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Old 10-02-2015, 01:04 PM   #31
BishopMVP
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Concord, MA/UMass
Quote:
Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA View Post
As opposed to calling out the people who watch it all and want even more?
You of all people show know disdain can be directed at more than one group at a time. And in fact I did make a point to mention the hypocrites who decry it while secretly driving the demand.
Quote:
Media responds to demand, because demand = revenue.

I have specific questions about the case I happened to be interested in. Who was the guy, what was his basic motivation, what's the general backstory here (bad relationship? bad grade? utterly random?), and yes I was curious to know the number & type of weapons involved. And that's probably about it. I've managed to satisfy that interest with 15-20 minutes worth of reading since the details started to emerge, no need to Google any of it, it's all been touched upon in stories that readily came into my view from a headline aggregator site. I've seen exactly zero seconds of TV coverage of any kind.

Wanna bet there's a (small) ratings spike for cable news last night though? Or what a leading #hashtag yesterday was? Point being that I don't have to be part of the demand to recognize that it exists.

Pointing the finger at the media instead of the viewing public is a mistake afaic.
I don't have any problem with going to read a story on it - I usually end up doing that once with these stories for the same reasons you do. I have a problem with wall to wall coverage that pushes it into peoples faces, with affiliates 3000 miles away all trying to break news instead of just having the national team do it and using their information or the reporting from the local station when they feel it necessary to talk about it on the nightly news, and most importantly with people glorifying it to either push an agenda or make money.

Honest question here - if the TV media all agreed at least not to show the pictures of the people who did this and made it something you actually had to search for on message boards and in darker corners of the web, like when a horrific video like a beheading comes out, do you agree it would reduce the chances of at least one of these attacks? If yes, at what point does that start to have more value than some people's need for details? This isn't something the media is unaware of - I actually saw the link to that CNN story yesterday with a February publish date, and it was updated today so it would show up on their front page feed.
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