This selfie is unflattering

By mid-afternoon Thursday, the story about a man charged with murdering a woman and her daughter in Post Falls had elicited zero comments on cdapress.com.

Meantime, a story about a Coeur d'Alene police officer shooting a dog had generated 43 comments. And that didn't include the 17 comments on the press release issued by police and published on cdapress.com Wednesday afternoon.

Dead dog 60, dead humans 0.

What strange times these are.

We understand some of the keyboard backlash was generated by the fact police misidentified the dog as a pit bull; it was a black Labrador retriever. Some folks are downright touchy when it comes to pinning anything bad on pit bulls.

We also know that the violent demise of someone's four-legged friend can tug at the heartstrings of complete strangers. Further, the recent trend of North Idaho peace officers using their guns to end lives is alarming. The "what ifs" mount with every incident, and fear and speculation fuel the opinionators.

But none of this explains why readers would be moved to the point of sharing their thoughts in writing on the shooting of a dog but not on the horrific murder of a young woman and her 5-year-old daughter. Nor does it address citizens' fascination with stories that are interesting, maybe, but not very important.

The Amazon.com-owned website Alexa tracks the most popular topics on the Internet. Alexa updates its information every five minutes, 24 hours a day. We checked in with Alexa while writing this editorial at 2:23 p.m. Thursday.

In order, the 10 topics Alexa deemed "hottest" - generating the most searches - were LeBron James, CYNK, coolest cooler, Axelle Despiegelaere, Otcmkts:cynk, Emmy nominations, UPS tracking, Google Docs, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Alix Catherine Tichelman. Granted, Thursday wasn't a big news day on a global scale, but the sum of all searches did not appear likely to raise the planet's IQ an iota or to encourage civic participation in - well, in anything but finding out what the heck UPS did with your order from Amazon.com.

If this is an opportunity for valuable introspection, let's use it.