by Kenneth Justice
~If you live in the United States you pretty much had to be living in a cave to have not heard or seen the television news footage in Boston; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the 19 year old Boston Marathon bomber was captured.
But you don’t need me for the details.
There’s been so much news time devoted to this story in print media and 24 hour cable news that I swear I now know more about Dzhokhar than I do about my own mother.
Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting the news coverage was bad, overblown, or over-sensationalized………
But here we are on Saturday morning…….now what?
I am a media junkie so I was watching and reading 10 different sources yesterday as a part of my normal routine. When I flipped to NBC National News, there was Lester Holt, correspondent on assignment in Boston, looking so giddy I thought he just got laid or something…..Uh, no, Lester was just excited that law enforcement had captured the bomber.
That’s what the News does to us, it sucks us into a story, it creates an emotional bond between us and the story and then like the proverbial red headed step-child; they kick us to the curb.
Lester Holt is no different than you and I….he got so sucked into the story that when the cops finally captured the dude; he was overcome with emotion, his own wife didn’t get that much emotion out of Lester on their wedding night.
The News story will begin dying down today……and I feel a bit…. unsatisfied?
The bomber is locked up; good.
But you and I don’t get to walk into his jail and slap him in his face.
you and I don’t get to grab his arm and scream, “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING MAN??”
As is the case so often with these kind of stories, the public rarely gets to hear any inside information about the motives behind the crime.
Remember the Colorado movie theater bombing? The authorities have likely interviewed that Joker nut-job a thousand times but we don’t get to hear what they found out……
I want closure….is that wrong?
Imagine you’ve been dating a guy for 6 months and all of a sudden he won’t return your calls. You’ve hooked up with him but now he breaks up with you and he won’t give you the decent courtesy of an explanation.
That’s what these News stories are like….we start dating the story and then the story moves to Guam and forgets to leave us a breakup letter. We’re left holding the key to an empty apartment.
This isn’t just an American problem…..the news cycle is the same in Europe as well….the media connects you with a story like the Cyprus financial problem, and once they’ve got you connected to the story they pull the carpet out from underneath you and now they are reporting on Princess Kate’s raised eyebrows which are totally to die for……….yes; I actually read a story this past week about women in Europe who are getting plastic surgery on their eyebrows to mimic Kate’s look.
So what does all this mean?
I think you know what I’m thinking……
It’s time for another cup of coffee, I’m thinking something from Peru this morning…..
Kenneth
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Categories: Culture & Society
Culture Monk 
I’m following the shenanigans in Venezuela!
Margarita,
the new president that they just swore in?
All the mayhem leading up to the election, the back and forth about a recount, the purportedly state-sanctioned violence. The vote was extremely close, and the attempt to rule through fear and intimidation is always troubling. By the way, it’s nice to turn on Al-Jazeera in English and actually see world news!
I know what you mean, so many times I get pulled deep into a story and then when the stuff we want to know is found we don’t get that information. I could care less that the guy at a donut and coffee the morning before, WHAT I do care about is WHY and that, so many times, is never told.
hughie,
exactly…..funny you mention donuts! One of the first stories that came up on my reading list this morning was a story about Dunkin Donuts staying open during the lockdown in Boston ha ha
The MSM in this country are a bunch of hard left libtards. To hell with them.
Plastic surgery for eyebrows lol 😂
so there was a bombing ?
Simon,
simple response but it put a smile on my face 🙂
While I do not live in your country, Kenneth, I do subscribe to conspiracy theorists and a lot of their information is good stuff (while some I must admit is over analyzation), I do believe there is much more to that story than meets the eye. I do believe that the media is very much controlled. I do believe that like Sandy Hook, The Joker at TDKR premier and 9/11 there is much more than they are letting the world know.
