Boston Bombings and Bad Media

We don't watch local news and we don't watch evening news. Of course there are those instances when the game is over and it rolls right into the news and we're not quite ready to move away from the screen and into the reality of a Sunday night. That is then when my wife and I relish one of the greatest advantages of marriage: you have someone to sit and make fun of the news and all its poorly interviewed victims, witnesses and miscreants. 

The news deserves it. It long ago lost its way, and more and more the organizations that have been entrusted with the public airwaves have slipped into their own private voyeurism. Whenever there's a shooting, those helicopters sure remind me of vultures. And whenever a kid goes missing, well you'd better book some time at your therapist because you're about to wake up to an America that uses its exploited children to sell cheeseburgers. Well, as long as the kid is blonde and female. 

The sad thing about televised news is that it's simply rehashing home videos and copying and pasting from Twitter. These are all things we could see online and through our own filters and bias, not the one the middle-aged guy with the good hair gives us. My wife comes home and tells me of the stories that we need to hear, like Time magazine's "Bitter Pill" and of all the bills sneaking through Congress while we were distracted by gay marriage. We might hear about those things on CNN, but not for weeks, if ever, and only when the blood ratings stop rolling in from the Boston bombing. 

Yes, we need to know about Boston. But we need to know how to help those who need it and...this is the sucky part...we need to have the conversations about why it happened and how we can prevent it. And by that I don't mean armed guards by every trash can, but about the tone of the broadcast conversation lending itself to more violence. Sure, there are motives galore, but when a country's media glamorizes the very thing that's killing it...well that's a fricken news story.