Reporting on the last Texas mass shooting followed a familiar pattern.
-Numbers of victims,
-the usual lament from the Dems and a call for disarmament
-a Republica spokesperson repeating the usual talking points blaming anything but the lack of gun control.
What if, instead, journalists reporting on mass shootings uncovered, in advance, how much money the pro-gun lobby had donated to which politician at what time? And, at the next incident, went to that politician with cameras and confronted him?
"Senator X, another 10 children will never return to their parents in yet another mass shooting. We noticed you received 15 K and an endorsement from the NRA at the last election. What, exactly, did you promise in return? "
Wouldn’t that be a more effective way of reporting?
Realistically? Because American media doesn’t report on such matters in general. The vast majority of media is owned by a few megacorporations and they’re part of the class that’s buying politicians, so they don’t want to bring attention to that type of corruption/buying political power. You very rarely see serious reporting about conflicts of interests and political donations in such a specific way.
I hate to be cynical, but … which journalists? And who’s employing them?
And, frankly … I dunno about the next guy, but I’m so damn tired of the same ol’ same ol’ (“Thoughts and prayers!”) that I don’t know that it would do much good at this point.
Sadly, Americans are becoming wearily immune to the outrage.
If someone had acted like that right after Sandy Hook ("all those chil’uns!!) then maaaaayyyyybe something might have happened.
But even then, probably not. Sorry to sound jaded, but this shit just … happens in the Majikul Land O’Murrica.
I know that seems cold blooded of me, but when this shit happens once or twice a week, eventually the … well, I don’t want to call it “novelty” but the … look, the spirit wears thin, yanno?
Nope. And that’s mainly because a large number that the media would be reporting to support the entities making those contributions and thus those particular politicians.
Preach it! We’ve always had a right wing leaning media. Reporters don’t decide what the news is, the owners of the media businesses make those decisions. The astronomical dollar figures for campaign financing are primarily going to be spent on advertising and media executives aren’t going to bite the hand that feeds them.
I don’t think it would matter – their supporters don’t care. Part of me thinks this will only change once a large majority of Americans either actually have personal experience with a mass shooting (i.e. they are survivors or they have lost a friend or family member in a mass shooting) or were pro-gun-control in the first place. I wonder how many mass shootings it would take for that to become a reality.
Texas, the macho state, is suddenly having a rash of gruesome mass shootings. It will be interesting to see in what political direction this whole thing goes.
No one cares. The NRA was funneling Russian money to conservative politicians and no one cares. We have had at least four mass shootings every week of this year and no one cares.
An outfit like 60 Minutes could easily decide to look into NRA funding of specific named politicians as a general matter of public interest / salacious scandal. That would be right up their traditional alley.
And once they had a list of politicians and donations received, which became well-known to the public and hence to the media at large, then the next time there was a shooting, ordinary reporters just looking for a different angle could go visit whoever on the list is local to them. Then stuff a camera in their face and start asking awkward questions.
The only real argument against this plan is a cynical one that says all reporters everywhere are faceless shills for Murdoch & his cronies. Or that, because most media is local, there are wide swathes of the country that consider mass shootings to a) be the price of freedom, and b) simply proof that the police are underfunded and need more and heavier weapons to return the fire. Especially if the shooter is non-whitecishetmale.
I think there’s also the assumption that the reporters have an explicit axe to grind/political slant on the news they’re covering AND that they want to trumpet it.
This may be a European/American difference; from what I can tell in Europe, entire news outlets will have a particular audience and associated political slant, and the staff all the way up are promulgating that slant.
Here in the US, with the notable exceptions of Fox, NewsMax and the other explicitly right-wing outlets, the news outlets profess to be neutral, and what political slant there is tends to be exercised more in the editorial control over story mix and/or literal editorial content.
So doing a sort of pre-emptive research effort into gun lobby funding of politicians and then using that to confront them is a more explicitly political action than most US news outlets typically take. They’d typically do something more along the lines of just reporting that Rep So-And-So (R-Rural State) was funded to the tune of X thousand dollars by the NRA, without necessarily confronting him directly about it.
Start a superPAC, find out what the gun lobby is paying them, and outbid them. They already know the majority of voters favor gun control, so taking money from the gun control lobby would be a win win.
I’ve uncovered a conspiracy; it covers guns, and the border: the idea is, through their inaction, to encourage mass shootings in the hopes that the US will seem more deadly than the countries from which the immigrants are fleeing, and they’ll just turn around.