Posted 2:38 PM by Gene

David von Drehle's memorable essay has many things worth responding too, and not wanting to relive last week's horror one more time we may add to them later. He says, for one thing, the audience for the cable screamers is small. True. But news hacks have provided them with megaphones. Take how practically every Web site must transcribe ED MURROW's courage -- His audience bolts from 1.5 million to the tens of millions exposed to the second-hand drivel spouting him. And he's a mere journa -- COMEDIAN. We hear that PILLHEAD has an audience of between 200 million and 80 billion. No one knows and no one has the curiosity to try to find out. That inflates His influence. "David Brock, confessed smear artist", is a master money-raiser. Kos is no mere blogger but a master organizer. Even His enemies call Roger Ailes a "genius". These blowhards have overcome their nominally small audiences or factions to become tyrants in no small part thanks to well-placed media friends. This does not exactly help the body politic.

Nor is PEOPLE WARNER blameless despite its "neutral, non-partisan" cable-news filler. Mouth of the South, after all, invented a show called CROSSFIRE. Though John McLaughlin may have invented screaming -- and I remember thinking how refreshing it once was, before I tired of professional wrestlers screaming -- CNN perfected it. FOX!!!!!!!!!!!News and the Mess owe their vastly disproportionate success to CNN.

But maybe this time something is different. We still cringe about how the fraud Dick Corliss blamed Columbine on GUNS!!!!!!!!!!. Today the TWXSTERS have decided not to blame what happened in Tucson on SARAH!!!!!!!!!!. This is an advance. But it comes too late; as THE MASTER said, "[W]hen a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully", and the TWXSTER newsrag's being hanged in the marketplace, its circulation over a million off its peak, its contents a shadow of the past. Why the TWXSTERS choose now to treat their readers as adults is beyond us. Perhaps the sight of the noose is concentrating it. We will take what little scraps of respect we can.

P. S. The TWXSTERS, two years ago, interviewing Dave Cullen, the author of Columbine:

A lot of myths sprang up immediately after Columbine. Why were we so quick to jump on pat narratives?

The problem with Columbine was we felt the need to explain it right away. It was so horrifying, and the public wanted to know why it happened. We in the media wanted to know why too, and we thought we had to answer them. What we should have said was, "We don't have any good information, and it would be irresponsible of us to say why." When you speculate in a case like this, it very quickly morphs into "fact." We started with the assumption that school shooters tend to be loners, outcasts and bullied. That turned out to be a myth: some are bullied, but not even 50%. The majority are not any of those things.

We have had lots of morphing this week -- and pretty good answers too.

P. S.

A drug connection just adds to the probability that this was nothing more or less than yet another senseless incidence of violence in a country with a long history of senseless violence.

We got your mea culpa -- JAKE!