The Roanoke Shooting Belongs on the Front Page, Images and All

[Karmadillo]

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/08/the-ny-daily-news-is-a-disgrace-but-those-images-b.html

The Roanoke Shooting Belongs on the Front Page, Images and All
By Shane Ryan
August 27, 2015 | 9:23am

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Why am I glad that the images of Parker facing down the barrel of a gun made the front page? Because, sensational journalism aside, actually watching the sickening footage of a terrified young woman being murdered by a psychopath may actually get a point across. Maybe it will stop the willful ignorance, and the ridiculous cycle of superficial recovery that ends with finding hope and meaning in something that is both hopeless and meaningless. Maybe it will wake us up to the pain that we cause each other, and the changes we desperately need to make.

Let’s go back to Sandy Hook. Imagine if we had video footage of Adam Lanza terrorizing those 20 school kids and six adults in a fit of calculated madness. Imagine you could see the panic on the children’s faces as they tried to flee, only to be cut down and murdered by a raging lunatic with a Bushmaster rifle. Imagine you could watch the teachers desperately trying to barricade their students inside a classroom as Lanza paced the hallways, searching for new victims. If we had seen it happen, rather than reading about it, maybe it would have made a difference in Washington.

But there was no video, and what did we get instead? A country so deep in denial that a large faction has convinced themselves it didn’t happen. These are the same people that will believe any third-rate conspiracy theory about the government—who legitimately think Obama is on the verge of invading Texas, a landmass that already belongs to the United States—and they want to keep their guns so badly that they’ll pretend those kids didn’t die, as long as it saves them from examining their batshit beliefs.

Answer this: Why did the first George Bush ban news media outlets from photographing coffins of U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq? Why did that ban continue under his son’s reign? The answer is that they both knew something important about American citizens—as long as you don’t shove violent death in our faces, we’re too happy to look away. We’ve taken our human capacity for empathy and abstract reasoning and shoved it back toward dark pre-history, when we were uncaring animals. If you don’t show the dead people, the Bushes knew, the living won’t care. At least not enough to matter.

And believe me, we’re all picking up the message—especially young people. College kids on the right won’t read books that challenge their beliefs. College kids on the left are eagerly censoring speech that makes them uncomfortable. Even the Washington Post can write words like these with a straight face:

If we’ve learned anything from this incident, it’s that we do have a choice. We can click pause. We can turn off auto-play. We can, as many others have done, encourage people not to look. Counterspeech is what should be restoring our faith in humanity today.

Avoidance, somehow, has become heroic—as though depriving a dead man of attention is a panacea that will stop future tragedy in its tracks. It’s a wonderful fantasy, conjured up by clueless, over-privileged liberals who have no idea how the world works, and the best part is that in order to participate, all you have to do is bravely avert your gaze. How easy!

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[Blue_Tires]

1. The next mass shooter could wear a body cam

and livecast it to the whole planet -- Still wouldn't change anything... Nutbars will still believe their conspiracies, Gunners will still have their pre-emptive "Don't fuck with our gun laws" -campaign, and people will grieve and decry the state of modern America...

Rinse and repeat....

[Tipperary]

2. Yes, there was all that controversy over 60 Minutes showing the sarin gas attack. No doubt if

pictures were available of the extermination camps at the time that was happening, there would be those who would object to those images being shown on the television news.

[Vinca]

3. I think the bodies of shooting victims - uncovered - should be on page 1 above the fold.

Every little dead kid from Sandy Hook should have been shown. Not the cute school pictures, the ones where there brains are on the floor beside them. There's something about our sick society that is "out of sight, out of mind." A horrendous incident gets coverage for a few days, sometimes politicians make promises, but most often they don't, then it goes away. Until the next time. The current "on air" shooting is being treated more like a reality show because of how it happened. And nothing ever happens. The hate continues, the guns continue, the madness continues. Until the next time.

[MisterP]

4. 70-90% of *NRA members* want a little different: remember that we're kneeling in abjection before

these masters, we're letting a tiny corporatist camarilla run all 100 Senators and quaking that they might be mean to a candidate, we're literally under the gun and accept we could be shot in our churches, our malls, our schools, our homes at any moment and nobody can do anything at the moment or in Washington, we always look for engine blocks to hide behind when--not if--it happens, people in Central America feel sorry for US because at least they have the excuse of being so poor

we've let ourselves become rats happy only that we've evaded being stomped for another day

[GreenEyedLefty]

5. I've already seen "fake" and "false flag" conspiracy stories with regard to this tragedy.

Sadly there is a cohort of highly delusional people out there.

[Sam_Fields]

6. But nobody reads newspapers any more.