Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, addresses questions from the media on May 27 in Uvalde, Texas.
photo:
San Antonio Express – News/Zuma Press
A sinister fallacy that characterizes our modern media is that every event that rises to the level of news must signal some widespread social or political crisis that can only be addressed by government intervention.
Tragedies, natural disasters, acts of unspeakable evil are simply not reported and explained for what they are often: the product of personal will or carelessness, irreversible human malignancy, or some complex set of scientific interactions. Instead each incident—from fatal accidents to vicious murders to Category 5 hurricanes—is immediately serialized into its own pre-labeled moral tale file, each filled with equally useful sensitive illustrations.
They become props in the larger drama that is constantly being written for us by the preachy purists who now control most news organizations, convenient plot devices to portray the virtue of their cause and the malice of their critics.
mass murder The joy of fourth graders and teachers celebrating the last few days of the school year in a Texas border town can almost stand as the definition of an inexplicable act of the same mind that has gone astray. There is a vast literature on the psychology of mass shootings. With each new tyranny we gain a more nuanced understanding of the perversion that produces it. But there is no primary reason why the moral compass of some youths has become so corrupt that they consider it legitimate, or even heroic, to shed the innocent blood of young children.
We all understand this. But immeasurable is not something that our media owners can tolerate. An unsurpassed self-assurance in one’s own moral and intellectual knowledge is not allowed to be punctured by the complex inexplicability of the real world. So they have to fit the story into one of their narratives to maintain that sense of omniscience. It ceases to be a complex act of psychosis and instead simply becomes a clearly evident Case.
This is the morally cringe and intellectually inclined approach that now characterizes almost all news reporting. Media put up The brutal murder of 10 African-Americans in Buffalo this month as a sign of the white nationalist wave that the nation is believed to be in its grip is all the more exciting to the new breed of journalist who wants to do their own journalism. Wants to ban all other journalism except mainly to blame of Fox News.
The murder of a black man by a police officer in Minneapolis two years ago becomes an example of an alleged ongoing war against black people by police officers across the country.
Every storm and wildfire—events that have been occurring with random frequency and intensity for millennia—are now all climate-related synonyms for the evil we’ve done to the planet over the past half century. Any journalist who challenges the narrative is condemned and given its share of responsibility.
The preponderance of preaching over reporting inevitably leads journalism to a path of exaggeration, distortion and outright construction.
A remarkable account of what the world’s media is like created moral panic The discovery of old graves of Indigenous children in residential schools in Canada last year is a good example of how badly we can be misled by this determination to fit a story as a narrative. It turns out that they were not “mass graves”, suggestive of some newly opened terror perpetrated by schools and churches, as a reminder of the continuing evil of the white colonialist mentality.
The moral panic over guns is also at its peak. The violent crime spree of 2020 increased the rate of gun homicides that year. Nevertheless, total homicides by firearms is still much lower than it was 30 years ago, even as the number of guns in circulation has increased sharply. But the mass shootings are happening so they deserve attention—and are the subject of our lecture.
It turns out that it is also not true that police officers, as the director of data science at Reuters, are engaged in the ongoing genocide of blacks. discovered When he tried to call attention to the lie. He was dismissed from his job.
This Is It is true that conservatives are sometimes tempted to use the news for convenient, covert purposes. Right-wing news organizations, for example, may also seize episodes and events around immigration, which are used to support a narrative.
But it is much more harmful than progressive media. Not just because they are cultural hegemony is driving the national discourse so much. But also because of his belief in the government’s infallible ability to correct the various errors that these incidents uncovered. The answer to all our problems is never more freedom but less: more gun restrictions; greater restrictions of speech and behavior; more rules on the economy; More limits on energy development.
Every bad thing that happens has a ready-made solution in the form of a new government program, tax or regulation. To paraphrase what an aspiring Democrat once said: Never let a tragedy go to waste.
