Say what you will about The Today Show—that it's an infinitely large black hole of stupidity, that watching it feels like your brain is floating in a helium balloon somewhere above your head, that it's powered solely by Al Roker's ferocious gnawing id—it's not afraid to grab all the eyeballs it can, even if those eyeballs are attached to real-life Humbert Humberts. Having already cornered the half-asleep, freak-show-loving, and people-who-like-to-be-shown-calorie-counts-of-various-food-items-in-dramatic-fashion demographics, today the Today Show appealed directly to pervs everywhere. How else can you explain the following 3 minute segment "Madonna's little girl grows up," aka "Madonna's 12-year-old daughter: officially pubescent"?
Yuck, Today Show. You can try and deflect the creepiness with as many Matt Lauer jokes as you want, Meredith Viera, but that won't change the fact that you just presided over a two minute photo montage, complete with many lingering swoops up and down her body, put together to showcase how "grown up" a 12-year-old girl looks.
Obviously, Madonna has made her daughter fair game: She talks about her in interviews, and parades her around in front of cameras when she's off scouting for new children. But that's not a license to air a story that's little more than sighing over the "grown up" appearance of a 12-year-old girl.