The Money, Media Focus, and the Virginia Tech Disaster
by Dennis Peacocke
The recent catastrophe at Virginia Tech is more about money and media focus than guns, mental illness, or bureaucratic failure. To be sure, guns were involved, and the gunman had a "trail" of mental illness behavior. Nevertheless, the guns were purchased legally. So what about the mental illness issues?
Firstly, there is no doubt Mr. Cho was severely disturbed if not demonized. The authorities who examined him, both on and off the university campus, should have "flagged" him so as to put him on the existing state-wide lists which would have prevented him from buying the two handguns. Undoubtedly, the whole nation will take due notice of this and begin to severely tighten gun purchase clearances as a result. It shouldn't have taken this kind of tragedy to make the obvious so obvious. Nothing new here.
Secondly, the campus authorities had no plausible reason to assume that the gunman would commit unrelated mass murder since they had no immediate suspect linkage to Mr. Cho. Surely this incident will result in a much more available presence of campus security around our nation's schools. In this age of psycho-babble lunatics, this too is good beyond the obvious economic costs involved. So why drag in the money-media connection? Only because it plays a dominant role in this and virtually all other recent mass murder-related scenarios.
One of life's most obvious "rules" is that what we heed or focus on, both personally and socially, we get more of. That being the case, from a media analysis perspective, "what shows grows." Whatever the press, the film and music industry, or the arts tend to focus on, the higher our social consciousness profiles tend to move in that direction. Finally, in the last several years, even the idiot press is beginning to take note of this truth. Crimes are increasingly being examined as potential derivatives of the "copy cat" phenomenon. Indeed, this phenomenon is exactly what we mean when we talk about the law of what we feed tends to grow. This reality is hardly new and requires no particular insight to observe.
So what is the driving energy behind the media frenzy of detailed gore and personal trauma in our prevailing news reporting? You've got it: money, honey. The media is driven by bad news because bad news sells a whole lot better than good news. When an industry curries favor with collective prurient interests, it empowers and emboldens our attention-seeking sickos. What you feed is what you grow.
The real question is not whether the networks have a "right" to profit from prurient pursuits. Nor is it a question of the "right" of film makers and movie theater owners to show and push sick, perverse, obscenely brutal films playing upon people's needs to get off on controlled fear experiences. Yes, you have the "right." When will this nation get it that our crisis is not about our rights but rather about our collective and personal responsibilities? Focus on "rights," and you get self-centered libertines. Focus on responsibilities, and you get productive, responsible citizens.
The real crisis in America is not about gun control. It is about self-control. Guns or even "gun availability" doesn't kill people. People kill people. Ban the guns without cutting off our nation's "rights binge" and what we'll get is an implosion somewhere else. Hello, media moguls and "bottom line" money-changers. It's about the sick people strung out on Monday and the dreaded "attention creation syndrome" even more than the sickos you're empowering, and that is . . .
the bottom line.
