Thursday, October 22, 2015

Manufacturing Consent

Over at Ammoland Dean Weingarten published a graphic you need to see


Click on over and read all Dean has to say on this subject.  He has links to a twenty-year-old study by Clayton Cramer on the disproportionate amount of coverage given to mass shootings: 

I have not seen a recent study of the amount of time that the old media devote to mass shooting.  But the stated desire of President Obama to politicize the shootings, and the response of the old media to facilitate his desires, is clear.

One of the major reasons that we seem to be having more mass shootings during this administration, is the administration’s and the media’s desire to use those shootings for political purposes.

Progressives call this “manufacturing consent”.   Cramer, in his paper, notes that disproportionate coverage of certain crimes changes the public perception of how much of a danger they are.

No one is going to try and dismiss the evil and insanity of mass shootings nor are we about to discount the tragic and senseless loss of life or the sufferings of the victims and their loved ones.  It is an indictment of the state of our society that (mostly) young men murder the innocent, whether it involves multiple victims in a single instance or single victims in multiple instances, as is the case nightly in our urban centers.

The truth is that life is neither safe nor certain, that tragedies and loss occur on a personal level everyday.   Everyone, though, wants to see a fire, a train wreck, an automobile accident, and any other spectacle.  The media sells its soap on the fact that humans seem to be wired to stare at carnage.  That is bad enough.  It is even worse when our freedoms are threatened on the basis of the media spectacle and the emotional vulnerability it creates.

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