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.)
Related: Hugh Hewitt in the Washington Examiner today, observing “The mainstream media vultures gather.”
And in The Week, Matt Lewis writes, “The media should be ashamed of its Connecticut coverage.” But why would the “Death Porn Media” start now?
More: “Buzzfeed: upset that the NRA not rushing to get shooting details wrong, like… Buzzfeed did.”
Media may be vultures, but call these people by their proper name: Grief Leeches
Speaking of Saturday Night Live, remember the take-off the original group did on Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” where Dan Aykroyd (playing Kane), reacting to a slump in circulation, pulls out a gun and shoots a couple of people in the street below his office window. Then he turns to the reporter standing next to him and says, take this headline down: “Extra! Mad Killer Targets Citizens at Random! No One Safe in Mad Shooting Spree!”
We’re not quite there yet, but almost.
The same media institutions who acted as cheerleaders for the “No Blood for Oil” smear are the very ones who exploit blood for ratings and advertising revenues.
Oh, I agree with Sirota. Why, when I think of the Washington sniper killings a decade back, I think of the speculation it was an angry black man, and the lack of reaction when it was found to just be two white guys. I mean, if it had been African-Americans sniping at people from the back of cars because they hated whitey, the racists in this country woud have started pogroms once it was found out…
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