How Media Framing Makes Everything Scarier

This morning, my wife sent me a story. There was a “mass shooting” with no fatalities in Macon, Georgia. We don’t live particularly close to Macon, about an hour and a half to two hours, depending on which of us is driving. She sent it to me, though, because it happened pretty much in front of the office of a doctor my daughter sees regularly. 

And it was a serious shooting, with 12 people injured, two critically.

I might have written about it from the start, but something jumped out at me in the reporting. It says 12 “teens” were injured. About those teens…

Multiple teens were shot and injured during a mass shooting at Carolyn Crayton Park early Sunday morning, according to the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff’s office later said around 5 p.m. Sunday that 12 teens were shot. The 12th one was a 19-year-old man who went to a local hospital around 12:24 p.m. Sunday afternoon who was suffering from a gunshot wound that wasn’t life-threatening. After talking with investigators, they found that he was shot during the Carolyn Crayton Park shooting.

They say 12 people were shot, including two people who are listed in critical condition. They said the call came in just after midnight Sunday morning.

According to the release, there were four 18-year-old men, five 17-year-old boys and two 18-year-old women who were shot. They were taken to the hospital, where one of the 18-year-old men and 17-year-old boys are in critical condition, according to the report.

Now, the 17-year-olds are one thing, but 18- and 19-year-olds are legal adults. While the term “teen” might technically apply, people don’t think of legal adults as teenagers. They see “teens shot” and immediately think kids who just got their licenses last week. They’re going to react, and they’re going to react viscerally as if these are children being hurt, not mostly adults and near-adults.

That’s the point, though, isn’t it?

See, I’ve figured for a while that we should never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity. The problem is that, after a point, there’s little to no functional difference between the causes when the outcome is what it is, but also that after a certain time, ignorance can no longer be held up as an excuse. At that point, you’re willfully engaged in perpetuating untruths and misrepresentations because you’ve chosen to dismiss the criticisms out of hand.

Applied to the news media as a whole, this means that even a local Macon television station won’t get a pass because they’d have had to go out of their way not to learn otherwise.

So now I expect to hear about a dozen children being gunned down in front of my daughter’s endocrinologist’s office, when that’s not remotely what happened, and anyone who cares about the truth will be able to tell it.

When emotions became a weapon, it became imperative that an unbiased media avoid evoking them. Since we don’t have an unbiased media, however, we end up with reports about a dozen “teens” being shot, everyone responsible knowing full well how few people will actually read the report beyond making sure they understand the location well enough.

No matter how much you hate the mainstream media, you don’t hate them enough.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.

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