Just MSNBC the Memory Hole

Big Journalism notes that “MSNBC Panel Race Baits Connecticut Massacre” — but then, it’s always racism straight up when it comes to the “progressive” “news” channel:

Leave it to the shamelessly craven NBC News cable outlet MSNBC to find a race-baiting angle on the Connecticut school massacre tragedy. On the Sunday morning edition of “Up” with Chris Hayes Salon.com columnist David Sirota claimed that the debate about how to respond to the mass shooting would be “much uglier” if the murderer had not been a white male.

That certainly seems true enough in MSNBC’s case. Recall how they chose to become part of Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho’s psychodrama. Here’s a flashback to what I wrote in 2007:

If you watch any football game (and presumably every other televised pro sport), if a liquored-up fan attempts to run onto the field, the television director in the control truck cuts as quickly as possible to another angle–any angle–to (a) not give some knucklehead his 15 seconds of fame and (b) to discourage others from attempting the same stunt. If the director of NBC’s Sunday Night Football knows this instinctively, then why doesn’t whoever runs MSNBC’s Website? Or as Mona Charen writes:

NBC is doing something extremely stupid by running those photos the Virginia Tech shooter sent them. Are they crazy? This will encourage every publicity seeking loser in the world to do something similar to get himself on TV. Foolish.

I’d make one slight change to Charen’s statement. The photos themselves are newsworthy, and should be released to the public. What I find discouraging is how they’re used as part of the Webpage’s graphic design, solely to build controversy and hits, to the MSNBC site. (Here’s a screen grab of that page, before it’s revised.)