Sometimes A Tragedy Is Just A Tragedy

[Geee]

Weekly Standard:

Even before anything at all was known about Jared Lee Loughner, who went on a deadly shooting spree outside a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday, a narrative was beginning to take shape.

Partisans on the left immediately blamed the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, “talk radio,” and Republicans more generally. That’s regrettable but probably inevitable. Agitators like Markos Moulitsas, whose Twitter feed on Saturday is full of such charges, make fact-free accusations as a matter of course. So he wrote: “f%#%@#$ American Taliban” and “Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin.” He wasn’t alone. Paul Krugman blamed talk radio for a “climate of hate” and Keith Olbermann blamed Sarah Palin and others.

The mainstream media has operated with the same assumptions. And so despite the lack of evidence that Loughner had political motivations, journalists have wondered aloud whether – or to what extent – “political rhetoric” on the right is to blame.

One of the most important things journalists can do is to provide context for major events, to take a seemingly disparate set of facts and explain their meaning in a way that allows readers, viewers and listeners to understand better what has happened and perhaps even why. Providing such a framework is usually helpful. But not always. Sometimes you cannot make sense of the senseless.

In their attempts to provide such context many journalists – at prominent newspapers and magazines, at the networks, and on cable – are doing more to obscure the truth than to reveal it.

[Pepper]

Geee

 

Experts are emerging

 

 

What if 31 Shots Had Been Only 10?

 

"If he was restricted to a 10-round magazine, lives could have been saved," says Daniel Vice, a senior attorney with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence

 

 

I guess the ten who might have been hit would have a bone to pick with Vice.

 

BTW, what would happen if Loughner had driven an SUV into the group? Would Vice have suggested a small hybrid instead?

 

It's the idiot with the means, not the means, idiot.

[NCTexan]

Even before anything at all was known about Jared Lee Loughner, who went on a deadly shooting spree outside a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday, a narrative was beginning to take shape.

Geee! and Pepper!

 

That first sentence in the article rang a bell with the word "narrative".

 

I'm currently reading an action/adventure book by Stephen Hunter.

 

Stephen Hunter is a Pulitzer-prize winning newspaperman who recently retired from reviewing movies for the Washington Post. In his spare time over the past few decades, he has written some of the greatest and most under-sung novels in American literature.

Below is dialog that Hunter wrote to be spoken by a senior FBI official when confronted with a mindless attack by the press. (Hunter obviously knows of what he speaks!)

 

We are fighting "the narrative".

 

The narrative is the set of assumptions that the press believes in... possibly without even knowing that it believes in them.

 

It's so powerful because it's unconscious. It's not like they get together every morning and decide "these are the lies that we tell today". No, that would be too crude and honest.

 

Rather it's a set of casual non-rigorous assumptions about a reality that they've never really experienced that's arranged in such as to reinforce their most ideal assumptions about themselves... and their importance to the system... and the way that they've chosen to live their lives.

 

It's a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without really addressing carefully. It permeates their entire culture.

 

They know for example that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know that Communism was a phony threat cooked up by Right Wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the Executive.

 

They know that Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction... The response to Katrina was f___ed up... Torture never works... Cheney's a devil and Biden's a genius.

 

Soft power is good, hard power bad... Forgiveness excellent, punishment counter-productive, capital punishment a sin.

 

Pretty darn factual for a piece of fiction!