Many things about the mainstream media annoy me — the habit of portraying every bit of bad news as if it’s a call for Big Brother to “DO SOMETHING!!”, the sensationalism, the following of celebrity “news” by media outlets that have more pressing matters to cover, the unfortunate tendency to take the words of all political authority figures at face value, etcetera, etcetera. The most basic issue I’ve got though is the Single-Minded Follower mentality, how when one story breaks they all run towards it and seemingly can’t take anything else seriously. The way I see it, by engaging in this the media is eroding a major benefit to having a free press.

Having said that, here’s an example of taking that beef and running into a wall with it. At 120 MPH. While juggling hand grenades. All emphasis mine:

The Virginia Tech massacre is legitimately a big news story, on the crime-and-natural-disaster beat. And I understand why those affected by this event cannot think of anything bigger and more important in their lives than the tragedy they have just suffered.

But something more is needed to explain why this story has completely dominated the national media (and even the global media) for two straight days, to the exclusion of everything else–while the president and Congress are in a showdown over funding for the War on Terrorism.

Keep in mind that this week we are already approaching the point at which the Pentagon is going to have to start diverting funds from other parts of its budget in order to keep paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, since the Democratic Congress has refused to pass a war funding bill that does not require the president to withdraw our troops from Iraq. In effect, Congress has already de-funded the War on Terrorism. That is the most important national news story of this week. Good luck trying to hear about it on the national news. […]

This flavor of the coverage was reflected in New York Times article that explained the ease with which reporters slipped into a familiar routine in covering the Virginia Tech story by saying “how familiar campus shootings have become.” But of course, they aren’t. It has been at least six years since the press has covered a big school-shooting story like this. If the press thinks these stories are “familiar,” it is not because of their frequency, but because the press feels metaphysically comfortable covering them. They feel like they are at home, in their proper element, relieved from the mental strain of having to deal with the uncomfortable topic of Islamic terrorism.

So that’s where we are today: a school shooting dominates the news, while the media ignores the much greater threat of Islamic terrorism. It’s a 1990s flashback.

The author here took a legitimate media problem — single-mindedness — and, amplified by his bloodthristy neo-imperialist agenda, explodes into a torrent of spin (he suggests in a sideways manner that the reason 9/11 happened was because school shootings were seen as more important than terrorism, and attempts to wrap Iraq up in the “War on Terror” blanket — which is full of holes itself) & outright lies (congress has “de-funded” jack squat). He doesn’t stop there…

The irony of the Virginia Tech case is that it is distracting our attention from the War on Terrorism, when it ought to make the need to fight and win that war all the more urgent.

The details that have emerged so far about the Virginia Tech killer ought to give us a slight shudder of recognition. According to early reports he apparently left behind a “manifesto” that consisted of “expletive-filled rants against the rich and privileged” with a “somewhat incoherent list of grievances.” Doesn’t this sound just a bit like the actions of a terrorist? The only thing missing–the only thing that differentiates this killer from archetypical terrorists like the Unabomber or Osama bin Laden–is a grand-scale ideology to tie his rambling grievances together and give him a systematic moral justification for his crimes.

The Virginia Tech killer is, in effect, a terrorist without a cause.

Surprise! Cho Seung-Hui has been retroactively & posthumously added to the Axis of Evil! See, it doesn’t matter that he seemingly did this crap for no reason, even though terrorism by its very frickin definition means violence against innocents for a political purpose. Cho was a Bad Man, and so are the insurgents in Iraq, so his actions only remind us that Jihad Is Everywhere. Oh yeah, don’t forget Iran!

Ahmadinejad has all the makings of a spree killer just like the one at Virginia Tech–but a killer who will soon be armed with nuclear-tipped missiles instead of a mere pair of pistols.

Spree killer? But I thought you said he was a terrorist?

I gotta say, if the alternative to hive-mind coverage of the latest story is Bushist warmonger propaganda, I’ll gladly stick with the current flavor.

(cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats)