Friday, December 4, 2015

Sad Commentary

News coverage of mass shootings raises bile into my throat.

TV "personalities" babble on incessantly because they have air time to fill. Long after the horror has been reported on, long after everything relevant has been laid out, these talking heads drone on and on and on, tripping all over their words because they are saying the same thing over and over and they know it.

"The fatalities here are dead, bereft of life, unable to respond to our questions because they are dead. Not that we would ask a corpse a question but what I am trying to say is that there are a lot of bodies here and they are definitely dead. Some are wounded and they are receiving treatment in area hospitals. Apparently when they were shot, they bled. The blood cannot be rinsed away because we are dealing with an active crime investigation. Although, in the hospital the blood can be washed away because it accomplishes nothing to allow the victims to continue to bleed and besides, hospital laundry expense is soaring in this country." 

They do this because they have sunk their fangs into "breaking news" and/or "what's trending now."

They are competing against other networks to see who can earn the highest ratings for coverage of the "event."

I was watching MSNBC yesterday. A journalist was interviewing a woman in San Bernardino.

He was obviously trying to bait her into Muslim bashing and he was really sucking at it because he was trying to come across as politically correct at the same time.

He said something along the lines of "this community has a high percentage of Muslim residents. Have they been able to, ah, er, um, adapt to life in this country, ah, in a way that indicates they, um, fit into our culture?"

Unbelievably unprofessional.

To her credit, the woman did not rise to the bait. She said something along the lines of " I don't think any one religion can be automatically targeted as perpetrators of violence. All religions believe different things and it is wrong to say that one religion might be more prone to violence than another."

Then she got a little goofy, saying something like "I don't know what is in peoples' heads, why they think the way they do or do the things they do, I cannot understand what this person is thinking or that person is thinking, nobody knows what is in peoples' heads."

THEN she turned the tables and it was excellent. She asked the reporter a question and he was totally flustered.

She said something like "We have a big problem with gun violence in this country and it is disturbing and I don't know what is the reason for it. Do you know why we have so much violence in America?"

Journalist boy stammered and stuttered and muttered and eventually said some thing like " well, I don't, um, what I think is, ah, what I want to do is to get people in this country to think about that."

Absolutely lame.

It was refreshing to see him so shocked that an interviewee would ask him a question. It was even better that she asked him such a meaningful question on live TV and he knew he had to say something weighty.

He was on the spot and he blew it.

TV talking heads should have tears rolling down their cheeks when they report on horrific events like what just happened in San Bernardino. They should report on the events and then move on instead of mining the spotlight for ratings.

Even better, they should report the facts and then lapse into extended periods of silence to hammer home the shocking nature of these killings and what it says about us as Americans.

We can't stop these killings and we can't even report them honestly, without agenda.

Sad commentary on the state of this country.

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