Trivializing Four Deaths for the Sake of an Election

The president’s appearance on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” has been well-covered for the statement “If four Americans get killed, that’s not optimal.” Well covered thanks to Conservative blogs, that is. What is less well publicized is the response of  Sean Smith’s mother, Pat Smith, to the president’s remark: “It’s insensitive to say my son is not very optimal — he is also very dead. I’ve not been ‘optimal’ since he died and the past few weeks have been pure hell.

I am still waiting for the truth to come out and I still want to know the truth. I’m finally starting to get some answers but I won’t give up. There’s a lot of stupid things that have been said about my son and what happened and this is another one of them.” Like most things critical of the president, this item appeared in the foreign press. On this occasion, in the U.K.’s Daily Mail Online.
This was not the president’s first misstep concerning the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi; one of his first statements following these murders occurred on “60 Minutes,” when the president was speaking to Steve Kroft. The president referred to the atrocity as “bumps in the road.” The outcry for this analogy was non-existent. Growing grass makes a bigger racket. And the president always gets away with it. He has since he took office.
Our media seem hell-bent on getting the president re-elected at any cost, facts be damned. Any negative press that does manage to escape the reservation immediately gets labeled “racist,” “an overreaction” or, a personal favorite, “out of context.” The problem for the president is that when his remarks are delivered in their entirety, “in context,” the end result is always worse. The problem for the rest of America is that The Ministry of Truth is never willingly going to deliver it; they will keep news away from the public at all costs.
It has become part of “the new normal” that our media doesn’t report the news. The hoi polloi, after all, cannot be trusted with unvarnished information. These media gods, dwelling in the rarified atmosphere provided by the first amendment of the Constitution will, instead, make the news. It is up to them to shape their chosen narrative. And part of that narrative is a desire to keep the masses “in their place.”Scandals about this administration rise and fall faster than the tide. Fast and Furious has all but disappeared from the radar. It took Univision, a Spanish-speaking outlet, to break a story that had been a matter of public record for over a year. Their story was blackballed by the mainstream media as quickly as was humanely possible. Campaign finance irregularities, uncovered a matter of weeks ago, barely saw the light of day.
The president’s use of form letters, sent for condolences to the families of servicemen and servicewomen killed in action? A non-starter. Now Benghazi. There are more troubling questions about the Benghazi cover-up than can be enumerated. The issue is dead on arrival. The attention paid to the incident continues to be blamed on the Romney/Ryan camp.
So what does the media consider newsworthy?The president’s appearances on “The View,” or the Letterman show or on “The Daily Show,” of course. The latest in breaking news pertains to the Oscar de la Renta dress worn by Ann Romney to the second presidential debate. We are breathlessly told the dress cost $1,690 and we are supposed to be scandalized because the dress has not yet been released for sale to the public.
Shocking, elitist behavior, to be sure. Well, in the interest of providing some balance that is missing from the media that found this item compelling, the president’s wife was wearing Marc Jacobs that evening. Her ensemble cost twice as much as Ann Romney’s garb and was part of the 2013 line…not yet released to the public.
The media have been out of control for a long time. Journalistic competence is a thing of the past. News items that should have monumental importance are trivialized. We may not be able to change that in the short run. Getting rid of the focus of the media’s worship in the up-coming presidential election, however, should make a good start.