Sunday, February 03, 2008

The news, and why I ignore it

I don't watch TV news. ever.
I don't read the newspaper - the ink makes me sneeze
I get my news from the 30 mins or so of NPR in the morning
and listening to Slate Magazine daily podcasts
I give my attention to these sources because I generally feel that they are unbiased and present just the news.
Well, I know that they are biased. And most of the time, I don't notice the colorings and opinions of the presenter woven into the general text of the presentation.

The other day I did.
There was a story about the bombing of a compound in Afghanistan where an alqaida leader was killed.
And the announcer phrased the sentence like this:
...bombing of a compound where 21 people were killed including an alqaida leader. This is great news 'cause this guy was high up in the chain and having him dead is good for the WORLD...

of course, a bunch of people died in Iraq too, so a couple sentences later we had:
...over 15 people were killed in a suicide bombing, this brings the death toll this morning to 20..

or something like that.
Anyway... the gist is that when a guy "we" think is bad gets killed, doesn't matter how many innocent bystanders are also gone.

Dead people are dead people... it doesn't matter who did the killing or what the reasoning was. Don't pretend its otherwise.

1 comment:

Aaron Stiner said...

Amen Lisa! At some point, some one is going to have to take a stand, just like MLK and Ghandi and say you can kill all of us, but we will not kill back. Another human killing another human is wrong - straight out!