The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

A Nation of 327,000,000 People

Posted on | February 20, 2018 | 1 Comment

Three hundred twenty-seven million is a large number. Keep that in mind when you see news coverage or commentary that portrays social problems as a “trend” or an “epidemic.” In a nation of 327 million people, it is always easy to find a dozen examples of any phenomenon that a reporter, a politician, or an activist might wish to highlight.

People having sex with dogs, for example. It didn’t take very long, in December 2016, for me to do a bit of Googling and compile a year-end digest of people arrested for having sex with dogs, and the bestiality “epidemic” continued in 2017:

  • MISSISSIPPI, Feb. 21 — Amy Graves was arrested and charged with unnatural intercourse with a dog after videos and images of her crime were uploaded to the Internet. Graves, 43, pleaded guilty in March.
  • OHIO, April 10 — Amber Finney was charged with performing sexual acts on a dog after employees at a drugstore called 911, recognizing her from TV news reports about a video of a woman engaged in sexual conduct with animals. Finney, 33, subsequently pleaded no contest.
  • PENNSYLVANIA, Aug. 26 — Rachael Harris, 20, was sentenced to jail and four years of probation after pleading guilty to ” producing an obscene performance.” Police had obtained video of Harris attempting to have sex with a dog. Her husband also pleaded guilty in the incident. Under the terms of her sentence, Harris will not be “permitted to have any pets or work in a job that involves animals.”

How can we keep our pets safe from sex-crazed freaks? Shouldn’t Congress pass a law to protect America’s canine companions? Why isn’t President Trump doing something to stop these dog-rapers?

Well, don’t expect to see these stories reported on CNN anytime soon, because bestiality is not (yet) a partisan political issue. In the months leading up to the 2016 election, however, CNN devoted many hours of coverage to the Black Lives Matter movement, which claimed that police brutality against innocent black people was a major national problem.

Heather Mac Donald, author of The War on Cops, pointed out that a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by black man than the other way around. This fact did not prevent CNN and other left-wing media organizations from promoting the Black Lives Matter narrative, presenting the public with “a mirror-reverse image of reality — bogus anti-police propaganda.” The reason for this deliberate distortion was simple: Democrats were trying to motivate and mobilize black voters for the 2016 election. “Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines and it all makes sense,” as Professor Reynolds often says.

It is very easy to allow the media to distort our perceptions in this way, because they are very good at crafting narratives like this, where the partisan objectives are not apparent to people (a) who are not conscious of the historic pattern of liberal media bias, and (b) who are not knowledgeable about the techniques of propaganda. The media’s tactic of finding examples of unusually bad things happening, and then portraying these shocking incidents (which are statistically rare) as a trend — a “growing problem,” perhaps even an “epidemic” — is what I’ve called the Atrocity Narrative tactic of propaganda. One of the classic examples of this was the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. Those of us old enough to remember how that story was reported can recall network TV coverage of candlelight vigils that portrayed Shepard as a martyred saint, a victim of homophobia that was, allegedly, a widespread problem in American society. The way this story was told in the liberal media, an unsuspecting person might have believed that the two young men who killed Shepard were members of the “Religious Right,” whose crime was inspired by the rhetoric of Republican politicians. In fact, the murderers were a couple of petty criminals with prior records for drug possession and burglary, and the media’s depiction of Shepard’s death as a homophobic “hate crime” was essentially false. By the time reporter Stephen Jimenez exposed the truth in The Book of Matt in 2013, however, the myth of Shepard as an innocent victim of homophobia had long since become an unquestionable article of faith among liberals. This myth was simply too valuable to gay activists, and to the Democrat Party, for liberals to report the truth.

This has been going on for decades. The issues change, but the tactics are predictably familiar. In a nation with hundreds of millions of people, all the media needs to do is wait for that one story that perfectly embodies some liberal theme, or which advances the Democrat Party’s agenda, and then pound on that story hour after hour, day after day.

After a teenager went on a shooting rampage at a Florida high school last week, the Democrat-Media Complex sprang into action, falsely reporting that the killer was a “white nationalist,” and spreading other disinformation — e.g., the bogus claim that there have been 18 school shootings so far this year — to advance a gun-control narrative. This required ignoring key questions about this specific incident, perhaps most importantly, why was the deranged teenager not already in custody, either as a prisoner or a psychiatric patient, given that police had been called to his home 39 times in the span of seven years?

What such agenda-oriented media coverage fails to do is to put these tragedies into context. For example, more than 300 people in Chicago have been shot, 60 of them fatally, so far this year. On average, another person is shot in Chicago every four hours. However, this daily carnage goes unnoticed in the national media because (a) more than 80% of the Chicago shooting victims are black or Hispanic, and (b) Chicago is a Democrat Party stronghold that already has strict gun-control laws. Hillary Clinton got 74% of the vote in Cook County, Illinois, and there is thus no partisan advantage to be gained by highlighting the ongoing violence in Chicago, so CNN and other liberal media outlets ignore it.

By contrast, the scene of last week’s school shooting — Parkland, Florida, about 20 miles from Fort Lauderdale — is 84% white and the median household income is nearly $130,000. The facts about violent crime in America make clear why people in such a community believe (correctly) that their children are safe. Nearly 70% of murders in the United States are concentrated in just 5% of counties, and more than half of American counties have zero murders in a typical year. There is also a stark racial disparity in violent crime — black males, who constitute barely 6% of the U.S. population, are about 44% murder victims in the country, and are also about half of those arrested for murder. Just like the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado — a prosperous suburb 10 miles from Denver — the Parkland massacre happened in the kind of community where murder is extremely rare.

This was a statistically abnormal event, but in a nation of 327 million people, statistical abnormal events happen often enough that dishonest propagandists in the media can turn these unusual incidents into a “national conversation” about gun control. However, there are about 17,000 murders in America every year, and the majority of those homicides are treated by the media as strictly local news. Ghastly atrocities like the one in Parkland raise serious questions about adolescent mental health — why were so many red flags about this teenager’s dangerous behavior ignored? — but the media won’t address that issue. Why? Because the media don’t see a “national conversation” about mental health as beneficial to the Democrat Party.

Nobody on CNN is asking why, in 2009 and 2010, when President Obama was in the White House and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, they never passed any gun-control legislation, nor did they do anything to address the immigration issue. Now that there is a Republican in the White House, however, there is suddenly a demand for action on these issues, to which CNN gives round-the-clock attention, when they’re not too busy hyperventilating about Russian “collusion.”

Americans are being deliberately misinformed by a media establishment which cares more about partisan politics — electing Democrats — than they care about reporting the facts. This undermines public trust and causes a sense of paranoia, as more and more people wonder what else the “fake news” industry is lying about. Why is CNN ignoring the epidemic of dog-rapers? I don’t know, but I have my suspicions, and I wouldn’t trust any CNN staffers around my pets, IYKWIMAITYD.



 

 

Category: Crime, Media Bias

Comments

One Response to “A Nation of 327,000,000 People”

  1. No, Our Boys Are Not ‘Broken’ : The Other McCain
    February 21st, 2018 @ 7:49 pm

    […] As I said yesterday, the Parkland massacre raises “serious questions about adolescent mental health — why were so many red flags about this teenager’s dangerous behavior ignored?” However, the media avoid these questions, instead offering formulaic liberal “solutions” while ignoring evidence that such “solutions” are part of the problem: […]