From UrbanDictionary:
Clicktease – When a website or website link leads you to believe you will be seeing pornography or some other sexual material, when in fact this offer is false or misleading.
“Man, I thought that email was totally my ticket to free porn, but it ended just being home loans and pay sites! What a clicktease!”
This piece serves as a follow up piece to 33 Dead Americans is a Tragedy, 33 Dead Iraqi’s is a Statistic, which raised the point that while the Virginia Tech tragedy was a tragedy, these death tolls are all too familar to Iraqi’s — including multiple bombs detonated in January that killed 60 at a Baghdad university. In fact, the grand coincidence was 33 Iraqi’s were reported killed the same day that 33 were murdered at Virginia Tech, but obviosly their deaths generated far less publicity.
So a couple of days have past and some significant events have occured, including four bombs in Baghdad that killed over 157 people “as violence climbed toward levels not seen since before the U.S.-Iraqi campaign to pacify the capital began two months ago”. So, there’s some major acts of violence that fly in the face of the US-led troop surge, and what gets reported:
On FoxNews, you get ‘Imminent Danger’ and a picture of the ‘Mad Man’ himself on the front page — so more reporting on the psyche of our deranged Blacksburg shooter:
But where’s the information about the failures of the surge and the worst day of violence experienced in months in Iraq? Not even a text link on the front page, you have to go to the World section:
Conclusion: A tsunami of dead Iraqi’s would have to wash up to Dick Cheney’s underground bunker in Idaho itself for Fox News to report on the ‘progress’ being made in Iraq. Click here for the full front page picture of the FoxNews front page, which interestingly enough includes a large ad for bringing Imus back on the air, how a preachers wife was forced to watch porn, and how a whale was spotted in the New York Harbor. All of these deemed more important than violence that killed over 150 in Iraq.
On MSNBC, it’s more of the same, but they at least acknowledge what’s going on in Iraq under a litany of links providing full coverage of the shooters video tape:
On CNN, things didn’t get much better. Victims, online grief, shootings, video’s of victims, video’s of crazy lone gunmen, but we do get the pleasure of knowing ‘at least 170 died in Baghdad bombings’ (next to, of course, stories about preacher porn wife and ‘Bin Laden’s name used to lure people to polls):
And finally, on BBC (World Edition mind you, not UK or ‘American’ (though there is no such version as American), which still has its feature story on the Virginia gunmen:
Conclusion: While none of the mainstream media can be accused of sinking to Fox “What’s Iraq??” News, most of the American (save for BBC, which is British) did a fairly poor job of reporting on a very large issue. A story larger and more significant, than I would say, playing a video that makes a murderer into a celebrity.
For more commentary on this subject, I suggest you check out the following: CNN’s Sensationalism of the Virginia Tech Video is Disgusting, Bloody Wednesday: Guerrillas, Violence kill Nearly 300 Iraqis, and violence suggests the surge is failing.
While I won’t discount the horrific nature of yesterday’s incidents at Virginia Tech, I’m fairly annoyed by the media coverage surrounding it, considering the level of violence that continues to rage in the Middle East, claiming exactly the same amount of civilian lives a day in Iraq. While I don’t think Americans would on a conscious level weigh a white Westerners life as more important than a brown Middle Easterners, the media has made some serious subconscious decisions for us. The majority of news pages appear as the CNN does, asking how, why, and the amount of terrible violence inflicted by ‘crazy Asian loner guy’:
Yet on the same day, 20 Iraqi policemen & recruits were reported executed and a bomb in Baghdad killed 13 (that’s 33 total deaths — the same as the VT shooting — if you’re keeping track). Yet you have to get to the ‘World’ and ‘Middle East’ page of CNN and BBC News respectively if you care to update your Iraq body counts (the CNN’s World page even has it’s front page article as a feature piece on the ‘World Reacts’ to the Virginia Tech Shootings):
CNN’s World Page:
“One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic,” spoken by Joseph Stalin is an apt statement for the 1940’s; it’s modern day equivalent may be “One Western death is a tragedy; a million Third World deaths is a statistic”.
Over the weekend, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) visited Iraq, his fifth visit to the country. He held a press conference yesterday where he reminded reporters that the U.S. commitment was never intended to be “open-ended,” adding, “We can’t continue to stay in Iraq the way we are.”
Hagel also took a jab at the recent trip by Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) and Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC), stating, “We did no shopping while we were here.”
Via Think Progress & Not Very Bright.
The word of the day is common sense. [wp]
Common sense proverbs.
Common sense plant colors.
Common sense human colors.
Common sense grocery store prices.
Common sense American religion.
BONUS: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
