Hyperion-X

Thursday, August 17, 2006

HyperionX 961 - Whitewash

[Author's Note: I wrote this in a fury, in just over four minutes, with my eyes closed, fingers pouding on the keyboard. I knew if I re-read it I'd never keep the courage to post it, so it is not even edited. I'll sacrifice grammar (and even a structural flow) to keep the anger at the forefront, and just maybe get through to someone.]

HyperionX⁹⁶¹

Whitewash

More People to throw in the Pile

From time to time I’ve been writing about who belongs in the Pile….of Shit

Today’s Entry: (Some) members of the Media

Part 1 – If it bleeds, it leads.

Too often the Media doesn’t care if they get the story right. They just want to make the story good. Take for instance that little league baseball team, where the coach supposedly walked a batter just to face a kid who’s a cancer survivor, needs a shunt in his brain just to live, because he’d be easier to get out (and he was; Cancer Kid struck out and his team lost the game).

You hear that story and you think, “Man, that’s some cold-blooded shit.”

But it wasn’t like that at all. Turns out the coach walked the other team’s best batter to face anyone else. Coach had no idea the kid was up next, and said he would have walked the power hitter in any situation, not out of some cruelty, but trying to win the game.

Now, you can make an argument that Little League isn’t the place to walk kids (although it happened when I played), but this was the championship. Furthermore, if you’re playing Little League, you got to be ready to swing that bat, no matter if you’re a cancer survivor or just suck. If you strike out, is it any less painful if you’re just some horrible batter? I played baseball many years, ended up a good hitter; started out a bad one. I know what it’s like to be the kid who strikes out and loses the game. It sucks. But that has nothing to do with cancer. In some ways, the way it played out for Cancer Boy means he got treated normally, not like some freak.

But that’s not the point. The point is, the Media didn’t care if they got the story right. They just wanted the juicy story. What plays: a power hitter gets walked, leaving a weaker hitter who strikes out, thus validating the strategy? Or a mean old coach throws salt in the wounds of a young boy by cruelly setting him up to lose the game.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams said,

“Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.” (The Dilbert Principle)

You tell me. Are journalists the most principled people on the planet, fighting to get the truth out there to the people? Or are they just like everyone else?

Speaking of journalists claiming they’re doing God’s work, this brings us to Point #2: Journalists = Superheroes.

We see all the time—right now, today, even—journalists going to jail to protect their “sources.” They feel all noble, and First Amendment issues get discussed on Talk Radio and NPR. But sometimes it isn’t about that. Take for example the Barry Bonds case.

I don’t want to get into Bonds right now (we’ll cover that another day), but two years ago it was reported that Bonds told the Grand Jury that he once took steroids by accident, and didn’t do it again.

The whole steroid investigation has been to get Bonds, who hasn’t seemed to figure out that if you’re brash, arrogant, hate reporters and don’t give them quotes, they’re not going to like you. (Of course McGwire was notoriously surly with the Media, and he generally got a pass. If only I could figure out what on Earth difference there was between Bonds’s surliness and McGwire’s? I’m going to put together a committee and get back to you.)

Anyway, a judge has ruled that the reporters must reveal who the leaker was in this grand jury case. The reporters are refusing to budge. Are they heroes? Fuck no. Leaking grand jury testimony is a felony. This act is a far far bigger deal than any allegations against Bonds, even if they were true. (At the time, baseball was 100% complicit in looking the other way, and didn’t even have a steroids policy, so it wouldn’t have been against the rules anyway. But I digress.)

You see what I’m saying? Reporters decide the story, they decide what’s important, and they decide what’s right.

Do you think when you read the news you’re getting the full story? You’d be better off just assuming you’re not. Back when the JonBenet Ramsey case first came up, I remember actively not paying attention. This is because I get so pissed off on how the Media turns these things into a circus. (More on that in a minute.) I do remember the parents’ behavior seemed odd, which most people took to mean they were either guilty or at least knew more than they were telling. But it could have been just the Media scrutiny. How can anyone hold up—especially after just losing a child—with all that spotlight shined squarely on them? If the Ramsey’s were completely innocent, might they not have acted just the way they did?

