On the day murder suspect John Mark Karr flew from Bangkok to the United States, the New York Post ran this headline: “Snake on a Plane!” The Post is a classic tabloid and as such is consistently shameless.

But how to explain the purportedly serious media when it comes to JonBenet Ramsey. Or Natalee Holloway. Or Laci Peterson. Or Chandra Levy. Or Elizabeth Smart. Or, well, you get the picture.

Makes me wonder what the media mayhem would’ve been like if today’s standards for a proportionate response to such crimes would’ve been in place when Valiree Jackson, the 9-year-old Spokane Valley girl, went missing in 1999. A seemingly distraught father turns out to be the culprit. The case is cracked thanks to an unusual use of a Global Positioning Satellite device. A cute, innocent girl is the victim. I can just hear the pitch by national TV news producers for sending crews here to camp out and report every development – real or imagined.

I suppose we’ve gotten a glimpse of that in the Joseph Duncan case, but even then there’s been restraint – and for reasons that seem entirely random.

And that’s the way it is. It’s heartening to see the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite make a quiet, dignified transition to Katie Couric (is she there yet?). And it’s clear why Bob Schieffer had to be moved aside. Sure, he has extensive experience and endless qualifications, but Schieffer just never opened up, never once showed us the inside of his colon.

Didn’t he pay attention to what happened to Aaron Brown on CNN? He also tried that low-key, traditional journalism shtick, which forced the network to promote a “personality,” Anderson Cooper. When will the codgers learn that the news is secondary and much more difficult to promote?

Stunning! Brutal! Horrifying! Amazing! One of the sorry trends of TV news is that anchors and reporters now tell us what emotions we should tap when listening to them.

I only feel disdain.

Country clubbed. Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point,” has an excellent article on the history of private pensions and health-care benefits in the Aug. 28 issue of The New Yorker. He makes a compelling case that if corporate chieftains listened to union leaders back in the 1950s and advocated for universal systems, rather than the employer-driven model, the business community wouldn’t be so slammed today by pension and health-care costs.

He also wonders why it’s taking chief executives so long to call for more government control so they can be free to maximize profits for shareholders and compete with global companies not saddled with pension and health care obligations.

A union official quoted in the article suspects that executives don’t want to endure the hazing they’d get at their country clubs for knuckling under to “socialism.” If that’s true, get used to more bankruptcies and reorganizations that will result in dumping those obligations on the government anyway.