Is It News

Or Propaganda?

Watching for the “News” coverage of the most recent tragic mass murders in Aurora, Colorado, it occurred to me that almost no new news was being treated as “Breaking News” on broadcast, cable and satellite TV.

What is “News” and what isn’t, seemed like an important question to me? 

Recently I’ve seen many people getting their News from the Internet via You Tube, Facebook, Blog sites and web pages, some dedicated to news coverage of world and national events and some just using their Internet access to exhibit their photos or videos of events in which they were either witnesses or victims.  

Some I saw were from Libya, Syria, and Colorado.

These were News!  At that place and that time in the direction that that camera was pointed, assuming it was not a staged event, to the extent its visual content and context was self evident with little chance of misinterpretation; it was News.

Most contained no expression of opinion, just statements of fact, like the time, the date, the place name, and distances and cardinal directions.  The destruction, foreboding, terror, mayhem, and fear were evident by the actions of the people in the video.  Little commentary was needed.  No commentator feelings, value judgments, assumptions or opinions were needed or wanted.  Although some showed up from self proclaimed, “Major news” organizations days later standing in front of ruins speaking as though they knew something about what happened there

That is as close to news as I have seen in several decades.  It’s no wonder to me that millions of young and old have turned to the Internet to get first person unadulterated, un-amended, mostly unbiased, un-manipulated event audio and video. 

On NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and even FOX provided almost no factual data, and went immediately to conjecture, insinuation, musing and supposing things about which they had not a scintilla of facts, data, or even second person information, and brought on agenda driven personalities and celebrities with even less news and more opinions.

And they all moved immediately to accusing one faction or another (NRA or businesses) implying involvement by insinuation, or by asking why would a seemingly intelligent advanced degree student from a liberal university go crazy and start killing people like a disgruntled middle aged white male conservative, or the big one; can’t we now get some more new gun and ammo control laws, so that those crazy people who won’t give up their religions or 2^nd Amendment Rights can stop causing our children to be killed by these poor misguided unfortunates.

All about feelings, agenda, demonizing, attitude, accusation, insinuation, mischaracterization, and in ABC’s case misidentification of a 59 year uninvolved man as the 22 year old, immediately arrested, perpetrator.

Virtually no news was provided.  Just the gun control mantra repeated in various ways and by various representatives from among the well-meaning pretending that inanimate objects, not a deranged liberally educated person, animated, loaded, aimed and fired itself spontaneously and was responsible for the terrible deaths and mayhem.

Assumptions, accusation, insinuation, agenda, and opinion is, they apparently think, Good News.  

Terrible Murders;

But It’s People That Need Controls, Not Guns

These very terrible murders and many unfortunate woundings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado recently have brought out the gun control crazies and the well meaning in huge numbers.

That too is very unfortunate.  Things don’t need more controls; people do.  Guns, vehicles, chemicals, hammers, chainsaws and butter knives don’t need more controls; people do.

As usual, it’s what you’re not hearing that is more interesting.  Little is being said of the failure to enforce existing laws.  Few are asking what’s wrong with these people or our culture and society.

Nothing is being said of failed policing.  Or, the failure of some states to report to the national data base.  Or, the failure by psychologists and psychiatrists to identify, house, and treat the mentally deficient; or the failure of academia to educate professionals with the insight to identify the criminally insane, or the courage to institutionalize them; or the failure of institutions to maintain confinement of the dangerously deficient; or the complete failure of a supposedly intelligent individual who was completely incapable of recognizing and doing something responsible about their own personal deficiencies and behavior.

Nothing is being said about increased evaluation, containment, incarceration and treatment of the seriously mentally ill and emotional deficient.

Listen people; stop blaming other things and other people for your deficiencies.  Learn to assess your skills, intellect, health and mental stability accurately.  Get in touch with reality.  Stop deluding yourself.  Don’t believe feel good crap fed to you by the “socially just, politically correct or the well-meaning.”  Learn to think for yourself, if you cannot, it’s an indication you need more evaluation and training. 

If you are thinking about and planning the murder and maiming of dozens of people; go get mental care.  If mysterious voices in your head are telling to do bad things, and you think you should be doing what they tell you, go get mental care.  Turn yourself into a state run hospital for containment and further evaluation.

Stop blaming your personal circumstance, condition, inadequacies, incapability’s, bad behavior and poor choices on something or someone else.

If something bad happens to you; you allowed it and probably helped cause it.  Even most accidents are partly caused by your choices or behavior.  Rarely, does fate, chance or luck alone intervene in your life.  You make your choices; don’t blame things, don’t blame others, real or imagined.

If disappointment, disease, misery, and disaster constantly occur in your life without occasional good, helpful, valuable things that you have earned; then something is wrong; change your life choices, get professional help.

Don’t take some tools or devices and start slaughtering other people.

And, if you are one who thinks these kinds of problems need more government laws controlling inanimate objects, especially if you are having trouble understanding effects and their correctly associated causes, then….

You should check yourself in for a complete mental evaluation.