GOOD MORNING AMERICA

The ABC-show Goodmorning America , The Larry King Show (CNN) and the Inside Edition. And that's only the beginning of Peter R. de Vries' tourney across the land of the brave. Oprah and Dr.Phil must be rejoiced.

The Natalee Holloway case was created by the media. Its importance in the US was blown up to the level that would allow to make good profits. Now the case has generally been resolved by the media and the profits made. Natalee's face turned into a money making brand like that of Osama bin Laden's prior to the Iraqi invasion, she was in fact reduced to a pack of slim yoghurt selling swell in the commercial breaks.

I don't deny I was one of the seven million who watched the De Vries show on the Dutch tv Sunday. But how many of us watched it as a story of human tragedy, maybe even a story of an ironically stupid, irrelevant death, should she still have been alive in a coma when she was dumped in the sea? And even for those who did, was it not at the same time another reality show, only that now it also included a real death. Cool.

Peter Greenaway once said: "There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death." That's then the ultimate goal the media are lusting for. Not the violence we see in everyday news, but a close encounter with death, a virtual tour through death, sms DEATH.

Once that happens, the control of the media matrix on our existence will be complete and total. We will no longer have the right to believe that we exist, at least not anywhere outside its domain.

The stupidity, the panic, the trauma (seeing Natalee's mother I'm not surprised the girl was eager to run away with the first male available), the fear, the human error all remain outside of the equation. Everything must be held simple, like in a computer game. We have the bad guy. The security of an Empire has been attacked. This reminds me of the recent Russian hype around Vitaly Kaloev, a man who had lost his wife and child in a plane crash resulting from a Swiss flight dispatcher mistake and killed the dispatcher out of revenge and despair. When he was prematurely released out of Swiss prison late last year, Russian nationalists greeted him as a hero. He was made minister in his native province. While in fact he, too, was used as that yoghurt package, to make political dividends. His personal broken life and the broken life of the Swiss dispatcher's widow and kids, and of the many other relatives of the people who died in the same plane crash, were the not exciting enough details.

Because the media like simple menus. Americans know nothing about Kaloev. In Russia , according to Google, I have been the only one writing about Natalee Holloway over the past couple of years. When I suggested to do a story on her after the Peter de Vries show, my editors did not want it, because no one knows who she is in Russia .

Meanwhile, in the little Mexican town of Juarez near the American border, over 400 young girls have disappeared over the past several years. Talking about one of them on prime time tv does not reap as much?