The Aurora Movie Theatre massacre is now six days in our wake, Obama has come and gone, and three straight days on the road has meant listening to a variety of networks cover the tragedy on satellite radio during the day (whenever the comedy channels got too lame), and then on television when I would land for the night. Not to say that I was forced to absorb any of it, but even Fox News was over-the-top, and believe me, Fox was by far the least worst of the networks covering the event. It is to say that even for an organization that generally does a good job, Fox's coverage of the mass murder of movie-goers by a lone deranged gunman was inane when it wasn't inept, and the only thing longer than the list of casualties was the extent to which the Nation's Newsreaders collectively would blather on about the details of the thing, the meaning of it all - and my favorite - speculation about yet further calls for gun control.
What is up with our media anyway? Their approach to every tragedy of a similar nature is to endlessly report about it, psychoanalyze it, dissect it, re-assemble it and then beat it to death again, with only the limitations of broadcast technology preventing them from literally projecting spittle onto your face. You and I have seen it all before: First with the breathless repetition of the few known details, then with the interviews, then with the press conferences, then with analysis, and Repeat: Endlessly, and apparently, shamelessly.
Among the stranger moments of this whole deal was Obama showing up. Great, I thought: The Comforter-In-Chief gets a campaign freebie. How perfect, and how stunningly surreal. Candidate Obama - oppo research, negative ads and demagoguery literally oozing out of his pores - sweeps into town to offer solace to the families of the victims. This small respite from his months-long wallow in infamy, I predicted, would not last long, and it didn't. He was complaining about Romney, Republicans and a variety of inanimate objects almost before he was wheels-up a few hours later, the families all consoled, his mission accomplished, and the Nation's Voters feeling strangely in need of a shower.
Not that I fault Obama for being Obama: He's never been anything other than the substance-free, rabid Campaign Chihuahua and TelePrompTer-addled bag of cliches we've observed him to be. What I can fault is the collective efforts of our news-gathering organizations to further infantilize the national consciousness by their coverage of events like this, so typified by their reaction to his visit, specifically their worshipful tone upon the occasion of Obama doing nothing more than the least that might be expected of him. Even Fox News - learning that Candidate Obama had "suspended his campaign" and was hustling it to Colorado - could not help but lapse into this mode, with commentator after commentator endlessly commenting on "the role of the President in healing the nation", and a seemingly endless variety of Zaftig blondes earnestly speculating with each other about exactly how wonderful the President's words might be at a time like this?
I am not making this up.
The end result has got to tick you off: Hundreds of millions of Americans once again are prevented - as citizens and fellow human beings - from making any real connection with the victims of Aurora that might have resulted from more restrained coverage. What dignity and privacy the Survivors and their families might have desired is forfeit to the News Readers and their insane desire for content. And the real significance of the event is forever indistinguishable from, say, the coverage of OJ's trial or the endless pursuit of George Zimmerman, all three events rendered incoherent by the Media's compulsion to talk such things to Death in an attempt to invest them with meaning.
Or at least enough meaning to keep you dialed in through the next batch of commercials.
