Arizona shooting: Have Sarah Palin's election chances been damaged?

[Turtle]

I would contend the opposite is true. Until cable television and the internet came along, only a handful of voices at NBC, CBS, and ABC actually had a live national audience. Plus a few national radio broadcasters. During that era, the Big 3 networks and a few national newspapers held a nearly monopolistic grip on the dissemination of news and opinion. Now, with the advent of cable TV and the internet, there are exponentially more voices being heard. All points of view are easily accessed.

Well, I though we were talking in the context of 50, 100, 200 years ago, especially with the mention of Booth. If you look at things within the context of the television era, on the surface there are certainly more voices, but it's not quite that simple. When the Big 3 were the only game in town, they tended to broadcast actual news using sound journalistic principles, rather than political rhetoric. Journalistic integrity was not sacrificed for ratings the way news anchors and entire news networks do today.

Before USA Today, there were no national newspapers. The Wall Street Journal had a wide distribution, but it wasn't really a national paper, and concentrated on Wall Street and business, and had very little political commentary. The New York Times has somewhat of a national distribution, but mainly in larger cities and distributed primarily from local newsstands. ABC, NBC and CBS may have been the only television news game in town, but the local paper was still the news king in towns both large and small. Most people got their news from the paper, because the paper could go into more depth and detail than television could. The editors of newspapers controlled what was printed, especially with regard to political rhetoric, and shaped the opinions of the locals. More voices, many of them very different and not in unison, speaking to smaller groups. Many papers had syndicated op-ed columns, but it was the local editor that made the call as to which of those opinions got printed. If the editor didn't agree with what was in a particular column, it didn't get ran. National stories were fed to the locals from UPI and the AP, but there again, just like the Big 3, those stories tended to be unimpassioned news stories without the rhetoric.

It used to be where one company could not own a television station and a radio station or a newspaper in the same market. There was also a limit on the total number of media outlets that a single company could own, regardless of market. That was done specifically to prevent a monopoly of opinion and information being disseminated by a few, to the many.

Today, we have very large conglomerates which own several media outlets in the same market, where half a dozen radio stations and one or more television stations, plus cable stations, are owned by the same company. The U.S. media landscape today is dominated by massive corporations that, through a history of mergers and acquisitions, have concentrated their control over what we see, hear and read. In many cases, these giant companies are vertically integrated, controlling everything from initial production to final distribution.

News Corporation's media holdings, for example, include: the Fox Broadcasting Company; 120 television and cable networks around the world such as Fox, Fox Business Channel, National Geographic, FX and between 25% and 39% of various Sky Network channels; print publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and TVGuide; the magazines Barron’s and SmartMoney; book publisher HarperCollins; film production companies 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Blue Sky Studios; numerous websites including MarketWatch.com and wsj.com.

Time Warner is the largest media conglomerate in the world, with holdings including: CNN (including CNN International, CNN Headline News in Asia Pacific, CNN Headline News in Latin America, CNN+, CETV (36%)(China), CNNj, CNN Turk, CNN-IBN), the CW (a joint venture with CBS), HBO, Cinemax, Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT, America Online, MapQuest, Moviefone, Warner Bros. Pictures, Castle Rock and New Line Cinema, and more than 150 magazines including Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Marie Claire and People.

The other 4 of the Big 6:

General Electric - NBC Networks, Telemundo, Ion Media networks, 46 television stations, plus NBC Entertainment, NBC News, NBC Sports, NBC Television, NBC Universal, CNBC, CNBC World (Arabia, India, Asia, Europe), MSNBC, Bravo, SyFy Channel, Telemundo, USA, Oxygen, Weather Plus, Mun2, Sleuth, Chiller, Universal HD, A&E Networks (16%; includes A&E, the History Channel, History en español, the Biography Channel, Military History Channel, Crime & Investigation Network, A&E HD, the History Channel HD, History International), the Weather Channel (partial), SyFy Channel HD.

CBS - CBS Networks consists of 30 stations plus affiliates. They own 130 radio stations in 29 markets, all of which are in the nation’s top 50 markets. They also own Simon & Schuster Publishing, which owns Simon & Schuster Canada, Simon & Schuster UK, Simon & Schuster Australia, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon & Schuster Digital, MTV Books, Atria Books, Kaplan, Pocket Books, Scribner, The Free Press, The Touchstone, and the Fireside Group.

Walt Disney - 28 cable channels, 277 radio stations in the United States alone, including ABC Radio Networks: Imus in the Morning, The Mark Levin Show, Morning Joe, The Tom Joyner Show, and have 226 affiliated stations reaching 99 percent of all U.S. television households. The company owns and operates ten ABC television stations in the nation’s top markets.

Viacom - is mostly entertainment and not news, but one can't too easily dismiss the impact of Paramount Pictures, MTV, Comedy Central (The Jon Stewart Show, The Colbert Report), Nickelodeon and BET.


More voices? Absolutely. Exponentially? Perhaps, but all singing, more or less, in unison.

 

[Turtle]

Just a point of fact here - the M16 is not a machine gun, it's an assault rifle and has been the weapon of choice for the US military for over 40 years. It has a semi-automatic setting plus a fully automatic setting that's available only in the military version.

Well, "machine gun" and "assault rifle" aren't mutually exclusive. The term "machine gun" itself is merely a Term of Art, but is clearly defined under US law by the National Firearms Act of 1934 as, "any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger."

I can't help but wonder if Representative Giffords and the MSM were aware of the map on this page from the DNC website that went up in 2010 (Note the subheading "Behind Enemy Lines"):

Thanks for posting that map. I intended to post it in my "On the flip side" section, but neglected to. Without question, both sides are equally guilty with this crap.

