Stop with the Newtown tragedy. Hour after hour after hour of airing the same shit. 5 minutes an hour would be enough. More than enough.
By this process of non stop airing of these tragedies, you’ve made the names of the monsters who committed these crimes household words. You’re doing it with the asshat in the Sandy Hook school shooting. I don’t want his name etched in my memory banks forevermore. I want to remember him as some worthless piece of shit that was bagged in a white canvas bag and dropped, without ceremony, in the ocean beside bin Laden.
I know the name of the Tucson shooter, but I can’t remember the name of that precious 9 year old girl who died that day. I know the make of the Columbine shooters, but I don’t remember the name of a single victim of that shooting. Same with Virginia Tech, same with the Colorado theater shootings. I know the names of the Oklahoma federal building bomber and the Unibomber, but I don’t remember the name of a single innocent victims.
I wonder how many of these asshats played their hand hoping to go down in history with their 15 minutes of fame? I wonder if you (and your competitors) are playing into their hand by all this non stop press coverage. Do we really need to know their name? Just call them the Asshat. Then move on to other news.
Even the Canadian networks are overplaying it way too much. Anyone who survived merely because they were in another room is referred to as incredibly brave and heroic. Reporters blatantly digging for emotional responses from students and residents is exploitation, not reporting. I wouldn’t be surprised if the people of Newtown get sick of the media’s presence there and kick them out.
Things like this are manna from Heaven for the news shows, news networks and talk shows. CNN, Piers Morgan, Dr. Drew, et al. will be eating out on it for weeks, and sporadically for months.
Amen—The killer is dead, the victims are dead, the carnage is over; Let those poor people grieve in peace, without having media ghouls hovering around looking for any tidbits of information (“The shooter hated macadamia nuts!”, “The fat girl from TV’s The Facts Of Life once drove past the doomed school in 1993!”) to titillate their drooling, moronic audience with. (yes, anyone still glued to the TV looking for “updates” is indeed a moron, by definition)
To a crazy dude who probably longed to be noticed and matter, you sure are rewarding him. Good job. Now the next crazy guy who might’ve just killed himself in peace can now say “well now I know how I can get the world to notice me, how to really go out with a bang!”
You people that watch this shit hour after hour, this recreational grieving bullshit you do, is what feeds this. You are giving the perpetrators what they want, and in the process, a little bit guilty for the next one. What kind of sick fuck gets off on this sort of coverage anyway?
What the fuck is wrong with you all? Shit happens, a billion bad things happen on Planet Earth every day, you just have to pay attention to what actually matters to you personally and move on from choosing one instance out of a billion to engage in recreational grieving over.
Along with wishes for world peace and an end to hunger, disease and poverty, I wish that the media worldwide would decide never to cover another mass murder or terrorist attack. Both would then plummet to virtual nonexistence.
And just think, unlike wishes for world peace or an end to hunger, disease or poverty, this one is actually doable.
I have always felt that the media causes terrible harm by focusing so much on the killers’ names and faces. I will never forget the names of the Columbine killers. I can’t say I remember the name of even one of their victims. That’s pretty much what the killers wanted - to feel important and recognized. They wanted to shock everyone and get their attention.
It’s not realistic to think that the media won’t focus on these kinds of tragedies, but I really wish they would form policies of NOT paying attention to the killers. Report on it in terms of the victims, NOT the killer. Just as responsible journalists don’t publicize suicides, because it’s known that suicide is socially contagious, and just as we don’t publish the names of people who have been sexually abused because it’s in poor taste, I think that the media should be careful not to turn killers into “celebrities” for those who feel alienated from society.
One thing I must say for Anderson Cooper is that he at least seems to get this and I recall after the Batman movie killings, he tweeted about how he planned to never mention the killer’s name and focus on the victims instead. That’s the right way to do things.
Oh, yes, they are. The networks have been doing this shit going all the way back at least to the Kennedy assassination. When it really began to take off though was with the advent of cable television and 24 hour news networks, who weren’t faced with having to sacrifice expensive programming and commercial advertisements to carry their coverage nonstop. Fox and MSNBC are relative newcomers to the bloodbath orgy.
I think she meant that if people weren’t watching it, it wouldn’t be airing. FWIW I completely agree the media facilitates mass murder by sensationalizing it.
A thousand times this. This even extends to those who didn’t survive. Not to speak ill of the dead, but the media is going on at length that one of the teachers “distracted the shooter so that some of the children could escape.” Just because the shooter kicked in the door and shot the teacher first doesn’t make the teacher a hero. It happened in seconds. Who knows whether the teacher was thinking “I must save these children!” or “OH MY GOD NOOOOOO!!” in those last seconds.
I know the media worships heroism. But who knows what those last moments were really like.
The term “Hero” has been watered down in the past 20 years or so (seemingly starting around the time of the 1st Gulf War) that it has become utterly meaningless.
That doesn’t mean that some of those teachers didn’t indeed react with incredible bravery, selflessness and heroism, but to paint EVERYONE in the entire school, both survivors and victims, the living and dead alike as all being heroes is assinine, and does a disservice to everyone involved.
Actually covering the news is expensive, difficult and boring. Selling the living shit out of one big story makes everybody happy except that cranky minority who doesn’t think of news as entertainment, and they can apparently go fuck themselves.
I agree wholeheartedly. It should get one mention on that days 6 pm news [showing my age, remember daytime TV went til 6, then it was half an hour of local news, half an hour of national news, then 7-8 was silly crap like Hogans Heros, then at 8 the network took over for their evening programming until 11, when it turned over to half an hour of local programming, then stuff like the Tonight Show]
I have to admit, there have been a few times I watched CNN for constant updates - back in Desert Storm I was in Norfolk VA visiting, and there was an issue with possible sabotage to some oil storage tanks and military establishments locally, Pat and I were watching trying to decide if we were going to load all the kids up and beat feet for my farm in Connecticut or not. I can remember watching on 9/11 - I was getting my morning fix of national news when they showed the tower footage live. I also tend to watch when they did shuttle launches. I remember Columbia.
[The jackasses in charge of programming for most of the Connecticut TV stations have no idea about national or international news. They tend to show shootings and housefires, and traffic issues on I95. sigh I need to do BBC America and CNN for any sort of nonlocal news.]
This is an annoying trend that’s becoming a growing problem with CNN. It’s like reporting on several smaller stories is just too damn hard, so now they latch onto stuff like this for as long as they can. Hell, after hurricane Sandy, Anderson Cooper did his entire show outside somewhere in NYC for like two weeks. I never caught why he’d started to do so in the first place, or why he did for so long. Don’t even get me started on hurricane Katrina!
The bottom line is that I watch CNN a lot less than I used to.
Look, I am probably the hardest person in the world to offend, but when one of these stations interviewed one of the babies who survived that carnage…I mean…what do you want from this 5 year old baby. She should be in private mourning and support and comfort with her loved ones…not stuck in front of a mic, struggling to have a back and forth banter with this fucking ‘journalist’. First time I ever turned off my t.v. in utter disgust.
My husband told me that he watched a teacher get interviewed, and he was so confused by his feelings…he said it was obvious to him that she was hamming it up a bit, and he felt sick that he thought that of someone who so clearly had been through a very traumatic experience…yet he said he could not fight that feeling off.
Yes, I couldn’t believe they actually did this reprehensible interview . . . or that the kid’s parents supposedly consented (or pushed the kid into it). They’re undoubtedly keeping it as a memento of this tragedy. It made me want to puke, and I turned it off too.
