Discussion for article #239802
I have a tiny sliver of hope that this will have a nation wide impact in the news community and cause journalists to start questioning the insanity of the NRA and our gun fetish culture.
I know, but I’m an optimist.
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I also hope we soon reach the tipping point with the American public who will pressure more politicians at all levels to expose and overturn ALEC gun laws. May it start in this corner of Virginia.
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Delusional?
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Hold on to it. I gave up on all hope when twenty first graders were slaughtered–some almost cut in half–along with half a dozen heroic educators who literally threw their bodies in front of the bullets to try to protect the children and it failed to do more than generate a two week burst of impotent outrage. Didn’t even change the GOP’s continuing campaign of slander and denigration of educators.
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It’s not that they’re oblivious, believe me. It’s that there’s a longstanding feeling in most American journalists that to let your own opinions color your coverage is “editorializing,” which is bad unless it’s in an editorial. In effect they treat the various sides of a controversy as equally worthy of respect, even if they privately think one side makes a lot of sense and the other side is stupid and crazy. Very smart, very confident journalists can convey the relative strength and weakness of the various sides’ arguments, but it’s rare. And with profits down, nobody wants to rock the boat anyway. So it’s not like there’ll be some come-to-Jesus tipping point. The problem is baked in. But if you want to be optimistic, the public does want a saner approach to gun control. If we can pry the gun lobby out of the GOP’s cold, dead hands and show it the door we’ll have progress.
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Truly sad. Surprising the NRA hasn’t spouted the usual garbage about if the reporters had been armed…
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Not sure where else to post this but The Atlantic’s site has an amazing image on its home page—the anchor at the TV station in the first moments when they cut back to the studio.
I lost hope then as well. My sliver of hope now comes from it being two of there own.
No, it generated campaigns to loosen gun laws even more, which they did. Thus you can now carry guns into bars and churches in many states and the press is on to let students carry guns on campus (gun-free zones being a direct target of the post-SandyHook NRA focus).
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I stand corrected.
That’s right, the reporter, camera man, interviewee, anyone near by, all of them should have been armed to the teeth. And everyone watching at home too, one of them should have shot the killer thru the teevee. America, land of the freaks, home of the depraved.
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Dude was fired two years ago. That’s a long time to hold a grudge.
Hmm, leaving out the obvious right wing propaganda machine fox, which editorializes all of its “news coverage”, there is plenty of editorializing in all media forums. Just deciding which stories to show the sheeple (Cecil the Lion) and which stories not to run (the thousands of children who die every day from malnutrition and curable disease) is editorializing. Choosing the guests who get to appear on the Sunday cluster-yacks is a form of editorializing. And all of this is before anyone says a word on-air, which is all carefully crafted not to offed any political side for fear of non-access later. Who are these “Very smart, very confident journalists can convey the relative strength and weakness of the various sides’ arguments”? Even MSNBC has it’s shills.
It’s a shame him and Dylan Roof can’t be placed in the same cell together.
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Sickeningly so…
I lost hope in the weeks following Sandy hook myself. I watched in awe and disgust at how easily the NRA was able to keep its paid for politicians in line.
While it was nowhere near the pain felt in Newtown, it was an especially hard thing to watch as my son was in 1st grade at that time.
I even have a hard time typing this right now…
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Never going to happen.
The ONE THING that will never change in America is the obsession with Penile Extensions; be they Cars, Guns, Sports, or that King of Dick-Enhancements: MONEY.
That is all that counts with the vast majority of American Males because they have been culturally conditioned their entire lives to think that way.
To the American Male it goes in this descending order: (any lack of one focuses the obsession double on the next one down)
- MONEY
- Cars
- Guns
- Sports
- Religion
Threaten any of those and they freak out and will tell you flat out that taking “X away from them” makes them feel (wait for it) EMASCULATED.
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Hmm yourself, you’re coming off a little antagonistically and like a possessor of superior knowledge, so instead of curling up on the floor sobbing I think I’ll make a few comments in return. First of all, you don’t really refute what I’m saying about how most journalists work. All you’re saying is standard drearily familiar been-to-college knowledge-is-socially-constructed pomobabble stuff. And people like you put that forward as if they’re saying something remarkable, when in fact it’s pretty much common sense. People don’t think, work, communicate in a context-free vacuum? No shit! I’ll have to remember that. Journalists make choices? You don’t say! They choose the remarkably trivial story over the less newsy and sexy but certainly more important ongoing endemic misery story? Again, tell us something we don’t know. Sunday news shows don’t want to ask hard questions that piss off their regulars? Wow, none of us have ever noticed that.
Anyway, I didn’t say nothing happens in any form, there is no process whatsoever, that could color or slant the coverage in any of the various media that make up what you might call the communication ecology today. I’m explaining, from a position of a moderate amount of experience, if you want to know, why news stories about shootings don’t go “There was a shooting today somewhere in the United States, which has astronomical rates of gun violence that are obviously related to the numbers of and ease of access to guns within its borders, and maybe that ought to change?” And trying to explain why journalists aren’t likely to say that even in the moments after watching colleagues be gunned down live on the air.
Who are the smart, confident journalists? I must offer up the names for your judgment? You know what? I’m not going to do that, just because somebody on the Internet orders me to. And by the way, you meant “its,” not “it’s.”
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Another reason to be against “Open Carry”…
It’s indecent exposure…