• Matt Walsh: I sneezed twice at the grocery store a few weeks ago

    From Ubiquitous@21:1/5 to All on Thu Sep 23 21:05:04 2021
    XPost: alt.tv.pol-incorrect, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.media
    XPost: alt.politics.usa

    I have never paid much attention to high profile murder cases. Around 40
    people are murdered in this country every single day. All of these are sad situations — some sadder than others, perhaps — but the media wants us to be especially concerned about certain cases and not others. I do not feel obligated to follow their lead on this point. Or on any other point.

    That is why I haven’t followed the Gabby Petito case very closely, horrible though it is. For those who have been similarly out of the loop, a quick summary: Petito and her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, set out on a cross country
    road trip back in early July. They documented their adventures on Instagram
    and YouTube. Petito made her last Instagram post on August 25th. A week
    later, Laundrie returned home alone with no explanation as to Gabby’s whereabouts. Several days after that, Laundrie went missing as well. He was possibly captured on deer camera footage earlier this week, trekking through the woods of north west Florida. Meanwhile, the body recovered in a Wyoming national park a few days ago has now been officially identified as Gabby Petito. Her death has been ruled a homicide.



    Why has this case made national headlines while other missing persons and murder victims are relegated to the local news, if they get any coverage at all? It’s not very hard to discern an answer. Gabby Petito already had a base of followers on social media who were interested in her life. She was young, attractive, and photogenic. The disappearance out in the wilderness, the
    fiancé on the run, the additional details emerging like puzzle pieces — all
    of these factors make for a more sensational story. They don’t make her death more terrible than anyone else’s death, and they didn’t make her life more valuable or its taking more tragic, but they do add up to a compelling narrative. It may sound crude to refer to a real life murder case in this
    way, and it is, but this is how it works in a society where people consume murder cases as entertainment. “True crime” is one of the most popular genres on every streaming service for a reason.

    This is part of the reason why the national media selects and amplifies
    certain murders and not others. Though, recently, prominent members of the national media itself have pointed to a different explanation. Joy Reid of MSNBC echoed the claims made by many on the Left when she pegged the Gabby Petito coverage as another instance of “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” Reid, having never encountered a story that she won’t racialize, argues that the media and the public only care about white people — white women, specifically
    — who go missing or turn up dead. She charges the media with “ignoring cases involving missing people of color.”

    If we’re going this route, I could just as easily chalk it up to sexism. When is the last time that a missing or dead white man made the national
    headlines? And if anti-black racism lies at the heart of this, then why do white female alleged murderers tend to captivate the public even more than
    the murder victims. Casey Anthony, Jody Arias, Amanda Knox. I can’t name a single black female murderer off the top of my head. Is it anti-black racism that leads us to heap extra scrutiny on white murder suspects? And yet,
    still, the basic observation made by Joy Reid and others can’t be denied.
    Black people are killed or go missing every day, at a rate much higher than whites, and none of them — unless they are killed by a cop — become household names.

    A concrete example to illuminate the point. Two years ago, a black woman
    named Brittany Hill was shot and killed by Chicago gang members in broad daylight while holding her one-year-old daughter in her arms. The footage, captured by security cameras, is haunting. On the surface, the crime seems to contain all of the elements that would attract widespread media coverage. A young woman shot dead in the street. The crime is caught on camera. She dies while lying on top of her child to shield her from the bullets. It’s a devastating and dramatic story. There are many such stories in Chicago and other cities around the country, but this one is on film, and even in a place like Chicago it’s not every day that a young woman is executed in the middle
    of the afternoon while holding a baby in her arms. So, why didn’t the
    national media show any interest in this event? Why didn’t Joy Reid ever mention Brittany Hill’s name? The very media that condemns us for allegedly ignoring black deaths is itself guilty of ignoring those same deaths. Indeed, it is entirely their fault that the deaths are ignored. Joy Reid has her own show on MSNBC. A national platform. She could have singlehandedly made
    Brittany Hill a household name, and yet she ignored her death entirely. How
    can this be explained?

    Quite easily. The national media disregarded Brittany Hill because Hill was murdered by black men. The vast majority of black female and black male
    murder victims are killed by black men. That’s why Joy Reid and her ilk
    ignore them, even as they accuse everyone else of ignoring them. They do not want to discuss these deaths because they do not want to talk about the perpetrators who caused the deaths. As it turns out, there are two major factors deciding whether a murder case will appear in national headlines. The identity of the victim matters, but so does the identity of the alleged
    killer. To pass the media litmus test, the case must be sensational (or
    easily sensationalized) and it must also be politically useful. A white woman murdered by a white man fits this bill. So does a black man or woman killed
    by police. But a black person killed by a black person certainly fails to
    meet the criteria, and so does a white man killed by anyone of any identity group. Rare exceptions can be made to the latter rule. Every once in a while,
    a dead white man might provide political fodder to the Left, even if they
    have to lie about the circumstances surrounding his death (see: Brian Sicknick). And of course none of this applies to the dead white men who make the headlines because the media wants to mock their deaths, like the various white conservative radio hosts who have succumbed to COVID. But the common thread tying all of this together, and making sense of all of it, is the media’s steadfast refusal to bring attention to anything that conflicts — or
    at least fails to advance — their ideological agenda.

    “If it bleeds it leads” used to be the motto. We can only long for those cynical yet still simpler times. Nowadays, it might lead if it bleeds. Or it might be locked in a vault and buried under the Earth. It all depends on who
    is doing the bleeding, and who is responsible for spilling the blood, and how it all gels with the political narrative. Joy Reid is right to call out the media for how it handles these cases. Her only mistake was in exempting herself.

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