Brinkley on Kennedy's assassination in November 1963.
When it comes to the murder of public figures, I think there is something different about America by contrast with Russia or Italy or Pakistan, and that is that the mentally ill rather than the consciously sane but radically politically are responsible for more of the assaults. And the media makes more of a spectacle of politics, especially electoral campaigns, because we have the First Amendment but also have more of a history of commercializing the spectacle as entertainment. You don't need TV to incite political murders (they happen in Russia even if the subjects over which people are shot are self-censored by most TV coverage) but the mentally-ill form this takes does seem to be an illness facilitated by the media.
Of course, no one will ever, ever blame the media for mass murder; that can't happen.
Yet the ability of the media, especially "new media" to rapidly convey the rhetoric and incitement of both left and right -- as well as the ability of the media to fracture and divide people now that they have many sources for their news-and-views diets -- is an accomplice of sorts in the tragic events in Arizona. Of course the media amplifies what is human agency - you cannot lose sight of that. What's different about the situation now than 50 years ago is that we don't all experience the same amplification at the same time anymore. It's interesting that the creation of McLuhan's "global village" has led to the creation of a lot of global villagers in a lot of separate and backward villages now, each with their own channel on Youtube.
There is no one place for the country to get the news anymore, and there is no one trusted figure that people of different political persuasions can still agree will convey this news.
The gulf is widening between the Twitter-informed and the Internet-educated youth (and their semi-educated elders) who very rapidly pick up Internet cultic ideas inciting hatred of government, institutions or people, whether the Tea Party, the socialists, the Jews or the Muslims -- and those who still patiently watch and read news as it is prepared formally and think about it in some traditional way (despite its non-traditional delivery).
The increase of people fed news like an IV drip without consciousness of what it means, how to evulate it, how to judge it -- this is beginning to make itself felt. It is no long possible to reason with some people; they have become unreasonable due to the media -- and frankly, I don't mean only the right, particularly its extremes, I mean the left as well, indeed, I see their belief in the "science" of their positions more scary than anything.
This is a phenomenon far faster than the five hours that it took to move from one president to another, one city to another due to the jet plane describe in Chet Huntley's report, above and contrasted, lamentingly, with the train more slowly taking the coffin of FDR across the nation to Washington so that people had a chance to think.
When I was a child of four, I distinctly remember riding my bike along the sidewalk as the sun began to set at about 6 pm, and a teenager self-importantly telling me to go home, because "Huntley Brinkley was on". Huntley and Brinkley, the main prime-time news show that everyone watched at the time, defined our daily schedule -- we had to get home by then because the dads were coming home to watch the news, dinner would be ready soon, and you had to wash up. You had no doubt that in millions of other homes in America, everyone else was sharing the same news space of "Good night, Chet, Good night David"; everybody watched the same TV about the assassination of Kennedy; everybody watched the same TV with the Warren Report, something I remember riveting my grandma for a summer when I stayed at her house.
Nowadays, we don't have the same TV anymore. Some are watching Glenn Beck (that wouldn't be me -- I don't even have a TV); some are watching Jon Stewart (I might catch up occasionally on the Internet -- I don't care for him, either). Millions watch Palin; different millions read Krugman, and maybe on their mobile phones.
Then there's Twitter and Facebook splintering us further, and I have to say I'm getting most of my news from those containers, mindful that they aren't the best.
Part of the unease and fear I feel with this latest tragedy is that I feel that I can no longer get the news. There is no "turning on CNN". That is, one could turn on CNN, but it isn't the CNN it once was.
Here's what happened:
o Twitter is filled not with news, but shocked expressions, prayers, and enormous amounts of ranting about Palin's targets and the most outrageous invective and rhetoric about the right's alleged responsibility
o It's impossible to see the live-blogging from witnesses or relevant people on the scene, or journalists with real news, because the Top Tweet feature buries the hash tag searches -- this is one of the most actively obstructive aspects of Twitter now that the devs really have to realize is making their service unusable.
o Yes, Twitter, which we increasingly "go to for news" -- and rightly so, on things like the Belarus crackdown, where yes, indeed, it had better news than mainstream press or Live Journal -- WAS UNUSEABLE because of this awful mechanical phenomenon. Somebody tweets that Sarah Palin's target was taken down or that Giffords was in her sites 57 or 157 times, and it rises and permanently stays on the top as the first search return; add 100 more like that and you have a tide of rhetoric for three pages you cannot get past, with no signal of real breaking news. Consider the hash tag search for breaking news simpy dead and crippled at this time.
o Only if you have figured out some reliable people to follow will you get news -- and some of them will let you down with rhetoric -- certainly Ken Olbermann didn't waste any time piling on Palin, and most had to indulge. I certainly have more respect now for @digiphile than I did (he's the O'Reilly flak-meister in Washington so I constantly criticize him) -- he refused to bite on the low-hanging anti-Palin fruit and said we had to wait and see. Even so, I can't help thinking that was possible for him because he already lives in the Wired State, where assassinations, while they are terrible, and awful, and have real consequences, don't ultimately matter that much for his crew and their methodical taking of power digitally. They are confident that nothing will touch them in cyberspace, and they will run everything anyway.
o The New York Times was so busy with its liveblogging social media imitations that it merely repeated the hysteria of Twitter in all its forms
o I found only Yahoo with its carrying of the AP stories to be reliable. AP generally was first and best at reporting on the actual news -- but that's not enough. A wire service is good; a wire service is in fact a very blessed thing in this world of giddy and stupid social media prone to hysteria and mob rule, and the old media nervously imitating its style and form to keep readers.
But you need a newspaper's judgement; a trusted TV anchor's judgement. And that was late in coming. That is, not late, really, but it's just that the social media lie has time to come not just halfway around the globe before the truth can get its pants on, as Churchill once said about lies in the news in the 1940s; today's social media lie circulates the globe 10 times and becomes indelibly stored in Google forever before the truth can even get out of bed.
So we live in a world where the old media is fractured and the new media fractures us even worse, and you cannot get the news in one piece. That's bad news. It's bad news we are going to be living with for some time to come.
A few comments that have appeared, trying to call to conscience, trying to shape the narrative -- but there are only some people who are in a position to hear it and process it:
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, issued one of the strongest statements, saying: “I am horrified by the violent attack on Representative Gabrielle Giffords and many other innocent people by a wicked person who has no sense of justice or compassion. I pray for Gabby and the other victims, and for the repose of the souls of the dead and comfort for their families.”
He added, “Whoever did this, whatever their reason, they are a disgrace to Arizona, this country and the human race.”
"Anger and hate fuel reactions," said Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva, whose Arizona district also includes parts of Tucson. He said he was not assessing blame, and Saturday's shootings might be the work of "a single nut." But he said the nation must assess the fallout of "an atmosphere where the political discourse is about hate, anger and bitterness ."
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs said in a statement: "While we do not know the motives for today's attack, we do know that it cannot be viewed apart from the climate of violence and the degradation of civil society that are anathema to democracy."
All to true, and the question is whether we can examine all the forms of media creating the climate as such, and not merely the climate.
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