Joshua Brown, one of the two men charged with killing Jesse Dirkhising has been convicted and sentenced to 25 years behind bars.

If your response is "Jesse who," you’ve already proven my point.

If you have children in the room, I’ll pause for a moment to allow them to leave. This is not something to which little ears should be exposed. (pause)

Jesse Dirkhising was a 13-year-old Arkansas boy who was bound and gagged, repeatedly sodomized and was eventually suffocated by his own underwear.

That such a brutal, disgusting act should even occur is tragic beyond measure. That it should go virtually unreported is unconscionable.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the sensational sexual nature of the case, media coverage was limited to a handful of brave newspapers and virtually none of the mainstream broadcast networks. Only the Fox News Network had courage enough to touch the story.

Now, let’s compare this "consciousness lowering" media approach to the coverage the networks provided following the equally brutal slaying of a young homosexual college student in Wyoming, Matthew Shepard.

Virtually every satellite truck west of the Pecos hit the Interstate and camped out in the middle of nowhere to prove a political, not a judicial, point. The anti-gay killers of one homosexual deserve public vilification. The gay killers of an underage victim should pay private penance.

Let’s make this clear. None of us condones the actions taken by either group of men. Killing is wrong and there’s a price to pay, no matter what the sexual orientation of the victim. Murder convictions in both cases have reassured us that the justice system works.

But our criticism of the mainstream media goes far beyond giving a helpless, lifeless young boy his 15 minutes of fame. It establishes that certain activity, including the gang-rape of a minor, is not the norm and will not be tolerated by a society under the rule of law. Publicizing this crime may act as a deterrent to others considering future offenses. It certainly lifts up a standard of righteousness that indicts all who would cling to our modern "anything goes" morality.

Perhaps that explains why the mainstream media won’t touch the Jesse Dirkhising story.

Cast the spotlight on the Joshua Browns of this world and many of us might be blinded by the reflected glare. We can’t let the networks make us feel "uncomfortable" about ourselves, now, can we?

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