I was dialing around the boob tube Tuesday night and came across this odd segment on CNN. It was called "How Quickly We Forget". The basic premise sounds intriguing enough: following up on stories that "captivated" the news for a while then dropped completely off the radar to see what has happened since. And if CNN had actually made it a piece of investigative journalism, it might have been interesting. Instead, it turns out to be a pandering waste of five minutes, a sort of glorified "where are they now?" piece with as much journalistic merit as, well, Fox News.

This should have been self-evident by the very title of the segment. "How Quickly We Forget" is full of smug, haughty insinuations, namely that we are somehow wrong for forgetting these stories and how smart CNN is for reminding us, and that there's some sort of moral involved that we should be ashamed for not knowing. This alone should have had me reaching for the remote, but then they actually tricked me with the subject-matter: Elian Gonzales.

In case you (quickly) forgot, Elian was the small boy who washed up in Florida back in late 1999. His mother had taken him and fled Cuba with a host of other refugees. The boat sank and Elian was the sole survivor. He was taken into custody by his mother's relatives living in Florida. That alone had the makings of a ratings-rich TV-movie, but the catch came when Elian's father, who remained in Cuba, began demanding that his son return home to him. The story dragged on for months, Elian became a celebrity, and all sorts of interest groups got into the act. In the end the INS raided the house where Elian stayed and took the kid back to his father.

The CNN segment began by promising to fill us in on the fallout. Which consisted of learning that Elian, now nine, seems to be living a decently normal life in Cuba. A bit of a celebrity, the same way Baby Jessica will always be a celebrity, simply because he was innocently thrust into circumstances that resonated with people, but otherwise the piece had nothing to say about his life.

At this point it becomes readily apparent why these stories are quickly forgotten: because there's nothing to them worth remembering.

The piece tried valiantly to make a story out of nothing. They couldn't interview Elian, and his father declined as well, so the best CNN could come up with was showing Elian and his father sitting fairly close-up at a rally for Castro. The piece shamelessly insinuated that this meant something sinister, that Castro was using Elian as propaganda, but had the CNN team actually bothered to do some journalism, they might have found an answer. Though they had no problem posing the idea that Castro was using Elian for his own nefarious designs, they didn't bother to examine any other reason for Elian being there. For example, the piece mentioned, somewhat understandably, that Elian's father has become supportive of Castro's government since Castro went to bat for him, but failed to mention how involved he was; perhaps Elian's father is now a well respected activist for Castro, and that's why he and his son were sitting so close. Perhaps it was sheer dumb luck Elian got such good seats (won 'em in a raffle, maybe? Got to the event early?). And, even if Elian was there purposely to be used as propaganda, so what? Plenty of activists here in America did the same thing to him when he lived in Florida, and you can bet had he remained there'd be activists still using his name for their purposes.

What's more, the story completely avoided the national angle of the story. Elian's deportation nearly tore a Florida community into ruin. What about that fallout? Had politicians been voted out of office because they allowed the INS raid to take place? Have any of the activist groups made any headway when it comes to refugee policies? What about Elian's relatives in Florida--were they at peace with Elian in Cuba, or still trying to bring him over?

And that's the irony. The segment itself has merit, but the "reporters" involved completely avoided the issues worth the investigation. Instead it went for cheap melodrama and insinuation. And this is what passes for journalism in the 21st century. Yeesh.