Monday, December 01, 2008

Kaus on media whitewash



I'm used to a sort of Liebling-like hierarchy of news sources, with twitterers and bloggers being fastest, but maybe less reliable, while the grand institutions of the MSM weigh in later with more comprehensive and accurate accounts. But that's not what is happening with this Mumbai story. The "fast" sources are telling you what happened. The "slow" MSM sources are using their extra time to sanitize what's happened, to build euphemistic assumptions into their very reporting of the events themselves--in this case, it just so happens, liberal assumptions:1) the idea that there is no problem that can't be solved by greater funding for government bureaucracies and more interagency taskforces** 2) the predisposition to think widely-distributed small arms and a willingness to use them can never be a good idea and 3) an antipathy to any suggestion that an aspect of foreign culture is inferior to nasty American culture. (Maybe we Americans are trigger happy. But do we think that a handful of terrorists could have gone on a similar rampage in New York City without quite quickly encountering a fair number of cops who would have shot back--let alone armed civilians who did the same)? ...

3 comments:

Tecumseh said...

Maybe we Americans are trigger happy. But do we think that a handful of terrorists could have gone on a similar rampage in New York City without quite quickly encountering a fair number of cops who would have shot back--let alone armed civilians who did the same.

Quick, the smelling salts. Pepe is gonna faint. Shooting back at terrorists? The horror, the horror!
They need counseling, and we need to get to the root causes of why they get so upset with us, says Deepack Pepe, while fiddling with his enema.

Mr roT said...

Smelling salts indeed! Kaus backed Obama and is a Democrat!

My Frontier Thesis said...

One of the old NRA slogans: gun control is hitting what you shoot at.