Why Corpro Media Sucks
Hey, do you know who Jeff Weise is? It is entirely possible that you do not despite his recent killing of 10 people on a Minnesota reservation. This event was the worst school shooting since Columbine and yet so far as the copro media was concerned it ranked behind continuing round-the-clock coverage of the single most pointless right-to-life fight in the history of the US and the Michael Jackson freakshow parade. People, Terry Schiavo doesn’t have a neocortex; she is dead whether or not she breaths for another 10 years.
The lack of attention paid to the slaughter of 5 innocent children highlights some uncomfortable questions about our news and our society at large. Does your life matter if you are not famous or white? Corpro media would seem to suggest that it does not. I promise you if this shooting had occurred in Grosse Point or involved the child of the “Country Crock” dude it would have resulted in special reports, 24 hour news coverage, and in-depth interviews with the school’s former principal’s second cousin’s wife concerning her impressions of the school‘s climate of diversity. As it was, the story didn’t even make the first segment of one of the Chicago nightly reports on the evening after it occurred. This isn’t an isolated incident either. A few months ago a colleague asked one of her client’s (who was a gang member) if he knew whether or not he had ever killed anyone. He said that he did not. When further questioned he revealed that he knew he had shot people, but no news organizations report on murders in his part of the city so he has no way of definitively knowing whether or not his victims died. Just to clarify, he wasn’t saying that they didn’t make the first page of the Trib; these crimes don’t find their way into the Tribune at all. On the other hand news about a serial rapist who preys on people from the wealthy Lincoln Park neighborhood frequently gets placed on the front page above the fold.
It doesn’t surprise me that the US remains afflicted with our worship of fame or latent racism; it does disappoint me that the tragic deaths of five children was not enough to overcome these failings for a brief moment in time. Even the flawed and ultimately exploitative attention of the infotainment empire would have been better than no attention at all. Sometimes the United States is a hard country to love.
The lack of attention paid to the slaughter of 5 innocent children highlights some uncomfortable questions about our news and our society at large. Does your life matter if you are not famous or white? Corpro media would seem to suggest that it does not. I promise you if this shooting had occurred in Grosse Point or involved the child of the “Country Crock” dude it would have resulted in special reports, 24 hour news coverage, and in-depth interviews with the school’s former principal’s second cousin’s wife concerning her impressions of the school‘s climate of diversity. As it was, the story didn’t even make the first segment of one of the Chicago nightly reports on the evening after it occurred. This isn’t an isolated incident either. A few months ago a colleague asked one of her client’s (who was a gang member) if he knew whether or not he had ever killed anyone. He said that he did not. When further questioned he revealed that he knew he had shot people, but no news organizations report on murders in his part of the city so he has no way of definitively knowing whether or not his victims died. Just to clarify, he wasn’t saying that they didn’t make the first page of the Trib; these crimes don’t find their way into the Tribune at all. On the other hand news about a serial rapist who preys on people from the wealthy Lincoln Park neighborhood frequently gets placed on the front page above the fold.
It doesn’t surprise me that the US remains afflicted with our worship of fame or latent racism; it does disappoint me that the tragic deaths of five children was not enough to overcome these failings for a brief moment in time. Even the flawed and ultimately exploitative attention of the infotainment empire would have been better than no attention at all. Sometimes the United States is a hard country to love.
posted by Bartleby the Student at 3:02 PM
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