I've Joined The Pajamas Media Stable of Writers!

I've Joined The Pajamas Media Stable of Writers!

Here's a piece that they just published by me about mass murder, mass media, and the failure of deinstitutionalization. And they pay me, too!

The Devil Made Me Do It

The Devil Made Me Do It

Look, you don't have to work very hard to get me prepared to blame all sorts of evil on the mainstream news media. But talk about projecting blame!

A new Harris Poll reports that most Americans believe the media is in some part responsible for the current economic crisis by causing people to buy things they couldn't afford. Over half of Americans (54%) even point the finger at talk shows on TV or radio as having some responsibility. Getting off the hook are friends and family which over half of the respondents says do not have much or any responsibility.

Ad agencies took the brunt of the blame with 66% of people saying they believe the agencies are somewhat responsible while 33% attribute complete or a great deal of responsibility.

Oh yes: the ad agencies used their hypnosis beams to make people go out and buy stuff that they couldn't afford! And in another couple of years, much of that 33% is going to blaming the media for making them vote for Obama!

There's no question that the promotion of consumerism is a bad thing. But come on! Take some responsibility for your own decisions.

The Decline of Dead Trees Media

The Decline of Dead Trees Media

Traditional media keep pretending that they have professionalism and experience on their side in the battle against the blogosphere. But I keep hearing from around the country that really large tax protest rallies are just being ignored:

Yesterday, March 21st,

ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED PEOPLE showed up in downtown Lexington, Ky. to participate in the Kentucky Tea Party protest against the continuing fiscal madness in Washington, DC.
And how many front page stories were there in the newspapers in Lexington and Louisville, or in our own home town paper, the State Journal, about this event?
NONE. ZERO. ZIP.
In one of the most blatant examples of media manipulation that I have ever witnessed in my entire life, the mainstream media have chosen to ignore a mass protest by over a thousand Kentuckians, speaking their minds about an issue of major importance in our lives.
When that putrid hate-monger Louis Coleman held a rally at which only a handful of his sycophants showed up, they covered it like it was the second coming. If it had been 1500 NON-CITIZEN ILLEGAL ALIENS demonstrating for rights that they do not possess, demanding benefits for which they have not paid in a country NOT their own, they would have been all over it. But let 1500 men and women who love their country and are tired of being abused by their elected officials show up in one place, hold a PEACEFUL rally and what do they write about it?
NOTHING. RIEN. ZILCH.

You know, you could almost get the impression that the professional journalists are letting their partisan enthusiasm for the left get in the way of reporting important events. Nah!

What a Shocker: Media Behavior At Obama's Speech

What a Shocker: Media Behavior At Obama's Speech

From The Hill:

Several members of the media were seen cheering and clapping for Barack Obama as the Illinois senator accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday.
Standing on the periphery of the football field serving as the Democratic convention floor, dozens of men and women wearing green media floor passes chanted along with the crowd.
Two members of the foreign press exchanged opportunities to take each other's pictue while wearing an Obama hat and waving a flag.
Several others nearby screamed "woo" during some of Obama's biggest applause lines.

Wow! I never would have guessed that the news media aren't being objective about the choice for President!

Wouldn't it be amusing if the progressive insistence on "economic democracy" were applied to the media, and the federal government required all news organizations to hire reporters who shared the views of the majority?

Recession?

Recession?
A common definition of recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. The Democrats and the mainstream media (which are pretty much the same thing) have been screeching about recession in the hopes of scaring the population into voting Democrat. There's just one little problem: we haven't reached that point yet. From July 31, 2008 Forbes:

The Commerce Department reported an advance reading on second-quarter GDP of 1.9%, mildly below the expected 2.3%, but also revised its first-quarter figure to 0.9%, from 1.0%, and cut the fourth-quarter 2007 GDP figure to negative 0.2%, from 0.6%. (See "GDP Lags, Employment Scares.")

Now, the concern is that part of why the second quarter growth numbers are still okay was that this was the result of the economic stimulus package. The revision of the 4Q 2007 numbers to a negative is indicative that the economy is slowing, and there is some real danger. But we aren't in a recession. We could be in the future, and it is worth worrying about--but to the extent that media screeching creates public perceptions, it can help to create it. I would ask the media to be responsible, but I might as well ask the sun to not rise tomorrow.

