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.