The Virginia Tech Tragedy and the Media

I haven't said anything here about the Virginia Tech shootings. I wanted to wait a week and gain a little perspective. I don't know if there's a way to say anything that really makes any sense of this tragedy, other than to say that your heart aches for everyone -- the students and faculty who passed, their families, all the students who attend Tech, the Hokie alumni, anyone and everyone who was effected by this traegy. I even feel sick for the family of the killer -- I can't imagine how those folks feel today.

It's pretty clear the killer was mentally deranged. I'm not sure about the media, but plenty of people feel they might be lacking any sense of logic. Airing the killer's video... well, let's just say that I didn't think I needed more reasons not to watch NBC News. But before I go too far down that path, let me point out a terrific article from last Friday by Peggy Noonan, sent to me by the Lord of Truth. There's a reason she was a terrific speechwriter for Reagan, and she showed it in this piece...

There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Seung-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.

...I wondered about the emptiness of the phrases used by the media and by political figures, and how pro forma and lifeless and cold they are. The formalized language of loss hasn't kept up with the number of tragedies. "A nation mourns." "Our prayers are with you." The latter is both self-complimenting and of dubious believability. Did you really pray? Or is it just a phrase?

And this as opposed to the honest things normal people say: "Oh no." "I am so sorry." "I'm sad." "It's horrible."

With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate--we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy--but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.

Now, as to the media... I think Don Surber actually makes a very good case for why people are outraged at the media in general...

NBC should not have shown it. This video was a peep show, not news. There was nothing to be gained in showing it.

There was much lost. Dignity, for example.

And airing the video now gives some other cretin an incentive to kill a bunch of people so he can get on TV. Maybe You Tube can give these creeps an outlet.

People do not like the news media for all the right reasons.

We keep failing to say “please” and “thank you” and of course, “I’m sorry,” even when we are not the ones who made the mistake.

As a member of the mainstream media, please, accept my apology for the airing of this video. I’m sorry. Thank you.

You’re the customer, I’m the store.

In a nutshell, that's why the mainstream media outlets are struggling. Newspapers and television networks can't dictate to their customers anymore, because customers can seek out the news on their own. Thier business has shifted, and they can't keep up.

I think I've watched the network news on television about five times in the last three years. I've purchased newspapers for the sports sections when I'm flying or on a train, but I doubt you'll see me subscribe to one anytime soon.

Lest you think this is a continuation of past behavior, I grew up watching the network news every night, and used to read the Philly Inquirer and the Wall Street Journal every day as a kid. The Journal still gets read every day on-line, as does the Philly sports section... but even the latter is becoming a thing of the past, since there's often better sports coverage available on sports blogs.

The mainsteam media still thinks it excels at covering big events, but I'd disagree even with that point. They can bring a lot of resources to the table, but the coverage usually misses the point. For example, the coverage from Blacksburg featured tons of reporters descending on a small, grief-stricken college town, and accomplishing nothing but irritating the local residents and the students. I learned almost nothing from the reporters in Blacksburg after the first forty-eight hours, yet the local news networks here in DC still have reporters in Blacksburg as of today. Jonah Goldberg summarized this well...

To be sure, it’s difficult to see the line between enough and too much when journalists go wild, “flooding the zone,” competing with each other like starving dogs for the slightest new morsel of information they can then put on a permanent loop on cable TV, until the next fragmentary detail is pried loose by a reporter desperate to be first, for 15 minutes.

Because there isn’t enough new information to fill the infinite void allotted to these stories, the press quickly succumbs to a kind of emotional vampirism, feeding off the grief, fear, and anguish of victims clearly incapable of understanding their own feelings or of finding meaning in events that defy either understanding or meaning.

Just as with the Columbine massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing and countless other slaughters whose names tug at our memories - as well as our guilty consciences because we cannot quite recall the details of those “unforgettable” events - we can be sure the media will continue to milk their role as remorse voluptuaries for as long as conceivably possible.

You see, Americans don’t watch news that much anymore, preferring Oprah, The View, Grey’s Anatomy, and other soap operas fictional or otherwise. So long after the shelf life of the facts has expired and the news is no longer new, the networks will try to keep their swollen ratings by making their “extended coverage” as engorged with mawkish sentimentality as possible before giving way entirely to recriminations, self-congratulation and navel-gazing about how they handled this latest challenge.

It probably says a lot about America that we would rather watch CSI: Miami than the evening news. But right now, David Caruso has more credibility than Brian Williams -- at least Caruso appears to know he's just a bad actor.

One More Reason I Love America

Alyssa Milano has her own baseball blog.

Somehow, I should work in a joke about Tony Micelli's baseball career, but I'm too in awe. As I once noted, every American male born between 1972 and 1979 grew up with a crush on Alyssa Milano... and she just keeps adding reasons why. How many women do you know who are interested in Derek Lowe's comments about power pitchers and Coors Field? How many women know who Derek Lowe is?

Politics -- The Art of Ignoring the Obvious and Getting Paid For It

This is why I should have have been a political consultant. Read the following, from a senior Democratic strategist...

