Stop Reporting News …
… maybe it will go away. Andrew Sullivan (Megan) thinks if the media ignored the demand for massive coverage of a major news event that ordinary people were horrified and transfixed by, then other people might not be goaded into suicidal mass murder. According to this theory, the anti-war media needs to stop reporting on death and destruction in Iraq. Maybe that will go away, too.
I am fascinated by Andrew Sullivan (Megan)’s assertion no one’s editorializing on the ”one factor we know creates these mass murders: reporting on the mass murders.” Andrew Sullivan (Megan) doesn’t support this astonishing indictment with any kind of information whatsoever, in fact goes on to write to the contrary: “I don’t know how many such killers this would stop; how much of their reward is the glee of killing, and how much the notion that they will be famous for their acts?”
Damn it, man (woman) … see to your punctuation and see to it next time that what you say in Sentence 2 is not undermined by what you say in Sentence 10!
Andrew Sullivan (Megan) concludes with the bizarre suggestion that we not publish the names of murderers.
“The important thing is the victims; and yet, it is the madman’s name we all know. Newspapers don’t print the names of rape victims, by general agreement, so why not perform the same service in the case of shooting sprees?”
Wait a minute. I thought Andrew Sullivan (Megan) was arguing against the printing of the killers’ name, but as I re-examine this, is he (she) arguing against the publishing of the victims’ names? It’s a puzzle.
Good help can be hard to find. But where, Andrew Sullivan, do you find people like this? And this?
To get away from mocking Andrew Sullivan’s sublets for the moment, there was a big uproar last week about the loathsome Cho vid. I found it deeply disturbing, revolting, hated seeing it, wondered also who might be inspired by it. I thought NBC was a little too pleased with itself for being the recipient of it, and the thing didn’t need to be put on the endless loop, and most definitely needed every “disturbing footage ahead” it could get.
But it had to be seen. I wanted to see it and understand who this person was. I almost immediately began attempting to flush it from my memory. But I am glad I saw it and that I know that much more about the nature of that particular evil. Any effort to stifle it would have been subverted in short order by YouTube, and would have raised serious questions about why it wasn’t being shown. So no, I don’t have a big problem with it being shown. As a general principle, I believe people need to see the horrible things in life if they are going to understand what is happening in the world.
Now Gingrich, once you get past the indignant jerkoff at Crooks and Liars, makes a couple of points: Murder and base sex wildly celebrated in our society, morals ridiculed, and then people are surprised …
Topics: blogs
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:47 pm on Sunday, April 22, 2007
One Response to “Stop Reporting News …”
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April 23rd, 2007 at 1:16 pm
The news has to be reported, because we all want to know what’s going on where. Even if NBC hadn’t rushed to air Cho’s video, it would have surfaced sooner or later, because people can’t look away from a trainwreck. I think the uproar is really just a culmination of people’s frustration with the MSM’s habit of sensationalizing everything, thus trivializing those things that really are crises. People are angry that copycats might be encouraged. But they’re also angry that this horrible tragedy was treated with the same breathless glee as, say, the Katrina-like hurricanes that were spotted but never came ashore.