Distract / Divide and conquer

All the attention to the beating of the 350 lb. man has made me wonder... how much do we really care about these issues? How much are we manipulated into reacting to them in a particular way?

This man may have been treated unfairly. He may not have. This is an important issue, yes, but surely not worth distracting us from other, more important issues.

My main concern is that it is dividing us. A man called C-Span this morning, stated that he's a redneck who drives a pickup truck with a confederate flag on the bumper, and that he is a registered Democrat, but doesn't vote for Democrats because of what the leadership does.

Now, he didn't explain what he meant by 'what the leadership does' (or however he said it... it may have been 'how they act' or whatever), but a clue came from my conservative husband. After I commented that this caller would rather pay twice the cost for prescriptions than vote Democrat, and my husband said that all Democrats cared about was minorities.

I'm not going to argue about who has it worse, poor whites or poor blacks or poor hispanics or poor whomever. The fact is that it is POOR people who are screwed. Not just blacks, not just hispanics, not just whatever minority, but the whole group. However the whole group is kept in check by dividing them up against themselves.

But you can count on the media to play up stories like this in order to further foment suspicion, feelings of ill will and resentment, and just distract people in general from more important issues.

Consider: in Miami, there was a real problem with blacks being shot to death by white police. This received a fair amount of attention from the media, and I guess they made some changes. HOWEVER, for some reason the issue of blacks being shot to death by hispanic police is not receiving as much attention. I wonder why...

Another top news story today is the appointment of a black coach to a college sports team. Okay, so they haven't done it before. Okay, so it's a milestone. But is it really headline news? We're talking NPR here. Headline news on NPR. Does this qualify as headline news on NPR to you? Or is a tactic being used, and are the powers that be getting the reaction they want?

What do you think?

FYI, this isn't the first time something like this has happened in Cincinnati, and there was a riot over the acquittal of a police officer a few years back who shot an unarmed man because he thought he was reaching for a weapon. It's a big story when it happens in Cincinnati because of the recent history.

The issue of police brutality in general should be one of interest. I was talking more about how the media uses certain angles on specific stories to foment discord. Sadly it seems to work really, really well.

Sadder still, nobody seems to care. We just keep on arguing with each other over which subclass gets screwed harder.

they're trying to stir things up.

Every TV station and newspaper has 100 times as much news as they can use on a good day. A slow day, maybe 50. As they sift through the stuff, most of it is pretty boring and has no hook. One of the criteria for running a story is that there be some public interest, some hook to get people reading or watching. Extreme cruelty or violence, race, sex, vast destruction... These are hooks that get people interested.

Personally, I'd prefer a bunch of stories that allow the public to debate such things as police use of force and understand more about how things go down on the street than 24 hour coverage of MJ and the little boys. Or Kobe, or J. Lo, or...

The sideshow stuff aside (different subject, but a distraction nonetheless), stories about race relations / sexual orientation I really perceive as being treated differently.

If it was really about the use of force, fine. But the lack of stories about the use of force when the perpetrator is not white or the victim is not black is telling. Police aren't only brutal when the victim is ethnic. Some of the police themeselves are ethnic. We just don't hear about those stories. Black cop, black victim - no story. Hispanic cop, black victim - no story. White cop, black victim - well, you've seen the last 24 hours.

If it were really just sex, violence & destruction, it wouldn't be so lopsided. IMO we're being played.

I don't think that would be such a big story on the news channels if there weren't pictures of the attack involved. We're suckers for that sort of thing. But I do think the story is a big deal especially in Cincinatti where they have a history of race relations problems in the police department. I'm not sure if voter apathy among the redneck population should be a more important story.