GNN – The Ghoul News Network.
WPCNR NEWS & COMMENT. By John F. Bailey. December 17, 2012:
Guns don’t shoot themselves.
People shoot guns.
But is the news media and the tweeters of the moment, right now tightening the trigger fingers of the next gunner with a grudge that will lead to the next shooting of the next victims in the next American “tragic” shooting?
The coverage has been as despicable as the Newtown tragedy itself.
It has not been good. Not accurate. Brutally intrusive. It is doing that it usually does. It works America into a frenzy of grief and remorse, it is arousing the demons in America’s troubled and mentally ill who watch it.
After watching reports; after reading articles in “respected newspapers” admitting Sunday the print stories published Saturday were dead wrong; after jerk-your-heart photos of the victims, the latest orgy of sensational shooting aftermath coverage, I am convinced the media lust for ratings despite pious sentiments excusing the inexcusable.
( I saw one young reporter interviewing a child under 10 about what happened, saying the parents wanted the children interviewed).
After seeing and reading incredibly slipshod, unprofessional, tasteless, compassionless, reckless, unsubstantiated reports of what happened in Newtown, Connecticut, I suspect the next “loner” somewhere is getting ideas on how he or she can secure a place in history and “get even” for the resentment he or she feels about God knows what and God knows who.
American media fascination with disasters is like covering lynchings used to be.
Their answer is you have to cover it.
Of course you have to cover it.
But what is missing is using facts to cover with, not inventing them. Not substantiating.
Covering a big story as if it’s the only story is just not right. It may be exciting to the executives and the news editors but the way to do it is cutaway coverage, not nuance after nuance.
Facts are not showing tape loop after tape loop of the same overhead shots, the same standup commentators to keep America watching your network, listening to your radio station, or buying your next newspaper with endless reams of commentary.
Facts are found by waiting until authorities have something concrete to tell you. Instead, the reporters for the most part reported the first things they heard. They reported the mother of the killer worked at the school; the principal let the gunner in, two blatant errors. These were flat out mistakes, created by prolonging anxiety by reporting every piece of hearsay and supposedly informed source they can find at a scene, and doing a posthumous injustice to the brave who died.
This is going to make you mad:
There is a part of America that drinks up these vicarious thrills from watching real life tragedy unfold. They want to know why. They want someone to blame. They in some strange way are soothed by educators talking about it, experts advising on grief, leaders pontificating about it, and outrage is built.
The media feeds this like gossip columnists of olden days.
News Directors and editors have to get a grip. It was a mass murder in Newtown. Report it. Wait for facts to be released. Have taste to allow the the grieving to grieve instead of intruding.
Do not run it for the sensationalism.
A famous Cavalry general, George Armstrong Custer came across two Calvarymen tortured and mutilated in the desert., As he surveyed the two dead men, he said, “How horrible. But how exciting.” There is an appalling truth to that statement. Obviously the way the television, and the press cover disasters and the Newtown shooting they feel the same way.
Well, Monday Senator Diane Feinstein is about to introduce an assault weapons ban.
Now, the arguments from the gun enthusiasts will be heard again.
Here is what it should do, off the top of my head:
1. Ban possession and licensing of automatic weapons, period. Only guns allowed to be sold should be hand automatics and revolvers and rifles that are not repeaters.
2. Have all sales of repeating ammunition clips and massive sales of hand-gun clips subject to a background check, and reported with names of the buyers. That would possibly stop a spur of the moment event.
3. Have all gun owners reapply for their license each year or say, every six months (like a driver’s license). That would quickly identify persons buying handguns legally then reselling them on the black market.
Don’t worry, gun enthusiasts, congress will never do that. They do not have the guts.
There have been 181 persons killed in 60 school shootings in the U.S.A. in the last 13 years according to McGill University in Montreal. That is a rate of 4 a year! One every three months.
Extensive, Ghoul News Network coverage does not make this disturbing trend O.K., and I think it is responsible for a lot of it.
Ghoul News Network coverage advertises the behavior. It promotes it. It shows the mentally unstable, the misanthropes of life, and the evil (who know exactly what they are doing) a way to achieve instant satisfaction, a horrible get-even high that will bring many people to a low they will never get over.
The media needs to think seriously about the impact of their coverage on the impressionable, the disturbed, and the suggestible in the future.
Because we should have another by Easter.