Quote from: Wayward Son on March 22, 2018, 06:45:56 PM
The bottom line, though, is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to assign the differences in coverage to the idea that the mainstream media is specifically trying to suppress the coverage of shooters who weren't taken out by other armed people. I would find it very hard to reach that conclusion without a good running jump. 
Is this a response to me?
No.
It's a response to the original claim I was responding to.
Excellent points Wayward. I think it's safe if we just assume everyone is lying to us or misinformed or has an agenda and is telling only part of the story. Or all 3 at once!
Well, it helps keep you on your toes.
Why would you reach that conclusion? [They're not] suppressing that story, they just have no interest in repeating it, it doesn't confirm their bias.
There influence is felt by increasing the push behind the first story.
It's also felt when they characterize as crazy the idea that arming responsible adults in a school can have a positive effect on turning a mass shooting into 'not a mass shooting' or 'a common occurrence that's not newsworthy.' When the media sold an idea as crazy last week, and it literally happens the next, it should be part of the debate.
You can't eliminate bias from the media. I won't deny there is some liberal bias in the mainstream media, and that some stories don't get as much emphasis and screen time as they might if the bias was more conservative.
And the idea of arming responsible adults was reported and is part of the debate. You know about it; I know about it; we're debating it. QED.
(And to clarify, "arming responsible adults" was not what was called "crazy." As one news outlet said yesterday, having armed, trained security in schools has been around for years and no one is objecting to it. What was characterized as "crazy" was the simplified idea that teachers should be armed. As one very liberal teacher put it,
Do you really want to give me a gun? )
What I stridently object to is the idea that the Texas Church shooting and this latest school shooting weren't reported as
HUGELY and
PROMINENTLY as the Parkland shooting
only because it doesn't fit in with liberal bias. Basically, that the mainstream liberal media is trying to suppress conservative memes
purely because it disagrees with them.
What I'm trying to point out is that there are plenty of other reasons that these stories did not get the same prominence. Objective reasons like the fact that there are many, many other small shooting that happen every day. ("If we fill our report with this shooting where a single person was killed, what about the seventeen others today, and the twenty others tomorrow? What makes this one so newsworthy?") That there were more ancillary stories related to the shooting. ("Students are protesting at the Florida legislature and meeting with the President. We need to mention this was because of the Parkland shooting.) Or mere logistics. ("I know you want to follow up on this aspect of the church shooting, but there is an equally important story 50 miles away, and you're the only crew available. You'll have to drop it and go.") Or just the normal problems of choosing which stories to report. ("First principles, people: if it bleeds, it leads.")
To blame it all on liberal bias is to feed the paranoia that the NRA and others are trying to instill in this country. "The media is against us! Liberals are against us! They want to take away all your guns! For proof, look at how the media tried to squash the Texas Church shooting and this latest school shooting! If they weren't against us, they'd report it just like the Parkland shooting! QED!!" (OK, maybe they don't say "QED."
) And this paranoia is one reason why we can't talk about reasonable gun control, like mandating background checks for all gun sales or blocking sales to people with a history of mental illness. "Those new laws are a slippery slope to taking all your guns away!"
Only a tiny percentage of Americans want to outlaw all guns. And I understand the frustration of having your point-of-view not represented by the media as much as one thinks it should. I'm frustrated that the gun problem we have in the United States, which are used to murder about 170 people each week, has been overshadowed by a shooting that killed a "mere" 17 people (as horrific as that is). It feels like this tip of the iceberg has become the entire problem, and that if we somehow took off this tip, the iceberg would no longer be a problem.
But the media has its own problems, and just because it doesn't address our point-of-views doesn't mean it completely against them or actively trying to suppress them. We can't expect them to jump when we want them do. Nor can we believe that it is because they don't like us.
