Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Obscene TV

A few weeks ago, I saw something truly obscene on tv.

And in primetime!

It was about 10 minutes to 8pm, and CNN's Wolf Blitzer was on. I was forced to view this as I was on a treadmill at the gym.

And I was musing to myself, gee, I wonder what they're going to do to boost their ratings, now that FOX is eating their lunch.

And I didn't have to wait long.

Paraphrasing what happened, they cut to a perky newscaster, announcing something like, "and now coming up, an accident at the racetrack!"

And I'm thinking, what some kind of racing car crash or something?

And then they start showing this clip of horseracing.

And there's this pack of racehorses galloping towards the camera.

And the captioning continues, to my horror, "a 16-year-old jockey, trampled to death!"

And the camera shows, indeed, the lead horse stumbling, and the child jockey churned under the hooves of the herd.

And the camera then lingered on the body of the child, killed without warning before my eyes, in the mud.

And to my even greater shock, to my amazement, the perky newscaster then said something to the effect of, "that was some nasty spill!"

Nasty spill???

CNN just showed me a 16-year-old get killed!

For ratings!

This was news?

And worse yet, these news agencies are the very same ones who have decided to not show the tapes of the World Trade Center attacks on the anniversaries, to avoid "inflaming" or "upsetting" people. They won't show the true horrors of the innocents being forced to shoose whether to burn or to jump from 100 stories up.

They whitewash the activities of the jihadists regularly.

But they'll show me a kid trampled to death in the mud by a horse as infotainment.

One of these things is important to know as an informed citizen, the other is not.

As a business, CNN can show what it wants. But I surely don't have any respect for it as an information source or arbiter of opinion.

I think this must be the story in question.

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