Journal editorial report: The return of an intense partisan political battle. Images: AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
opinion | Political narratives are media blunders in times of tragedy
Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, addresses questions from the media on May 27 in Uvalde, Texas.
photo:
San Antonio Express – News/Zuma Press
A sinister fallacy that characterizes our modern media is that every event that rises to the level of news must signal some widespread social or political crisis that can only be addressed by government intervention.
Tragedies, natural disasters, acts of unspeakable evil are simply not reported and explained for what they are often: the product of personal will or carelessness, irreversible human malignancy, or some complex set of scientific interactions. Instead each incident—from fatal accidents to vicious murders to Category 5 hurricanes—is immediately serialized into its own pre-labeled moral tale file, each filled with equally useful sensitive illustrations.
They become props in the larger drama that is constantly being written for us by the preachy purists who now control most news organizations, convenient plot devices to portray the virtue of their cause and the malice of their critics.
mass murder The joy of fourth graders and teachers celebrating the last few days of the school year in a Texas border town can almost stand as the definition of an inexplicable act of the same mind that has gone astray. There is a vast literature on the psychology of mass shootings. With each new tyranny we gain a more nuanced understanding of the perversion that produces it. But there is no primary reason why the moral compass of some youths has become so corrupt that they consider it legitimate, or even heroic, to shed the innocent blood of young children.
We all understand this. But immeasurable is not something that our media owners can tolerate. An unsurpassed self-assurance in one’s own moral and intellectual knowledge is not allowed to be punctured by the complex inexplicability of the real world. So they have to fit the story into one of their narratives to maintain that sense of omniscience. It ceases to be a complex act of psychosis and instead simply becomes a clearly evident Case.
This is the morally cringe and intellectually inclined approach that now characterizes almost all news reporting. Media put up The brutal murder of 10 African-Americans in Buffalo this month as a sign of the white nationalist wave that the nation is believed to be in its grip is all the more exciting to the new breed of journalist who wants to do their own journalism. Wants to ban all other journalism except mainly to blame of Fox News.
The murder of a black man by a police officer in Minneapolis two years ago becomes an example of an alleged ongoing war against black people by police officers across the country.
Every storm and wildfire—events that have been occurring with random frequency and intensity for millennia—are now all climate-related synonyms for the evil we’ve done to the planet over the past half century. Any journalist who challenges the narrative is condemned and given its share of responsibility.
The preponderance of preaching over reporting inevitably leads journalism to a path of exaggeration, distortion and outright construction.
A remarkable account of what the world’s media is like created moral panic The discovery of old graves of Indigenous children in residential schools in Canada last year is a good example of how badly we can be misled by this determination to fit a story as a narrative. It turns out that they were not “mass graves”, suggestive of some newly opened terror perpetrated by schools and churches, as a reminder of the continuing evil of the white colonialist mentality.
The moral panic over guns is also at its peak. The violent crime spree of 2020 increased the rate of gun homicides that year. Nevertheless, total homicides by firearms is still much lower than it was 30 years ago, even as the number of guns in circulation has increased sharply. But the mass shootings are happening so they deserve attention—and are the subject of our lecture.
It turns out that it is also not true that police officers, as the director of data science at Reuters, are engaged in the ongoing genocide of blacks. discovered When he tried to call attention to the lie. He was dismissed from his job.
This Is It is true that conservatives are sometimes tempted to use the news for convenient, covert purposes. Right-wing news organizations, for example, may also seize episodes and events around immigration, which are used to support a narrative.
But it is much more harmful than progressive media. Not just because they are cultural hegemony is driving the national discourse so much. But also because of his belief in the government’s infallible ability to correct the various errors that these incidents uncovered. The answer to all our problems is never more freedom but less: more gun restrictions; greater restrictions of speech and behavior; more rules on the economy; More limits on energy development.
Every bad thing that happens has a ready-made solution in the form of a new government program, tax or regulation. To paraphrase what an aspiring Democrat once said: Never let a tragedy go to waste.
Journal editorial report: The return of an intense partisan political battle. Images: AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
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Appeared in the print edition of May 31, 2022.