What Is Left Out Matters

I was watching a powerfully depressing CBC/BBC documentary about Guatemala's soaring problem of murders of women. Women and girls being kidnapped, raped, murdered, mutilated, and beheaded--and with no prosecutions. According to the documentary, fear of retaliation keeps everyone silent, and the police seem to be going out of their way not to find the killers. The film also implies that traditional macho is part of the problem, and by mentioning the war against the Indians under various U.S.-backed governments of the past, they give you the impression that there might be some racial or class motives--although this leftist news source indicates:

The poorest parts of Guatemala, rural areas mainly inhabited by indigenous people, have lower violent crime rates than the rest of the country, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which warns in a new report that the murder rate -- one of the highest in the region -- has climbed steadily since 1999.

The violence tends to be seen in the less-poor municipalities where the majority of the population is not indigenous, which indicates the need to carry out a more in-depth analysis of the relation between violence and inequity, Arturo Matute, an expert from the Violence Prevention Programme, said in a press conference.

Hmmm. I think that this is how the left handles the problem that the facts don't fit into the leftist model of explaining bad things. It therefore requires more "in-depth analysis" to make it fit the "no justice, no peace" model.

Even more disturbingly, the documentary suggests that this lack of action isn't politically motivated--it's just gangs doing this. I found myself wondering if the lack of successful prosecution--or even serious attempt at it--might be because the police are also intimidated.

Part way through, I found myself wondering, "What is the murder rate for men in Guatemala?" The documentary mentioned 665 women murdered in Guatemala in 2005, in a nation of fifteen million people. That would imply that female victims are a bit under 5/100,000 total population. Yet the murder rate for both sexes combined is 47/100,000 total population. If anything, women are almost being ignored by the murderers.

There might still be a good case for being upset if the murders of women are being ignored by the authorities, while the murderers of men were being pursued. But I confess that watching a documentary that gives you the impression that women are subject to extraordinary victimization when this is not the case makes me wonder how accurately they are portraying the rest of the problem.

I sure wouldn't want to be a Guatemalan man or woman.

My Respect for Harvard Just Went Up

And my contempt for the mainstream media just went up, too. A couple of Harvard economists have produced a paper about media support for withdrawal and insurgent attacks. The abstract:

Are insurgents affected by information on US casualty sensitivity? Using data on attacks and variation in access to international news across Iraqi provinces, we identify an “emboldenment” effect by comparing the rate of insurgent attacks in areas with higher and lower access to information about U.S news after public statements critical of the war. We find in periods after a spike in war-critical statements, insurgent attacks increases by 5-10 percent. The results suggest that insurgent groups respond rationally to expected probability of US withdrawal. As such counterinsurgency should consider deterrence and incapacitation rather than simply search and destroy missions.

Hmmm. Or perhaps the search and destroy missions need to take place at the New York Times and NBC? I'm just kidding about that!

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Others have pointed it out, but it says something about either the honesty or intelligence of the at AFP reporter, photographer, and editor involved that they don't realize that this news story:

An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.

doesn't go with the picture:



For those of you who don't shoot rifles--she isn't holding bullets, but entire unfired cartridges. It also appears that these aren't even U.S. military issue ammo.

UPDATE: The QandO Blog has pictures of current U.S. military ammo. It is possible that other NATO forces in the theater are using these older 5.56mm rounds--but unless they are throwing unfired ammunition at her house, this story and picture are, at best, wrong.

CNN's God's Warriors

CNN has run three, two-hour programs about God's Warriors, which seemed to be trying to draw some moral equivalence between Islamic jihadists, Jewish extremists, and the Christian Religious Right. The problem was that while there are vast numbers of Islamic jihadists beheading people, raping, murdering, etc., there's a real shortage of those among Jews and Christians.

Yes, there was the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, and there have been other dangerous Jewish extremists out there. But I suspect that if you totaled up all of them over the last 30 years, their victims wouldn't exceed a typical day's victims from al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq.

Yes, CNN reminded us of abortion clinic bombings and assassinations by Christian pro-life murderers (and yes, I use "pro-life murderer" together for the irony of it all). But again, the Christian "God's warriors" that CNN profiled weren't terrorists--they were people working through the political process, trying their best to raise their kids, really no different from their liberal counterparts.

