{"id":88762,"date":"2013-04-13T12:48:19","date_gmt":"2013-04-13T18:48:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/?p=88762"},"modified":"2013-04-13T12:48:19","modified_gmt":"2013-04-13T18:48:19","slug":"dog-bites-man-man-rapes-girl-journalism-and-other-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/?p=88762","title":{"rendered":"Dog Bites Man; Man Rapes Girl: Journalism and Other Crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Other McCain<\/a> looks at the political agenda of modern ‘journalism’.<\/p>\n

For example, I\u2019ve never quite understood (and there was a lot of questioning among media-watchers at the time) why Matthew Shepard\u2019s death became a nationwide cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre, with nationally televised vigils and so forth. As murders go, Shepard\u2019s murder wasn\u2019t particularly unusual: Privileged college kid goes to a local pub, meets up with a couple of local two-bit hoodlums who decide to rip him off and, instead, the rip-off escalates into murder.<\/p>\n

Nasty crimes like that are unfortunately not man-bites-dog news and, except for the fact that Shepard was gay, his death might never have made headlines outside of Wyoming. But of course, Shepard was gay, and so his death became a symbol of America\u2019s Rampant Homophobia and \u2014 if you didn\u2019t pay much attention to the details \u2014 you might have thought Shepard\u2019s killers were right-wing fundamentalist Christians, rather than a couple of small-town petty criminals, both of whom had prior records for minor offenses including burglary and marijuana possession.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hey, if it fits the Narrative, that’s front-page material.<\/p>\n

OK, so what if the rape-murder victim is a 13-year-old boy? That\u2019s kind of a rare crime, and if the victim suffocated \u2014 bound and gagged \u2014 during an hours-long torture ordeal in which he was repeatedly sodomized, you might think a crime like that would be considered newsworthy.<\/p>\n

But most people have never heard of Jesse Dirkhising, and there are those of us who suspect that maybe Jesse Dirkising is nearly unknown for pretty much the same reason that Matthew Shepard became famous: There\u2019s an agenda.<\/p>\n

Never mind whether it\u2019s a good agenda or a bad agenda, it\u2019s an agenda, and everybody knows what it is.<\/p>\n

The point, from my perspective, is that news coverage is being influenced by a sort of consensus opinion among the influential elite of the journalism industry that some crime victims are more equal than others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hey, if it doesn’t fit the Narrative, it’s buried in the back pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Other McCain looks at the political agenda of modern ‘journalism’. For example, I\u2019ve never quite understood (and there was a lot of questioning among media-watchers at the time) why Matthew Shepard\u2019s death became a nationwide cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre, with nationally televised vigils and so forth. As murders go, Shepard\u2019s murder wasn\u2019t particularly unusual: Privileged college […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drivel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88762"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88764,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88762\/revisions\/88764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}