CNN Tries for New Angle on Chiefs' LB Murder/Suicide, Fails

“CNN Blames Culture of ‘Manliness’ For Belcher Murder/Suicide,” Ben Shapiro writes at Big Journalism, who responds:

Belcher wasn’t manly – he never married his girlfriend and clearly didn’t care enough about his child not to murder her mother. Less traditional values? Belcher didn’t do this because he was gay, and put upon by the traditional values establishment. He did this because he had no traditional values.

If we are going to blame society for Belcher, let’s look at some real societal problems: single motherhood, tolerance for antisocial behavior, lack of behavioral standards, multicultural acceptance of sexism. But the media is intent on blaming conservative ideals, from gun control to traditional manliness, for what is very clearly a breach with any conservative ideals whatsoever.

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Responding to “Bien Pensant” Costas, Ace adds that the sportscasters’ rant last night “revealed a series of flawed thoughts. I thought I’d note some of them.” This is just an excerpt from a much longer post:

Bob Costas wants you to know that if you sign on for the cultural preferences of the monied liberal urban elite, we can finally have an end to this whole murder business.

This is an extremely arrogant idea, of course. But is as usually the case, people have the strongest opinions when they have the least actual knowledge.

Another thing Costas does here is to ignore three cultural matters that are less easily burbled about than his anti-“gun culture” kick, which of course safely targets White Republicans. Adam Carolla talks about this a lot — it is a favorite posture of the liberal urban elite to discuss safe villains, White Republicans, who have nothing to do with the ills they’re discussing, in order to avoid talking about things that aren’t so easy to talk about. Things that actually do have something to do with the ill they’re talking about.

The easiest of the other three cultures to discuss is the bubble that athlete heroes live in, in which most of their personal problems are “fixed” by a large and wealthy organization that has a lot of investment in them. This leads to the idea of action without consequences and all the evils that flow from that.

More difficult to discuss is the very violence implicit in football itself — violence that leads to concussions and brain injuries (and brain injuries of course may well lead to defects in thought and judgement).

This is especially difficult to discuss because you can’t have football without this. You cannot have what we know as “football” without the very real risk and frequent incidence of serious brain trauma.

Thus, we’re all kind of complicit in this, or, putting it a different way, we’ve all accepted the violence as a necessary evil for a bit of entertainment. The athletes accept the cost-benefit tradeoff; the teams accept it; NBC accepts it; the public accepts it. We all accept that to have the game as we’ve had the game, and as we want the game, there are going to be some serious casualties along the way, the most serious of which involve the brain and spinal column.

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Read the whole thing. If Time-Warner, which owns CNN truly believes that football’s “culture of manliness” is responsible for Belcher murder/suicide, it can stop covering, or begin to dramatically downsize its coverage of the game, on both a pro — and especially college — level, at not just CNN, but Sports Illustrated and HBO, all of which are under its corporate purview. The same goes for NBC.

See also: rapid demise of boxing as a respected, front-line professional sport.

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