No doubt you too have become nauseated by ad-nauseam reports on the co-pilot who deliberately crashed that Germanwings plane in the Alps eight days ago. After all, the “breaking news” reporters are still trumpeting, every hour on the hour, amounts to little more than rehashing old news about the crash or propagating new tidbits about this co-pilot’s personal life.
I don’t know why the media always reward these psychopaths by giving them the fame they covet; that is, by plastering their pathetic mugs all over television and reporting pop psychology about why and how they did their cowardly misdeeds. Isn’t it clear to see, especially in this age of instant celebrity, why some loser kid would find this route to infamy irresistible?
You’d think that – given the record of these psychotic and vainglorious episodes since Columbine – we would have figured out by now that the best way to discourage them is by focusing our attention on the victims and limiting what we say about the [perpetrator] to: May God have mercy on your soul as you burn in Hell!
(“Massacre in Omaha,” The iPINIONS Journal, December 7, 2007)
Ironically, the only insightful or instructive thing the media have reported about this co-pilot is that he boasted to his girlfriend about doing something truly heinous that would make him truly famous. Alas, the media couldn’t care any less about the enabling role they’re now playing in making his ideation about suicidal mass murder come true.
Incidentally, nothing was more distasteful and dismaying in this respect than seeing the Boston Marathon bomber on the cover of Rolling Stone, channeling the smug, self-satisfied look of rock icon Jim Morrison….
Of course, I get that the media make celebrities of mass murders only because there seems to be no sating people’s prurient/macabre interest in their personal lives. And, alas, nothing boosts ratings quite like feeding that interest – even if it means peddling redundant, idle-minded information as breaking news.
This is what has become of journalism today – as I lamented most recently in this excerpt from “Journalism Is Having a Very, Very Pathetic Moment,” November 13, 2013.
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Don’t get me started on the way journalists now troll social media for news and report on every tragedy as if it were the friggin’ Super Bowl. For journalism has become such a pathetic enterprise – so utterly bereft of principles like journalistic truth, professional independence, and duty to inform – that journalists think nothing of reporting what they think the public wants to consume as news instead of informing the public about what is newsworthy.
Some purported news organizations even generate sensational, ‘viral’ headlines and then have creative writers produce stories to match those headlines. Sadly, journalists are becoming just like investment bankers who think nothing of packaging a junk bond as a triple-A stock and selling it for a quick buck.
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Apropos of this, I watched Sunday’s edition of 60 Minutes in utter dismay as Charlie Rose, the universally respected anchor for CBS and PBS, interviewed Bashir al-Assad, the universally reviled leader of Syria. Inexplicably, Rose spent most of the interview posing uninformed questions that seemed culled from viral tweets. This enabled Assad to spend most of it not only pointing out the baseless premise of his questions, but also lecturing him on the geopolitical realities of the sectarian conflict besetting his country.
The result was that, far from coming across like the genocidal mass murderer he is, Assad came across like the type of Jeffersonian statesman any American president would do well to emulate.
Who, just years ago, would’ve thought this even remotely possible?
That’s enough of this rant. But, as the quote above from my December 2007 commentary indicates, I shall continue beating this dead horse, as a necessary public service, until someone in the mainstream media has the courage to take up the cause.
In the meantime, I challenge you to cite what public interest is served by the media bombarding us with reports on the tortured lives and psychotic thoughts of mass murderers. And, in so doing, try to recall whether such reports have ever done anything to either explain their crimes or prevent similar ones?
Related commentaries:
Massacre…
Journalism pathetic moment…
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