Blogger David Stein takes a look at network news coverage on March 21st and finds “pink slime” where actual news should be. French terrorist Mohamed Mareh has left four dead men and three dead children in his wake, held up police for over a day, and was killed, but the Big Three networks didn’t find it necessarily to lead their programs with his story. Processed meat in ground beef, now there’s a real killer in today’s politically correct news media world:
Which of the following do you think should have been the lead story on the March 21st ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly newscasts?
A. Several supermarket chains have decided to stop selling ground beef that contains processed meat filler;
B. The NFL levied penalties against the New Orleans Saints;
C. Viral video of a helicopter crash in which no one was injured;
D. A mass-murderer who killed four people, including three children, at a Jewish school in France, and who also gunned down three French soldiers in that country’s worst terror attack in recent history, was revealed to be an al-Qaeda-linked Muslim terrorist who desired to bring the entire nation of France “to its knees.”
If you guessed “D,” you’re obviously not cut out for the world of network news. Not one of the “big three” networks led with the story of the Muslim terrorist in France. And not one of the “big three” deemed that story important enough to be in the top four stories of the day.
ABC led its newscast with an earth-shattering report about how several supermarket chains will stop selling beef containing a safe but controversial type of meat filler which the media has dubbed “pink slime.” No more pink slime at Safeway…a much more important story than France’s worst terror attack in years.
All these years after 9-11 and the American media still appears as though it wants to sweep the threat of radical Islam under the rug. If a criminal is someone like a Timothy McVeigh they can link to the American military or portray as somehow linked to today’s mainstream political right, that story often opens newscast after newscast, night after night, until it’s beyond played out.
But your average homegrown terrorist anywhere in the world needs a booking agent if he wants that kind of attention from the mainstream media. Rather than sound the alarm for the American public, today’s media decides to be blind, deaf and dumb on the subject.
Instead, these journalists take little bits of unimportant information, process it into stale, homogenized stories crammed into a preset template (“corporations bad,” “Tea Party racist”), and cover it with a facade of palatable human interest. They’re serving up–you guessed it–pink slime instead of substantive news.
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