Heard this morning on the radio regarding the shooting deaths of two women in my city:
“The two women were shot to death, execution-style”…
Redundancy is one thing I hate. The other is when the newspeople switch from past to present tense throughout the story. Grrrr!
“Last night there was a deadly shooting at a local grocery store…blah blah blah…The man walks in to the store with a gun, asks for the money in the register, and then shoots the cashier…”[etc etc in present tense again…WHY?]
Also. Does it seem that each tragedy in the world news kind of follows a certain ‘formula’ at least when being reported? The newspeople have these pat phrases like “devastation in Turkey” or “terror in Littleton” or “Taiwan tragedy” but they lose the essence of what is different and new and touching about each one in doing so.
This morning I realized just how jaded and hateful I’d become. Some girl on the radio was talking in her pretty little radio voice about the rescue of a 6-year-old boy from the rubble of an apartment building in Taiwan. For some reason the joy of it was taken from me by knowing that he was more of a symbol than a reality. Maybe people need to hear these touching stories. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe it’s the media’s way of counter-acting all the negative news they do announce. Maybe I’m just really tired and beyond making sense. Yeah.
FYI, the statement that “two women were shot execution style” isn’t redundant. “Execution style” means the gunman put the gun to their heads and pulled the trigger as opposed to shooting them from 5 feet away. The message is sort of that it’s a much more brutal way of killing someone.
As far as the rest, I totally, totally agree with you!! News programs are so stupid I can’t stand to watch them anymore. My pet peeve is that they always have to have some sort of animal story. That’s news?
Well I understand the difference between ‘execution style’ killing and ‘regular’ killing, but there was just something so absurd about it. What’s the bottom line? Two women are dead.
They were shot. Killed. Ripped from the world. It just seems so trivial to tack on something like ‘execution style’. Maybe I’m just way too big of a grump this morning. humpgh
Naw, it’s not just grumpiness. You, like me are just sick of the media’s way of making an event more sensational. The more graphic and appalling they can make it, the more people will gasp and shake their heads. The truth is, people love hearing those kinds of details - sort of like when they crane their necks and say, “how horrible” as they drive past accidents. People suck. I guess I’m grumpy, too.
melanie- your last post reminded me of a poem i wrote in high school about this same kind of thing. here goes.
Dead Participants
We all are born
with bricks
in our hands–
cold,
hard,
crisp
like a child’s funeral in December.
As we grow
our bricks grow with us–
wrecking balls of hatred
bursting to swing free.
As we move
to thick grey streetcorners,
we unsheathe the flesh of sold sex,
take another step
to the rape
of that shiny boyscout
we saw on the news;
no one could believe
it happened to him.
As another serial killer
is announced by the smiling reporter,
–the talking head–
we shake ours,
add to the slaughter,
eat another pig-in-a-blanket.
WHY
do we forget
what we think
we cannot stop?
Does a lamb in the slaughterhouse
scream
because of the life lost
or the knowledge gained?
jcm 1994
I agree about the media reporting issues (see my thread on ridiculous weather reporting). I also had a chance to talk to our local news anchor- she plays in my husbands volleyball league. I asked her why she always sounded so disappointed when someone didn’t die in a fire/accident. She had no idea what I meant. I suggested she review some tapes and see if I was right…she would report the incident, then say “No one was hurt” in the same tone as “No one got any ice cream”- very disappointed. Believe it or not she has changed her reporting- now when no one dies, she actually sounds glad about it- like “Thank God, no one died”. A vast improvement.
Run for the hills, folks! Or you’ll be up to your armpits in martians!
referring to the 3 American POWS in Serbia from earlier this year (2 are now in the news because they’ve resigned the military–they’ve “resigned” from the military – what the hell is that? But that’s another story) anyway…
This morning listening to the radio during commute, the news announcer said that
“the three POWS endured beatings, taunts, and death threats”.
Ohmigod!! death threats and beatings are bad enough, but taunts? Oh, where was the Geneva Convention?
Reminds me of the French castle scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail…
“If you don’t leave I shall taunt you a second time”
I liked what I once read in a Dave Berry column. He was talking about TV newscasters and said “You can tell when what they are talking about is supposed to be tragic because they all have frowny faces.”
Another funny thing I’ve read is about the emphatic nods most newcasters now use. The next time you’re watching a local news broadcast, count how many times the newscaster makes a single nod as he or she is reading the teleprompter. Apparently this is done to supposedly show that the newscaster isn’t just reading the words; he or she is actually paying attention and is nodding his or her head to show they have an emotional connection to each story.
In newscasterland all the fires are spectacular, and the biggest ones are firestorms, which get their own logos and theme songs. All the earthquakes are devastating, the storm activity hammers as the waves pound the shore, and the twisters invariably rip through the trailer parks.
Every death is a tragic death – except the apparent suicides – but those who die in the horrific accidents are upgraded to senseless tragedies. No doubt that comforts their grieving relatives, who may be either devout Catholics or avowed atheists, but who in either case are accepting donations at the address on your screen.
I have never heard a Cancer death that does not use the phrase “…lost their battle with Cancer.”
I am just wondering how many people in that situation were actually really battling? Or how many were just struggling with an inevitability, or even giving up early on?
Really all I want is some new words used, please. For pete’s sake, they are presenting yourselves as journalists, the least they can have is a wide lexicon!
My vote…get someone like TOm Green on their show. Unrestrained havoc.
Tom was brought on because the weathergirl was supposed to be a fan and she had a birthday. Tom basically began to annoy the hell out of everyone by hopping around and yelling I AM A BUNNY!!! while everyone tried to do reports and had the crew trying to catch him as he ran around the set. Funniest part was that he was thought to be gone and appeared in the very back of the set and kept screaming I am a bunny!!! and he stole their big sign in the back and tried to run off with it.
Only Tom Green could lay down enough annoyance to have the head guy get bleeped in describing him.