Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Damned good question

Commentary: Where is the outrage when humans are abused? - CNN.com

My own answer is that the Vick case was vastly overblown because of celebrity, while the case of the six cracker assholes received about the right amount of coverage. It was a newsworthy story, as should be the story of their rapid execution, but that's about it.

Come on, though. There are plenty of other things that need coverage, and focusing on one or two of the many, many outrages that occur all the time distracts from the wider picture.

Maybe that's part of the intent. Who knows? My two cents.

1 comment:

jj mollo said...

I think part of the disconnect is the level of perceived agreement. The society is already doing, we hope and believe, everything it can to suppress brutality against humans. It's something we agree on, pretty much, so, if there's no celebity association, we can categorize the news rapidly and firmly into the class of irreducible violent crimes.

Dog abuse often evokes more outrage because some people apparently don't think it's particularly problematic. It's just a dog, they say. The rest of us, dog lovers perhaps, react strongly to that unacceptable minority opinion more than the event itself. We want people to be outraged. If they're not, it's news.

There's also a perception that society is drifting toward increasing levels of dog abuse. The trend is also more disturbing than the event. Why, we want to know, is this happening? Change for the worse is puzzling and frightening. I know that in Philadelphia the rising murder rate has occupied more front pages than any other topic but Iraq. Iraq, of course, is newsworthy because we disagree among ourselves on the question of what should be done there.