My biggest problem is that people are going to want to know his reasons for doing this and try to help him. I just want justice for those that have fallen. People will cry about cruel and unusual punishment. I don’t care what his motivations were or where they came from because the bottom line is when it came time to stay inline or step over it, he stepped over it. In my mind at least, when you choose to take another person’s life and it’s not in self defense (civillian capacity) then you aren’t worth crying over regardless of the atrocities done to you by other people or the judicial and penal systems in this country. There is no such thing as too cruel or unusal a punishment for this psycho. I don’t care if he’s crazy; he killed people, children and that is enough to pursue the death penalty for this nut job.
Oh my God, yes…after all the excitement, right, of watching all the drama in watertown, it is kinda like, “Ok, well now what?”, knowing that it could be a month or more before we get any more details about the bomber. And yeah, I think it’s time for some more coffee, but as for me, I’ve decided to swear off watching the news, just for today.
Getting closure from an event perpetrated by two kids is a pipe dream…we all know (and research supports our knowledge) that teenagers are complete idiots until about 26.
It’s just senseless and sad. So, we should focus on the victims who need us and hope that the justice system does it’s rightful duty.
The system is set up that way. It’s marketing at it’s best. We Americans buy right into it. Stop watching the damn news! If everyone stops watching, advertisers pull out. No money means a change in format. We are a country of complaining citizens with little action. Now were is my video game, greasy hamburger, and super sized fry, and coke! My fat gut is crying. Sarcasm.
I think the news tends to drop stories once they stop being about action and start requiring a lot of information processing. American News in particular loves it when something’s a mystery that everybody can have commentary on then gets bored when it’s just about facts.
“facts”. Yuck…..we Americans don’t like facts 😉
The way I see it is we get the facts immediately – there’s an explosion, then another, so many dead, so many injured. And then no more facts, ever. Just speculation, hearsay, versions and opinion. Even justice is a form of someone’s opinion on the matter.
It is still on the news here in Australia. You had a bad week over there. I agree with your blog. So much in the media is not good for us.
http://iamforchange.wordpress.com/awards-page-and-nominations-thank-you-i-am-so-honored-and-grateful/ I wanted to share with you and say thank you!
I actually found this more satisfying than other media frenzies. Oh the pain of the 2000 election going to bed night after night not knowing what would happen with the chads and the ballots and Florida… I was feeling very worked up when they called off the lock-down and it looked like the networks would sign off for the night– and then, BAM! I was actually tuned in for THE moment! They even had a pic of him on the ground by the time I went to bed and they were showing it to us! This morning was def anti-climactic. NPR playing clip after clip and me yelling at the radio: “I HEARD this already! Yeah, yeah, his soccer buddy, I GOT It, yeah, yeah, the aunt and uncle…” We went to see the new Terrence Malick movie “To the Wonder” this afternoon and that trip and depth of imagery without much story at all kind of cured me.
The media may have controls in the US that I’m not aware of, giving the impression of a media behaving like a circus. Once it’s onto a story it reticulates it over and over until what you see becomes a nuance. They only give you what they can.
On the subject of a boyfriend doing the disappearing act, happened to me once – no big deal, we weren’t dating for too long, and still, it would’ve been nice to know why. No follow up, no explanation, nothing. Shit happens, and as you say in this post, the media behaves like this more often than not.
It is the nature of a broadcast organization to report on temporal events. Such information is utimately inconsequential in the grander scheme of history, but it can be useful, if looked at in the right light. The present information at hand tells you where you are right now. So you could simply wait for the television to report some other story that you’ll fall in love with. Or… you could do something of your own.
The character who did this bombing took his future into his own hands. He was probably sick and tired of sitting at home and smoking pot all day(I’ll admit, I haven’t really paid attention to this news item), and decided that he wasn’t just going to be a nobody on the speck of history. He took the easy way to infamy, which was committing a major act of terrorism. Within the week, his name became a household name. He got what he wanted. He is now the guy known as the Boston Bomber.
