I have absolutely no tolerance for anyone who revels in the misfortune of others. When Barbara Walters pesters and pries and prods until every person she's ever interviewed cries, I have the urge to go to the bathroom and throw up. What makes me even sicker is the fact that even small-town piece of shit reporters are getting on the "cry" bandwagon. Recently, my high school went all the way to the state playoffs in football. There's a student there, a senior named Charlie Dempsey, who has played football ever since you could play football for the school. He was scouted by East Carolina University. In other words, Football is his life. When we lost the big State Championship, our dinky TV news station made a point to show Charlie crying, from ten different angles, for at least a minute collectively throughout the three or four minute report. It's sickening.
It seems as if the media can't get enough of human agony. They thrive on pain. I remember seeing them pester the relatives of murdered people and victims of plane crashes. The media can change the lives of people for the better or the worse. There was a man in North Carolina by the name of Robert Kelly. He owned a day care center for children. All of a sudden, children started accusing him and his family of molestation. These accusations warranted a full scale investigation, and then a trial. Kelly was convicted of 99 counts of child molestation and sentenced to somewhere around 100 years of jail time.
But he was innocent.
How, you ask, could an innocent man be convicted of such a horrible crime? Well, to begin with, as soon as the first cries of "rape" came out, the media was right in there. They printed stories and played stories on the horrible details of the crime. They told of the molestations, the sexual torture, the deviancy... But they neglected to tell of the children's insistance that they were molested by giraffes too. And that they all went on boat rides while children were thrown into the water and they all watched as they were consumed by sharks. Of course, none of this happened. Medical analysis showed that the children had not been raped or sodimized. The only thing that the prosecution had to go on was the words of the children.
And the only thing that the jury had to go on was the media reports of the crimes.
Sure, you say, the justice system weeds out the jurors that have a preconcieved notion of the guilt or innocence of the suspect. But guess what? This doesn't always happen. The justice system isn't always what it's cracked up to be.
But the Media is. They are a bunch of scurrying scavangers, doing whatever they can to insure higher ratings. If anyone wants to see what I'm talking about, then I strongly recommend you watch "Mad City". Very true movie.
The media has overwhelming power over people's lives. They could use it for good, but they don't. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, for example, journalists of the likes of National Geographic, Time, Life, and Newsweek. But then you get unscupulous people from Star, National Enquirer, and all those other grocery store magazines.
There should be something done to lessen the power of the media, who often works in conjunciton with the fashion industry in things such as advertizing (see The Fasion Industry). Someone should shoot them. For as surely as the insurance companies and the IRS are, the media is also going strait to hell.
