33 killed it's a media blitz; 3200 Americans/650,000 Iraqis killed--media blackout.

[live love laugh]

What is wrong with this picture (or lack thereof)?

I'm not making light of what happened at VT. If anything, the tragedy that the nation is grieving over should put the tragedy of Iraq in context. Yet, nobody's grieving over Iraq. Life goes on.

[Jcrowley]

1. Good point

K&R

[liberal N proud]

2. The difference is the 3200/650,000 are government supported murder

Someone earlier today asked the question why Kent State was never mentioned with these other shootings.
It too was the government doing the killing therefore it is not to be mentioned in the "librul" media.

[johnnie]

3. My friend in Texas was watching local news

And they mentioned Kent State, I was surprised.

[babylonsister]

4. Oh, people care furiously; here's two different points of view:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x667512

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x667322

[live love laugh]

7. Great links. People care and are sorrowful. I am talking more about the media

than people. If attention and debate were focused on the tragedy that is a hundred-fold worse than VT, it could not continue. We know that. Most people never think about this because the media doesn't do its job.

[babylonsister]

12. Your heart is SO in the right place! I've read up on the media,

being on DU for awhile, and they are so into it for the audience, not the issue.
Remember the ANS debacle? That happened at the same time as the Plame investigation. I'm a
political junkie, but I cannot tell you how much that infuriated me!
And then we can start in 04, with the Swift Boat smears... it's pervasive.

Also, consider what we've lost:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x275337

[LouisianaLiberal]

21. Below is a posting from Craig's List that is very telling.

It speaks for itself:

Reply to: [e-mail]
Date: 2007-04-17, 4:55PM EDT


Please someone please make these reporters leave us alone. I had a reporter come to me and ask me "off camera" if I would go on the record condeming the way our school responded and when I said know he actually got pissy with me!

People. We have been through enough! The police and school did what they could. This was an isolated, tragedy that may never happen again. In any case anyone who can hear this please make the reporters leave our school and leave us to our grief.

How sick can you be to use this tragedy so you can make more news stories? We have enough to deal with.

Cant you people in the news media find something positve to do rather than come and harass us?

The only thing I can think of so far that the school has done wrong in this whole thing is not close off all campus dorms and facilities to news reporters!

Vultures!

[krkaufman]

5. It's a point I'd pondered...

... but one that can be made just as easily a day or two from now. (KeithO would be putting the owner of such a comment up for his "Worst Person..." nightly award, given he's done the same in the past when O'Reilly has used house fire and drunk driving tragedies to attempt to make some point regarding illegal immigration.)

The VT shootings are a tragedy.

[berni_mccoy]

6. What's worse: The THOUSANDS who died from Katrina

That they aren't even counting. That number is often forgotten here too.

[live love laugh]

9. Yes Katrina too. I heard Rachel Maddow talk about 1,280 dying in Katrina.

I will never believe that so few died and the fact that a number was never debated or really confirmed--again by the hapless media--is shameful.

[Erika]

8. Tony Snow said our U.S. troops were "just" a number, nothing more

And W has refused to comment on the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis deaths. I guess, to him, they rate as even less than just a number.

Too bad our citizens cannot extend the compassion to our kids killed in Iraq, or the innocent Iraqis, as they extended to those killed at VTech.

[live love laugh]

10. Yes but he spoke out about today's shootings. How kind of him.

:sarcasm:

[nam78_two]

11. Sobering

It is not reducing today's tragedy at all to realize that, this is what a "good" day in Iraq looks like :( (compared to the ones where 150+ people die I mean).
I cannot even imagine living surrounded by death or destruction on that scale....

[Jcrowley]

13. Bumping

[realisticphish]

14. I'm of two minds

on the one hand, there's ZERO excuse for ignoring the iraqi cost, so let's get that out of the way.

But the soldiers are SOLDIERS. They're in a war zone, unnecessarily, and are getting killed, a few at a time. It's a horrible heinous things, but these are soldiers.

But these were students sitting in German class, and 30 of them died in half an hour.

It doesn't excuse the ease with which the media ignores the dead solders, but let's be honest; for me, a college student, hearing about a fellow student getting murdered in class hits harder than hearing about a soldier dying on the other side of the planet. It's not fair, it's not morally correct, but it's human nature, and I can't help it.

[Erika]

17. Your post says it all. You don't identify with our troops

They pay the procie and you disconnect. We've lost 3,308 U.S. troops. Sixyt-six in the last month, and you can't find empathy?

[realisticphish]

18. yep

I'm a huge douchebag. I HATE THE TROOPS AND WANT THEM TO DIE.

Jesus Christ. Where the fuck did I say I didn't care?

I said it hits HARDER. HARDER. H A R D E R. Not that I don't care about the troops.

[Renew Deal]

15. Military vs. Civilian

The civilians are innocents. And yes, I know that Iraqi civilians are innocent too.

[Bronyraurus]

16. I don't think

that there's been a media blackout on the Iraq war. Do you really think this?

[live love laugh]

19. Yes. There is discussion about it ending or whether it is popular or not--

but no real coverage is seen of the war. They provide the numbers every now and then, but most often it is done out of context. For instance, they may mention that three soldiers were killed right before a segment on bird flu, but they never discuss Iraqi casualties. They may mention the total death US toll but it's done out of context, as a number, without footage, without coverage about the total state of Iraq. Never has there been any report showing what Iraq was like before we went there vs. what it's like now. I could go on and on...but I think you see where I am going with this. You can talk about something without really talking about anything. That's what has happened with the media and the war. It is a miracle that the war is unpopular as it is, because all the media provides in terms of factual reporting is banter about the political views.

[IsItJustMe]

20. Our media sucks. It is our media who sets the agenda, and it's always where the corporate powerful

want it to be. It makes no sense to me either.

Both are tragedies in their own right. But to keep it in perspective, what happened at VT is a drop in the bucket compared to what is happening in Iraq on a daily basis. Yet little to no coverage by our msm.

Something has been seriously wrong with our media for quit some time now.

[PA Democrat]

22. You know what struck me?

I tried to imagine someone complaining that the media wasn't covering the GOOD news coming out of Virginia Tech. No one would dare be so callous and insensitive to make a remark like that about this horrible tragedy, but the right wing had been making that complaint about Iraq for a long time. There was an intentional effort to trivialize the magnitude of the horror that is daily life in Iraq.

[Jcrowley]

23. Kicking