I suppose if CNN had compared the Religious Right to libertarian ideas about minimal government, they could have made the Religious Right look like dangerous totalitarians (or something close). But being CNN, they can only really compare the Religious Right to liberalism or leftism--at which point the Religious Right is less statist than liberals, and far less statist than the average hardcore left-wing Democrat. You can argue about which values should be given preference in writing laws--the majority (why the Religious Right has generally supported allowing legislatures and initiatives to prevail) or the elite (why the liberals and left rely on judges to overturn popular government). But such a comparison doesn't make liberals and leftist look too good.

What really impressed me was the amount of attention that this report gave to Ron Luce's evangelistic operation Teen Mania, which runs an event called Battle Cry. Luce is 46, someone who came out of a very messy family situation, was headed down to destruction when he found Jesus, and turned his life around. I was also impressed with some of the people that CNN interviewed that work for Teen Mania--one 22 year old young lady who, in spite of what I am sure was CNN's best effort to make her look like a fanatic, came across as a reminder that no matter how broken a life we have had, we can move beyond it.

Best of all was the contrast between what happened when Battle Cry came to San Francisco, and the bunch that showed up to protest that groups like Battle Cry shouldn't be allowed in San Francisco. To quote Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who told counterprotesters at City Hall on Friday that while such fundamentalists may be small in number, "they're loud, they're obnoxious, they're disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco." (Those lefties: so tolerant that they excuse pedophilia and naked half-transgendered people in public, but not Christians encouraging kids to turn away from a culture of drugs, suicide, and despair.) As I mentioned last year, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors actually passed a resolution condemning Battle Cry.

As much as CNN may feel the need to draw bogus moral equivalences, they failed. What is wrong with Islam isn't a few kooks on the edges, but a large and dangerous faction of Islam.

Teen Mania runs a school in Texas where they train their people. They have all sorts of very strict rules: no smoking; no alcohol; no R-rated movies; and skirts have to be a certain length.

Amanpour had the nerve to suggest that this was like the Taliban. Yes, except the Taliban executed homosexuals, "loose women," prohibited girls from receiving an education; banned clapping at sporting events; made apotasy from Islam a capital crime; blew up the symbols of other religions. Yes, that's quite similar to a dress code. How did I miss the comparison?

The Copycat Effect

That's the name of both a web page and book about how coverage of tragedies pushes some over the top:

Sadly, I saw this coming.

In an article based on an email I sent to a Canadian TV reporter Bridget Brown on September 18th and her followup interview, CTV noted that Expert predicted 'cluster' of school shootings, on October 3rd, 2006.

In that article, I was quoted as noting the psychological process that these shooters appear to be "competing for the highest body count." Sadly, we've seen that come true today.

Also, the news item from last fall noted: "He says that while the Pennsylvania shootings may not be the last in this cluster, the copycat crimes will likely slow down as we near winter. He says spring, and the anniversary of Columbine, could be enough to spark another cycle of tragedy." Again, my prediction of a reigniting of the school shooting wildfire during this very week was revealed today.

...

Specfically today, there is something over-the-top being heard in some of the reports that this shooting today is the "deadliest" in American history. Also, incorrect information is being shared. These newspeople are misreporting on the profiles and the changes in it. Cable news earlier this afternoon misrepresented that this is an American-only problem. During the early evening, I just watched a report on CNN saying that the few historical non-American school shootings have been done by adult non-students.

Of course, this is simplistic. The American cable networks are ignoring Taber, Alberta (1999) to Erfurt, Germany (2002), and several in-between international events where the shooters have been relatively young people. The US media outlets are also forgetting that most of the fall 2006 American school shooting incidents involved outsiders, non-students and adults.

Last fall, as I told all that would listen, there was a shift in the overall North American shooter profile. It moved from one of mostly Caucasian males who were members of the student body to "outsiders." It began in earnest with the the youthful South Asian immigrant who became happier as a member of the cult of Columbine before his attack at Dawson College, and the two adult alleged sexual molesters who victimized young females in Bailey, Colorado and at the Amish school in Pennsylvania.

Will more of these happen? Probably.

