Non-Lit Ranting: Why media is partially responsible for Las Vegas Shooting

It's hard to believe now, during the age of smartphones, Facebook Live, CNN and the 24-hour news cycle, that Americans 30-40 years ago and beyond spent their entire days doing other things unrelated to national news, despite the lead story. There was a time where folks woke up, read the morning paper that re-capped the news from yesterday, and went to work. These folks came home for dinner (or didn't, let's not past-cleanse) and sat down in front of the tube to catch the news. 30 minutes. The news was on for 30 minutes every day. Once at 6PM, once at 10PM. Then, these folks went to bed (again, or didn't. Who's to say?).

In 1980, Ted Turner--a well-known, wealthy man in the business of accruing more wealth, received all kinds of criticism upon announcing his new news channel. The Cable News Network seemed absurd to people in 1980 because watching the news was seen as social duty, not something enjoyed, and not something worth doing 24 hours a day (I know, crazy right?). However, due to the sensational attention-grabbing headlines, CNN quickly trained it's audience to want more and more information about every news topic; and because CNN cycles 24 hours a day, they had disposable real-estate to draw out these news stories. Over time, other networks caught on and expanded their news times, and at the same time deranged people recognized that one way to get the notoriety they seek, and the infamy they dream of, is to commit a crime heinous enough to grab the attention of these viewership-seeking networks.

As we have seen, the sensationalizing of affairs surrounding mass-killings; such as publishing the body count in the headline, delving into the background of the killer (while offering no information on the strategically nameless/faceless victims of this killer), and continuing on the coverage of something like this not only on an international level, but also a several-day cycle of the same information, leads to 1-2 more copy-cat events within a week. Yet, even when psychological experts issue statements directly to CNN, MSNBC and FOX, pleading them to change their address of events in order to spare the sanity and safety of a populous, nothing changes. These news organizations have been advised to keep the stories to the basics on the local front, and make them seem as boring as possible in non-local markets; so as not to feed the ideals in the minds of these vindictive and narcissistic individuals contemplating such actions of their own. But repeatedly, these news organizations ignore this advice. They stroke these ideals, they set up a circumstance in the mind's of these deranged individuals saying, 'hey, if you shoot up your school/home/movie theater, we will dedicate our entire news cycle for more than a week to you, and why you did what you did. You won't be forgotten. You will go out with a bang'. They do this for ratings. Please know that this is a disaster.

I would like to end with this: What we see on TV, on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, Facebook Live and Twitter is not fake news. This is very real, terrifying news. The problem isn't validity. It is accessability and excess.

#currentevents #politics #America