If there’s anything the national media should have
experience in covering, it’s mass shootings.
They’ve had several chances to hone their skills in the past couple
years, and yet when put to the test again in the Washington Navy Yard massacre,
they came up woefully short.
I have concluded that these national outlets are aware of
all the misinformation they’re spreading, and that they don’t care. It’s now a game to see who can get the latest
tweet on the air. I believe there are
enough seasoned news veterans on the staff of these national news-gathering
organizations that they’re aware of one of the fundamentals of journalism,
namely, that first reports are almost always wrong – and they simply don’t care
about accuracy.
They care about delivering the most compelling live coverage
they can muster. This is info-tainment,
not journalism, and it’s all about getting eyeballs on the screen.
There’s also an element of stupidity, which exists because
of the lack of content supervision. Take
a look at the photo at the top of this post.
It’s a screen-shot of CNN declaring that one of the weapons the shooter
used was an “AR-15 shotgun”. Of course,
there is no such thing. An AR-15 is a
semi-automatic assault weapon. And, for
those who need further depth of information, a gun is generally something with
a smooth bore barrel, and a rifle is something which has “rifling” in the
barrel which makes the projectile (bullet) spin. That increases accuracy, for
the same reason that an accomplished quarterback puts a “spiral” on the ball
when he throws it.
It’s hard for me to believe, as a ‘sconnie boy raised in the
Fox Valley who went deer hunting with his dad, a decorated WW2 vet who
rigorously inculcated his son with firearm safety training, that there is no
one at CNN who didn’t catch that “AR-15 shotgun” error and pull it down within
a few seconds. You can blame some
22-year-old kid who grew up in an urban area and has never actually held (much
less fired) a rifle or shotgun for creating that graphic, but is there no one
at any level of authority at CNN who didn’t take a look at that graphic and
correct it within seconds of it going on the air?
I guess not.
Any veteran newsie can tell you how they learned first-hand
that the earliest reports at the scene of a breaking news story are almost
always wrong, and that eyewitnesses are often the least reliable, but now it’s
a game of following Twitter feeds.
Here’s a screen capture of a CNN reporter’s tweet regarding
that non-existent AR-15 – note the time-stamp and consider that it was more than
an hour after she sent out that tweet that CNN (and all the others) finally
corrected themselves.
What’s even more troubling to me is that some of print media
play the same game.
Above is the cover of the New York Daily News, a publication
which has a well-earned reputation for sensationalizing everything, trying to
grab eyeballs (and lure purchasers) with a typically sensational cover story. Oooh, AR-15, bad, bad! Read all about it! Maniac! Newtown all over again!
A lot of people think this sort of stuff is part of the vast
left-wing conspiracy (with apologies to Hillary Clinton) to do away with all
firearms, and to empower Barack Obama’s Secret Muslim Army to come into your home
and take your guns away. It’s not. It’s just that what used to be journalism is
now, in many cases, no more than info-tainment.
One more thing: do you think Wolf Blitzer will ever learn to
stop asking astonishingly stupid questions during coverage of these
breaking-news-massacres?
One of the best send-ups of Wolf’s on-air ineptitude was a
lampoon piece done by Jon Stewart of Comedy Central. The screen-capture above is part of a
7-minute parody The Daily Show did of Blitzer’s dunderheaded questions,
including my favorite, where Wolf said to a CNN reporter on the scene something
like “we are getting word that the suspect was dressed in a black pair of pants
and wearing a black top….what, if anything, does this say, in a preliminary
sense, about what may have been his psychological make-up?” Stewart ran a split-screen with Wolf on one
side, and a picture of CNN’s Anderson Cooper on the other….dressed in black
slacks with a black top.
Just keep this in mind as you watch the next edition of live
coverage of a breaking news event involving a shooter: it’s info-tainment, it’s
not news.
And certainly not journalism.
