Randall Response

The way the mainstream media covers traumatic events has interested me for quite awhile. Randall's article has solidified my opinion of the matter once again. It is my opinion that the mainstream media, be it news, television, or cinema, takes the traumatic event and capitalizes and essentially glorifies it. Movies and programs about wartime and the terrorist attacks exemplify this. There have been countless movies made about soldiers in either World War and about Vietnam, from accounts of prisoners of war to following a soldier into the action and to what happens when they arrive back home. On the one year anniversary of 9/11, each and every news channel had it's own remembrance documentary about the attacks, which I believe they now air every year. But what really bothers me the most, more so than glorifying war, is what the news channels are doing for crimes. All we ever really hear about on the news is " so and so shot and killed" or the latest convenience store robbery, and it's sending the wrong message. It's sending the message that despite being against the law, these things will get you known and your name across the news. It's almost as if the news stations are flat out telling these people to go ahead and commit the crime, we'll follow you as you do and report on it.
There is a point where the human curiosity and need for information goes overboard. I'm thinking back to the Boston Bombings, around the time when the information about what kind of bombs they were and how the brothers learned to make them came out. Not only did the news reporters tell us what kind of bomb it was, they told us what was loaded inside it, described how the brothers deployed it, and , worst of all, they described, IN DETAIL, exactly how and where they got their information and instructions on how to build the bombs. When I saw that being reported on, I quite literally screamed at the news reporters through my television for being such idiots. Now, thanks to them, that information on building bombs has been mass distributed for anybody else thinking of bombing something to use.