(I know this is off the subject a bit—but I’m on an anger roll—one area where I do blame these parents is entering that girl in the little beauty pageants. What kind of fucked up parents do this? Why not just get your daughter a stripper poll for her bunk bed to practice on, and go ahead and enroll her in the FSOA: Future Sluts of America. The sexual component to those pageants is abhorrent. No four year old should be acting sexy, wearing make up, dressed up like a little woman. If this guy in Thailand turns out to be guilty and he got the idea from watching that poor little girl all tramped up in pageants, I hope the father (and the mother in hell, which is where any mom ought to go who’s dumb fucking stupid enough to put her daughter in something like that) choke on the knowledge that they might have played a part.)

The pressure of Media can be a nightmare. Witness Floyd Landis, and whether he’s guilty or not, the Media camped out at his Mennonite parents’ home is sickening. When I saw that, I wanted to throw up. (Not to mention that apparently his father-in-law killed himself yesterday. Wonder if that has anything to do with it.) If the Media camped out on my parents’ lawn to harass them night and day I would have no problem emptying a shotgun full of rock salt at those fucking vultures several times a day. How can we permit shit like that? Freedom of the Press my ass. I say if reporters are committing that kind of harassment, infringing on your very lives, you’re allowed to give one verbal warning and cock that double barrel and do the world a favor.

(And don’t even get me started on Paparazzi. Fine. Do get me started. I know some celebrities bring it on themselves by whoring their image to the Media to sell their products, but no one ever accused a Celebrity of being intelligent, enough is enough. How can we allow anyone’s privacy to be invaded to the point of going through people’s garbage, trespassing, running down their cars? I say if you break a law to get a picture you ought to get 10 years in jail. If you buy a picture where the law was broken you ought to be fined 20 millions dollars. And if you buy those rags in the check-out lines, or watch Entertainment Tonight and other Carrion-feeder shows, hang your head in fucking shame. You’re part of the problem, jackass.)

Before I forget: I have nothing but sympathy for any child who’s abducted, killed, abused. You all know me, you KNOW that. And I have total empathy for any parents who aren’t responsible for that. I can’t even blame the Media attention on the parents; that’s the wonderful sick fucking world of 24 Hour Cable News. (Gods, if I could just have half an hour in a closed room with the presidents of the News division for CNN, Fox News, and a ball-peen hammer…..)

But riddle me this: Why are all these cases about white people? Why is it years worth of story that JonBenet Ramsey was killed, but a little spic or nigger girl in the projects goes missing, and nobody gives a rat’s fucking ass?

(“Oh, Hyperion! How can you use such language?” I’m not using that language, you are. Every time you obsess right along with the Media about a JonBenet or Elizabeth Smart or Jessica Lunsford (or hell, even a Jennifer Wilbanks), you’re saying you don’t give a fuck about all those little black girls, little brown boys taken off the streets, out of their homes. Where’s the press on that?)

Maybe I’ve wrongly impugned you. Maybe you are a caring compassionate person. So tell me this. How much time have you spent in the last two days thinking about Ramsey? Now how much time have you spent thinking about the nigger girl down the block? You know what? I’m going to keep using that horrible offensive language until people get it. Until people realize that they feed into the obsession when the disappearance of a white girl stops the nation in its tracks, but nobody can spend five minutes thinking about he living hell many kids go through in the projects every day.

I can prove it. (You do realize that when I say “you,” I mean society, right? Although, if the sheet fits….). Think about this. Where was the alleged killer arrested?

Thailand.

What happens in Thailand?

Men go there to fuck little kids. It’s legal, or legal enough. Hell, it’s on the goddam tourist maps.

And yet, how much time did you spend thinking about that this week? Why aren’t we pissed off enough to stop that? Isn’t that something the United “useless as a bag of fucking hammers” Nations could do something about? Couldn’t we pretend that Thailand sat on oil?

Couldn’t we pretend those kids were white?

Hell, for now I’d settle for just pretending those poor kids in the projects were white. Maybe then some of them would get on the news. Maybe then someone would care. Maybe the Media would even get out of the Pile.

But I doubt it.

Posted by Hyperion :: 9:12 AM :: Permalink :: 0 comments