
If you pay serious attention to network and cable commentators after a mass shooting, you will see something nearly as alarming as the atrocities themselves. Set aside, for a moment, the horror of the event about which they are holding forth and it will become obvious that their solemn expressions are well-rehearsed affectations that mask a morbid glee. As you lament truncated lives and traumatized survivors, these creatures count eyeballs and clicks. While you worry about the health of our society, they search for a connection to some conservative cause or politician. And the print media are just as ghoulish.
It hasn’t always been so, however. The media have long been biased, of course, and that reality has been factored in by intelligent viewers and readers. But this phenomenon is scarier. To illustrate how much the “news” media has changed in just a few decades, think back to the murders of Sharon Tate and four others by the so-called Manson family. Charles Manson claimed this horrifying slaughter was inspired by the Beatles song, “Helter Skelter.” The universal response from the press, the public, and the song’s author (Paul McCartney) was that the man was crazy. No sane adult took Manson’s claim seriously.
Yet, in our era, ostensibly serious journalists would have us believe that a massacre committed by some psychopath in El Paso was the inevitable result of something President Trump said on Twitter or the random chants of people attending one of his political rallies. This is just as crazy as Manson’s claim about “Helter Skelter,” a song written about nothing more sinister than a type of English fairground. Still, rather than adopting the rational position taken by the Fourth Estate when a mass murderer started gibbering about a Beatles tune, contributors to today’s “news” outlets make Manson seem sane:
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