If that repulses you, it should. You have good reason to be repulsed. But you have no authority to judge, because in the greater scheme of things, this kid at least did something. He chose to utterly and completely ruin his life, of course. And yet, because it was he who chose to do it, he exercised more self-thought and conscious direction than every single person who was glued to Google News.
I’ll admit. I don’t have much fondness for the typical media firestorm. There is a diference between infamy and memorability. Infamy makes the headlines. It is here and then gone. Memorability, however, tends to linger for a bit. It stays with a person. It requires hard work. And it also requires creation, instead of destruction.
Nevertheless, you must still anwer your question, neh? Take your future into your own hands, and you’ll get to decide what happens, ‘next’.
It is rare I enjoyed reading a post as much as I did yours here … for many reasons, such as unveiling thinly disguised sensationalism media feeds and lives off.
Thank you,
Daniela
so i really wanted to respond to this earlier when i read it, but i was already running behind to get to work and i can’t just do quickie response haha. anyway, you really MUST get out of my head – it’s just eerie now lol. i do first want to comment please remember the media gives what people read so if there’s ever an overdose – well… it’d stop sooner if people would stop watching it. just a thought. as far as ongoing stories go – well the second part isn’t nearly as exciting and usually takes forever in terms of the legal side of it is concerned. even if we do get the so-called “why” it’s almost never satisfactory because we don’t think/rationalize like those folks (and thank God or we may just do the same) and we can’t get our minds around it. the reason always feels like it wasn’t enough to cause someone to do that – and its true. it’s not. now – as for the whole up and disappearing. this is part of why i didn’t respond earlier. it always happens to me (and if not that then the guy cheats, lies or some other super crap action). it just struck such a nerve when i read that portion. i was just thinking about the last guy who did that to me. i was so falling for him, etc., and then he gets out of the usmc, moves to alaska and i never hear a word again. in fact he promised to call me back the night before he moved, never did and i never heard from him again. that was a little more than three years ago. ugh. i’ve never felt so deprived of a closure in my life. it still hurts on occasion because one minute he’s there and the next he’s gone. nothing. i was left wondering what the hell i did wrong to deserve total abandonment – i didn’t but that’s how it feels. as far as that feeling for media – well again i think it goes back to the fact that the legal part is just boring lol. people usually don’t like to watch that part because of lack of understanding or simply, it’s not fast paced action like a movie. ok i’ve rambled enough. sorry. 🙂
I think they spent the week blowing air up our arses to distract our attention from some very scary people who were extensively photographed and had no business being there (IE: the “CRAFT” and their matching packpacks and hand held radiation detecting devices), and finding the “right” non-American to pin it on. Two little kids with no mom and dad here to protect them. Let’s go to the next disaster, shall we? Poor Waco has been under-reported, at least this time around.
I can’t sleep. I wanted to blog. Then again I wanted to allow my mind to freely explore whatever; therefore, I stopped by to see what was happening in your world, and, again, I was greatly impressed with your subject matter. Closure. Hum. We all want it most often we don’t get it. Wow! Once more, I learned something from you about human-nature. Great post!
ALL I have to say is “you hit the nail on the head” with this post! I used to be a news broadcaster (in another lifetime, it seems) and one the villain is caught, the story basically DIES. In story plot vernacular, it ends at the CLIMAX, there’s no “denouement” (falling action) or Conclusion (resolution)…and the only “excuse” I can come up with for this phenomenon is that resolution doesn’t “sell”…it’s so “yesterday’s news”…SOOO..for those of us who actually like the story completion…for the most part, NEWS ‘fails to deliver.’ Glad you took a day off! 🙂 looking forward to the next post!
Totally agree. I got sucked in more than usual this time, since my oldest son lives in Boston and works very close to where the bombing happened. It took over my life for the week, and I’m having a hard time withdrawing from it. I thought I had moved on and now all the Monday morning quarterbacking is going on on my facebook feed, and I’m still getting sucked in…