Andrew Speaker, the guy with tuberculosis who has been all over the news for at least a week now, has the unfortunate circumstance of being the target of obsessive 24 hour news media outlets. Now, on a slow news day, he has become an entertainment story, because CNN thinks people need to know the details in the personal life of “the guy with TB.”
Here is CNN.com’s lead story:
Mayor casts doubt on TB patient’s Greek wedding
A tuberculosis patient who may have defied health officials’ warnings by going on a wedding trip to Europe appears not to have gotten married, a Greek official said Friday. Andrew Speaker is now in a Colorado hospital suffering from a drug-resistant form of TB. A friend of Speaker’s told CNN there were documentation problems in Greece but the couple held a wedding ceremony anyway.
So now we have the full name of his wife and a picture of her face. In addition, in the midst of a thousands-of-casualties war, the leading story in the national news is that the guy with TB who went to Europe to get married may not actually be married because of paperwork problems. Nice.