Their penchant is no more prevalent than that of the left;

Clearly, I failed to make my point, in that both sides are equally just butt-stoopid with this hate-filled rhetoric. But my statement above is true nonetheless. The political right does indeed have a particular penchant for militant and violent political rhetoric. That hardly means the political left doesn't do it, too, because we all know they do, it's just that the left doesn't have a particular penchant for it. We just here it more often from the right than we do the left, but examples from both sides can readily be found.

IMHO the media should also shoulder a large share of the blame for these nut cases going "postal" in such a public manner. ... The MSM could go a long way toward reducing violent public incidents by these crazy publicity seekers by not releasing their names and photographs.

A very large share of the blame. The MSM and the non-MSM could go a long way towards reducing these incidents by not inciting it in the first place, and instead do something wild and crazy, like, you know, report the news. I would charge the media is responsible for 80 or 90 percent of not only the incidents, but of the hateful rhetoric in general. Say something shocking, enveloped in charged rhetoric, and it generates ink and airtime. Pretty soon, unless you're even more shocking than the last one, you don't get air time. So we have politicians and pundits alike competing for popularity and ratings, for ink and screen. It becomes ubiquitous, normal. People are bathed in everyday hatred. The nutjobs now have a purpose in life. Yay.

they often resort to the "if you don't agree with my point of view, you must be stupid" response. Their energies would be better spent on calling time out and doing a little more research on the issue at hand.

For national politics, as well as the EO Forums.

 

[greg334]

Cheri,
It isn't any where near a national tragedy, it is a crime. A national tragedy is the open border where invaders come over and hide in the shadows, it is the sex crimes that happen because we can't control who gets into our country, IT IS the fact that innocent people are victims of crimes by criminals who cross the border unchecked and it is the slave issue that has finally gotten national attention by at least CNN.

THOSE ARE NATIONAL TRAGEDIES.

What happened was a crime, it was a crime against the citizens of Tuscon, not the country. IT ALL should be put into perspective of what actually happened.

This guy had serious mental health issues and because of our system of mental health care, he will end up living his life out in prison. Instead of worrying about the actual impact, they are trying to figure out how to pass more laws to help people id these guys and put them away. One such law that they are thinking about passing is one that allowed a college or university to contact the parents and discuss with them the problem - the last time I looked, college people are adults, not kids.

The other thing I have to point out is that ALL who attempted an assassination of a president from Lincoln to Bush I were left leaning people, some were nuts, some like Booth were democrats but all were left leaning.

 

[cheri1122]

Greg: I don't disagree that your example is a national tragedy [and a disgraceful failure of leadership], but are you saying there can be only one at a time?
I call the death of this child [and the other five innocent victims] a national tragedy, as we all will suffer the consequences if the toxic vitriol and us vs them partisanship continues.
So far, too many are still pointing at the 'other' side, as if what got us into this mess could possibly get us out of it, too.

 

[Turtle]

Greg: I don't disagree that your example is a national tragedy [and a disgraceful failure of leadership], but are you saying there can be only one at a time?

I was thinking the same thing.

"What happened was a crime, it was a crime against the citizens of Tuscon, not the country. IT ALL should be put into perspective of what actually happened."

Just like we an have multiple national tragedies, crimes can have multiple victims. In this case the multiple victims were the obvious victims, the citizens of Tuscon, the State of Arizona, and the United States of American. You don't shoot a U.S. District Judge and a member of Congress and not have it be a crime against the United States.

Loughner has been charged with one count of attempted assassination of a member of Congress, two counts of killing an employee of the Federal Government, and two counts of attempting to kill a federal employee. And that's just for starters.

He'll almost certainly be brought up on state charges of four counts of murder for the four victims who died who were not federal employees, and that other charges (to cover injured victims who did not work for the federal government) could include attempted murder and aggravated assault. There will likely be a few more charges, like "substantial risk of imminent death or physical injury,'' which is one that gets used a lot in shootings or when people are endangered by automobiles.


When viewed in the light of the hate rhetoric that's been going on in this country on a national scale by politicians, pundits and citizens alike, we are all at least partly responsible for this. People who enjoy the hate can dismiss it as irrelevant in a nutjob who went on a killing spree, and can keep on keeping on with the finger pointing and the hate-filled rhetoric. And that too is a national tragedy.

 

[greg334]

What I'm saying is the impact to the country is greater with those issues I listed over the death of a few people, no matter how horrid it is. The country focuses on one event, the media tramples it into the ground telling us how important they were all the while other worst things are going on within miles of the location.

Regardless how you cut it, the death of a child is bad, but how about those children that are taken, kidnapped or sold into the sex slave operation?

Isn't that a national tragedy?

Taking something like this and putting the tag "National Tragedy" on it actually redefines what we should consider as a national issue and what isn't. Again 9/11 is a national tragedy, OK city is a national tragedy but not this.

Taking the child's murder out of the picture for a moment,
I think if we have gone backward, thinking that some people are more important than others and while those who are just law makers and judges work for you and I, they fail to protect the innocent of this country and in doing so, don't deserve to be put above other innocent people.

 

[layoutshooter]

"Irrational actions demand a rational response, though, and that's what we aren't getting. Every suggestion that the violent and inflammatory rhetoric be toned down is met with fingers pointing at "the other side".
A nine year old child has died - contrary to a previous assertion, it IS a national tragedy, even more so because we don't seem to be working out how we can best prevent it from happening again."

Sorry Cherri, there is no way possible to ever prevent this from happening again. Nice dream, no reality. These things have been going on since mankind has been on this planet. Political assasination, mass murder and nut cases are nothing new. Changing rhetoric will have little or no effect. As long as there are people on earth these things will go on. Taking away guns or free speech rights won't change it either. The more you try to control people the worse the killing gets.