The Tucson Terror Killings, or whatever alliterative handle is being put on the shootings in Tucson less than a day ago is still going wall to wall on the cable news networks. The bones of the story are simple enough: Man shoots 20 or so folks at a Tucson Meet and Greet held by Congresswoman Gabrielle Griffords, killing six and wounding another thirteen. Rep Griffords was shot through the head, but is expected to survive, while two of the six fatalities include a Federal judge and a nine year old kid.
Those pesky little fact things are still a bit loose, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the media. The same clips keep repeating every five minutes. Every hour, the meat puppets solemnly intone the grave nature of the situation and every half hour some commentator gets 90 seconds to frown mightily into the camera about gun laws, political backlash, lack of moderate discussion and how the New Coke was ultimately responsible for Jared Lee Loughner walking up to the group with a couple of full 31-round clips for his hand gun.
The latest factoid was that the 9-year old victim, Christina Green, was born on 9-11-2001. We’re waiting for some Truther website to claim that the shooter was determined to clean up the last of the 9-11 victims who might spill the beans about Tower 7, or other such hallucinatory nonsense.
What we’ve got in front of us, is the failure of our media to use their brains as anything other than a spacer to keep their ears from touching in the middle. The essentials are intact: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. Fair enough, the Why isn’t quite done, but that will come out in the next few days at regularly scheduled press conferences from the cops.
What we don’t need is the constant repetition of the same visuals, the same microfactoids and the same useless commentary that adds nothing to our understanding of what actually happened. But, that’s what we’re getting. The TV is off now and it might come back on around ten pm to see if there is any new information to add to the basic bones of the story. We doubt it.
However, we do have a PVR of a couple of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations shows that will gleefully take up the time. Watching Anthony eat a bear sphincter is much more entertaining than the mind-rot we’re seeing now, being passed off a news.
RoadDave 
Part of the frustration in the wall-to-wall coverage, is the press’s over-eagerness to blame “the other side”. MSNBC is convinced that Sarah Palin all but pulled the trigger. Fox is confident that the ACLU helped the whack job gunman to circumvent the law and buy a gun. CNN is confident that Glenn Beck held the gunman’s hand while Keith Olberman shoved in the clip. The irony is, they are ALL to blame. And not to sound holier-than-thou, but so is the US populace. The audience has allowed their attention span to shrink to goldfish size. We can’t be bothered listening to a WHOLE 15 minutes of a debate, just give us the key points. And be quick, because The Housewives are on the other channel. So how does the press respond? They yell. And the louder they yell, the more viewers they get. So now CNN, the calmest of the 3 in the US, have harpies screaming about the issue du jour in primetime. On Fox, Beck and O’Reilly shriek about the Muslim president and his Communist horde. On MSNBC, they scream about the Fox Nazis doing a beer hall putsch on Capitol Hill. And the audiences, with their TiVos and Blackberrys, blip from channel to channel, only stopping when somebody yells loudest. If the TV pundits could learn to TALK, rather than SCREAM, maybe those few of us with a bit of sanity left could pound an education of politics into our ADHD-addled friends and neighbors. Otherwise, you have witnessed the opening act. With nothing to say, the news outlets will start making stuff up. If we accept their mind-numbing chatter as legitimate, God help us! And now you know why a silly little Yank in the middle of nowhere reads AND watches the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and a dozen different web-based news sources from around the world. The Internet has one key advantage – you can get the news without endless repetition. And it’s so much easier to keep the volume muted! 🙂