The best political humor is also
pungent social commentary. This clip from the British
humorist-columnist Charlie Brooker's razor-sharp series
Newswipe from 2009 finds Brooker discussing a
recent incident in which a German teen perpetrated a mass shooting at
a school.
Brooker's programs analyze the media
(news programs in particular), with him making sarcastic comments
from the sanctity of his living room – the ultimate revenge of the
couch potato. The object of his shows is certainly to make fun of
media coverage of major news stories, but he's willing to sacrifice
the jokes to make serious points, as he did in this instance.
Here he intercuts sensationalist
footage from 24-hour news channels with an extremely pointed
interview with Dr. Park Dietz, the forensic psychiatrist who has
testified at several major murder trials, concerning the ways in
which the mass media can cover mass shootings and NOT inspire similar
incidents in the future.
The things he says may seem obvious to
most of us sentient humans – do not do 24/7 coverage of the
incident, do not make the body count the lead story, do not make the
killer an antihero – but it does serve as a short list of the ways
in which news nets do help perpetuate this cycle of violence.
Even
the left-leaning networks that decry the violence and are seemingly
in favor of gun control, like MSNBC, were doing “wall to wall
coverage” of the Connecticut shooting yesterday, when there was
absolutely no new news to report – in so doing they helped spread
false info about the identity of the killer.
The clip speaks for itself, and sadly
will be topical for a long time to come:
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