infinite improbability

What the national media isn't (for the most part) telling you about the Terri Schiavo story

Online polls by local news sources have been running, by and large, in favor of not starving Terri Schiavo to death, while national news sources seem to be polling just the opposite. Why is that? Not because the Tampa Bay area media is so much more conservative than the national media, because they aren't. Rather, it's because those of us who live in the area have been following this story for the last few years and have heard the whole story, where those folk who have only heard the news from the national news outlets (including the more conservative Fox News) are not hearing the same things that we are.

For one thing, Michael Schiavo, the husband, has a fiance who he has two children with, and the sooner that Terri gets out of the way, the sooner he can marry her. Why not just divorce Terri then, and marry the new woman? Why, it's perfectly simple. If he's still married to Terri, then when she dies, he gets what's left in the fund that was set up for her care--a fund that was set up when Michael sued to get money to care for her, based on the idea that he would be caring for a severely handicapped woman for many years to come. Funny though, as soon as he won the case and got the money, he suddenly "remembered" that Terri said that she didn't want to be kept alive by extrordinary means and started the legal proceedings to try to remove her feeding tube. Oh, yeah, by that point, he had found that new woman--does anyone really think that he had Terri's best interest in mind when he was already shacking up with a new honey?

You also aren't going to hear very much in the national media that Terri has never recieved any rehabilitation, even though that was what the fund was supposed to go towards--as soon as Michael Schiavo got the money, he stopped any real care of her.

This is not, and never was a "right to die" case, it was always about a husband (who may have been abusive before Terri's brain injury), who wants his wife dead so that he can get her money and marry his new girlfriend.