There was a Columbine copycat shooting last week (April 11) in Oregon (with no deaths) in which the shooter said he got the idea after watching National Geographic's April 7th showing of "The Final Report: Columbine."

Those who have read my article in Journal of Mass Media Ethics aren't surprised by this--it has happened before, and it will happen again--especially the more media attention that this gets.

For all the attention that guns get as an "American" problem, there's this news story:

TOKYO - The mayor of the Japanese city of Nagasaki was shot to death in a brazen attack Tuesday by an organized crime chief apparently enraged that the city refused to compensate him after his car was damaged at a public works construction site, news agencies reported.

The shooting was rare in a country where handguns are strictly banned and only four politicians are known to have been killed since World War II.

Mayor Iccho Ito, 61, was shot twice in the back at point-blank range outside a train station Tuesday evening, Nagasaki police official Rumi Tsujimoto said.

One of the bullets struck the mayor's heart and he went into cardiac arrest, according to Nagasaki University Hospital spokesman Kenzo Kusano. Kyodo News agency and national broadcaster NHK said Ito died of his wounds early Wednesday.

Tetsuya Shiroo, a senior member of Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan's largest organized crime syndicate, was wrestled to the ground by officers after the attack and arrested for attempted murder, police said.

Why Did I Not Read This Earlier?

And why can't I find any news articles but this one from the Toledo Blade that mention it?

Ron Bliss thought he had found proof The Blade suppresses news that doesn't fit its "slant left" agenda.

"I was browsing the Internet and ran across a story on the 18-year-old mall shooter in Salt Lake City (who) was a Bosnian national. It told in the article that he was a Muslim and while he was killing the mall shoppers he was shouting Allah Akbar (Allah is Great.)

"Now then … this means it was either a terrorist act in America or at the very least, a hate crime."

Yet Mr. Bliss said he searched our archives and found nothing at all on the Feb. 12 shooting. If we deliberately suppressed it, he felt we should remove "One of America's Great Newspapers" from the front page.

Indeed, he would be right about our slogan if The Blade were deliberately censoring stories about Muslim terrorists. And if that were going on, I would have no desire to be associated with this newspaper.

But that's not what happened. In fact, The Blade ran at least five stories about the mall shooter, Sulejman Talovic, who had lived in Utah since his family fled Bosnia when he was 9 years old. Curiously, the newspaper did not report that he shouted "Allah Akbar" during his killing spree, which took the lives of five people before the police killed the gunman.

I have no idea why The Blade left that detail out since the Associated Press and other news services the paper subscribes to reported it.

Hmmm. A Muslim goes on a killing spree in a shopping mall, shouts "Allah Akbar" while doing so--and this doesn't get much press. This would seem to have some relevance, I think. You know, there was some unpleasantness a few years ago involving the World Trade Center, and I think the people that caused the unpleasantness might have said something like that before things got unpleasant.

Imagine if the killer had been a member of the World Church of the Creator, and had been yelling, "Heil Hitler" while shooting people in a mall. Do you suppose that newspapers would have left out that little detail? I rather doubt it.

No more unarmed shopping for me. Yes, he was probably just mentally ill, and fixated on religion as his justification for killing people, and not an al-Qaeda operative. But it makes me wonder if a mass murderer did something similar, and was an al-Qaeda operative, if we would be allowed to know that.

Thanks to Classical Values for bringing this to my attention.

UPDATE: This report from KSL TV in Salt Lake City claims that this is incorrect:

The Salt Lake Police Department always expects rumors when something big like last week's shooting happens. We heard a big one. It was even spread by Congressman Chris Cannon on the Doug Wright show this morning.

Congressman Chris Cannon: "We go from a kid shouting Allah Akbar as he shoots people in Trolley Square."

Was 18-year-old Suljmen Talovic yelling, "Allah Akbar, God is Great," while shooting people? KSL found out: no.

Robin Snyder/SLCPD: "We have no indication he was yelling anything of that nature at all."

Cannon's spokesperson said he heard it on Fox cable news. It could have started with a video from inside Trolley Square. You hear yelling, but if you listen closely, it's the off-duty police officer, Kenneth Hammond, yelling "Ogden Police Department," or OPD.

Does anyone have the video? It must be extremely poor audio if "Ogden Police Department" sounds like "Allah Akbar."