Howard Kurtz slamming Headline News for "talking about this constantly on cable for more than a week" and "feasting on this terrible situation," Brad Jacobson (Media Bloodhound, 3/30/09) also cites Kurtz railing against media obsession with octuplet mother Nadya Suleman on CNN: "The media were demonizing her....all the while capitalizing on America's latest soap opera."

But, lo and behold, a "Crossfire-like vapid shouting match" couldn't be resisted:

Kurtz dedicated an entire segment of this past Sunday's Reliable Sources to a gratuitous pie fight between two players involved in Nadya "Octomom" Suleman's never-ending nationally televised freak show. But a little over a month ago, Kurtz decried the media's exploitation of the octuplet mother for ratings and for doing so under the false pretense that concern for her babies' well-being drove their 24/7 coverage.

While seeing evidence that "Kurtz seems to signal that he's in on the joke," as Jacobson sees it, "the problem is, he's not just in on the joke, he's part of the joke of which he's supposed to be critiquing." Picking from among "scores of worthy topics [that] were open for a substantive media discussion," Jacobson writes that Kurtz instead

might have covered the fact that, according to LexisNexis, not one broadcast or cable network news program--including CNN--reported last week's revelations that Bush administration prosecutors tried to pressure former Guantánamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, after years of being brutally tortured and having never been charged with a crime, to sign a statement saying he was never tortured and that he committed terrorist acts he didn't commit in return for his release.

Even though "it's no Octomom," Jacobson says this is "merely the kind of story that, consciously or not, affects every single American when millions of them are deprived of its coverage."

Women In Media & News guest blogger Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser's examination (3/12/09) of the "media firestorm" that "erupted... when Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets" shows that in initial "stories playing on the well-worn 'wow factor'"--like "the AP's piece, posted on Fox News' website, [that] bore a cutesy headline: '8 Is Definitely Enough'"--"basic information was missing: the mother’s name, the doctor's name, and the specific medical treatment undergone," and "without that information, any medical ethics concerns remained wholly hypothetical." But then it

turns out, eight wasn't enough. The story's focus morphed from medical oddity, to larger ethics questions, to gawking at a woman deemed crazy for having 15 children (octuplets along with six previous kids). Media buzz about Nadya Suleman began building, and quickly....

Suleman's first interview to Dateline NBC's Ann Curry in early February was a hot property--even the interview itself became big news....

During the interview--which was rehashed in the media obsessively--Curry probed: "People feel, you know, this woman is being completely irresponsible and selfish to bring these children in the world without a clear source of income and enough help to raise them. The world outside is saying, 'What are you doing?'" A divorced mother who says all 14 came from a known sperm donor, Suleman insisted essentially that she loved all of her children and could, once she completes her education, provide for them.

From broadcast TV to newspapers to tabloid magazines, from blogs such as Jezebel to MSNBC’s Scoop, every aspect of Suleman’s life seemed fair game for the media microscope: her motivations, her mental stability (or instability).

Buttenwieser writes that the result of this "massive media rubbernecking" was that "substantive questions about medical ethics, parental responsibility and even how the media covers such outliers have been pushed aside for breathy comment" in which "profit-hungry media simply sensationalized Suleman's story for ratings-generating, tabloid-selling buzz."