Everyone dreads April 15, but for decades, Republicans turned distaste for taxes into votes against Democrats. We were decried as the party of higher taxes, while Republicans championed Richard Nixon’s immortal slogan, “It is time to get big government off your back and out of your pocket.”

Races at all levels, at least sometimes, hinged on taxes, usually to the detriment of the Democrat. Almost every cycle, millions of dollars in ads attacked Democrats for supporting some tax or other. In 1946, Republicans developed an 18-point lead as the party better able to deal with taxes; Democrats lost 54 House seats, in part as a result. Though the question was asked only intermittently, Democrats maintained an edge as the party better able to deal with taxes through most of the rest of the ’50s and again in 1978, then through the early ’90s. However, in 1994, when the GOP opened a 10-point lead on taxes, disaster struck with Democrats again losing 54 house seats, partly as a result.

In the last couple of election cycles, though, the air has slowly, though not completely, seeped out of the tax balloon, as evolving public opinion has reduced the power of this standard GOP attack.

While no one wants to pay more taxes, the perceived burden has diminished. Earlier this month, 53 percent of respondents told Gallup the amount they paid in federal income tax was too high. Though still a majority, it represents a significant decline from the two-thirds who thought their taxes were too high in the late ’90s. In 1993, 67 percent of Americans told Harris they “had reached the breaking point on the amount of taxes they paid.” A decade later that figure dropped by 15 points. CBS found 49 percent saying they paid more than their fair share in 1997, but just 37 percent taking that position this month.

As James Taranto noted, there may have been a few events between 1993 and 2003. Um, like a tax cut or two. You know, the ones the Democrats want to "allow to expire"... also known in the reality-based community as "raising taxes."

There are reasons Democrats are now on par with the GOP on taxes -- too many Republicans have forgotten that people like Republicans, for the most part, because we will cut taxes and government. If they're asked to choose between two parties trying to raise their taxes, they'll take the authentic brand established by FDR decades ago.

Throw the SOBs Out

I'm glad to note that despite my blogging holiday, Congress continues to do its usual bang-up job of acting less ethically than Anna Nicole Smith's significant others...

The Senate's Democratic leaders have a political problem with earmarks. Ever since the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska captured the public's imagination last year, they have been on record against legislators stealthily slipping in their favorite spending projects. But most senators, from both parties, really want to keep earmarks. An ingenious effort to reconcile those conflicting political desires created a remarkable tableau in the U.S. Senate Tuesday.

First-term Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina rose on the Senate floor shortly before noon to request unanimous consent for immediate enactment of a rule requiring full disclosure of earmarks. But the Democratic leadership was forewarned. Just before DeMint took the floor, the Appropriations Committee -- led by Sen. Robert Byrd, the Senate's king of pork -- issued its own flawed anti-earmark regulation. Then, Majority Whip Dick Durbin objected to passage of the DeMint rule on grounds that ethics should not be considered on a piecemeal basis.

This Democratic scenario got rave reviews from most Republicans. Senators like to be on record against earmarks while still enjoying them. The problem is that DeMint and his fellow Republican first-termer, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, just won't let the issue rest. Amid thundering silence from the GOP leadership after Durbin's objection, Coburn declared on the Senate floor: "I would remind my colleagues that we don't have a higher favorable rating than the president at this time . . . and the reason we don't is the very reason we just saw. . . . It's a sad day in the Senate because we're playing games with the American public."

Shortly after the Democrats took power on Capitol Hill, the Senate on Jan. 16 approved, 98 to 0, the DeMint rule, requiring full disclosure of earmarks, as an amendment to the lobbying and ethics reform bill. DeMint rejoiced at "the intent on both sides of the aisle to make sure there is more disclosure." Byrd and Durbin, longtime purveyors of earmarks, seconded DeMint.

But the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) heard a different message from the new masters of Capitol Hill. CRS on Feb. 22 issued a directive that it "will no longer identify earmarks for individual programs, activities, entities or individuals." That deprived DeMint and Coburn of their primary source of intelligence. Furthermore, the ethics bill was bogged down in the House (which normally will pass anything the Democratic leadership wants). The DeMint rule was an amendment to nothing. Legislation was going through the congressional pipeline with undisclosed earmarks, as requests for earmark applications still did not require transparency.

Now that I think about it, the Democrats only campaigned against the culture of corruption -- maybe they didn't want to fix it, just protest against it. You know, like the Iraq War funding issue. I'm glad to note that they're consistent in being slimy and spineless.

To be fair, most of the GOP is just as slimy on earmarks. Give credit to Coburn, DeMint, and a few others for actually being good public servants.

There's one option to stop this -- term limits. Keep in mind, there is a way to achieve this without the slimy fingers of Congress preventing it. Article Five of the Constitution allows the state legislatures to petition Congress to call for a national convention for the consideration of amendments. If two-thirds of the state legislatures so request, Congress would need to call such a convention. I can see the benefits to keeping House members limited to three terms and Senators to one term. Imagine if Robert Byrd was forced to leave DC after six year -- we wouldn't have seven hundred extra buildings in West Virginia named after him.