Sunday, April 22, 2007

In Other News, the Rest of the World Still Exists

Boycotting the news media and sponsors for appalling behavior ~ NanoThoughts 1.0

Roger links to a blog that proposes boycotting the news media for airing the photos and videos from the mass murdered at Tech. I've been working long days all week, but even in the rare moments I could get access to news I only watched a few moments or read only headlines. So, essentially, I’ve already been doing that. I knew media coverage would be both heartbreaking (the Hokie stone as a back drop for swarming police cars was all I had to see in an airport bar before I walked out) and excessive. Even if they hadn't shown the videos and pictures, it would have been too much. They always do this. They shove microphones and cameras into the faces of the mourning. They try to blame anyone and anything but the person who was directly responsible. They bring fame to those whose punishment should be the anonymity they sought to escape by slaughtering innocents. They have no concept of the consequences of their own actions. They’re perfectly willing to blame their media siblings in the movie, television, music, and video game industries for these tragedies. But they think themselves blameless. They bring information to the public. But they cannot distinguish between good and bad, helpful and harmful. They just spew it at you as it comes to them, so busy standing in front of a camera they don’t have time to actually investigate, delve deeper, or even verify what they have. If nothing new comes, they just give you the same five minutes of information for hours on end. They’ve got air time to fill, after all. And they can’t cover something else because viewers might change the channel to someone else who is covering it from a slightly different camera angle. And we can't have that.

Perhaps Lionel Shriver should join the boycott, too.

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