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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
Live free or die!
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September 21, 2002
They report. I'll decide
Child abuse sucks. People ought to treat their children decent. However, this Fox News story runs WAY into stupidity, indeed turns into its own special brand of child abuse arguably much worse than a beating from mommy.
A department store surveillance video caught about a ten second clip of a mom in a parking lot in Mishawaka, Indiana slapping her four year old girl around as she put her in the car. It looks bad. It was obviously an unpleasant moment for the child.
Not nearly as unpleasant, however, as it will be for the child now that the media has gotten involved. They've taken a small unpleasant incident, and made it a nearly inescapable central trauma for the rest of the girl's life. After they have played and replayed the tape in real time then slow motion, then still screen grabs, then started over- this stupid little nothing incident has been hung like an albatross around this child's neck. Millions of people saw this tape- again and again- saw the names.
This little girl will never live it down. A mark of shame has been placed on her. Twenty years from now, some office co-worker will recognize her, and she'll be having to go through the story again. Then it'll be someone at her church, or her neighbor.
For what? Nothing but a few days bump that a couple of jacklegs at Fox News expect to get from people tuning back in to follow the story. Maybe it will give them a few thousand more viewers for a couple of days.
What the hell is wrong with people? Mom slapped the girl around some. OK, that's bad. But now they've just completely destroyed this young mother over these few seconds of video. Does she really deserve that? How will this effect her relationship with her daughter? Do they care?
First, Fox News Channel was airing the footage before they knew any names. It was an alert. If you know who this woman is, call the Indiana authorities right away at some and such number. Of course, they've posted the video on the Fox News website so you can watch it over and over again, taking superior indignance at the sight.
Out of thin air, they've conjured up a national crisis. There haven't been any nasty kidnappings in a few weeks, better gin up another kiddy scare to stoke the viewers.
So then for the Friday follow up, they brought in a psychiatrist Henry Paul, MD. He was deeply troubled, easily led to speculate on the great dangers the child faced for being slapped around in the back of the car. After again milking that few seconds of video by playing it in slow motion again and again, he speculated that the child needs medical attention right away. If mom hit her like that just right, why she could even die!
Shut the hell up the whole lot of you cheese eating pansies. She got slapped a few times as she got put in the back of the car. It's unfortunate, but that was not anything like life threatening. It's not like she was being branded with a cattle iron or something.
For whose benefit has this story been presented? Certainly not the child's benefit. Even half a second of thought should tell you that making a huge national media case out of this will not help the girl. They took an unpleasant moment, and magnified it 10,000 times. They turned an unfortunate incident in the parking lot into a huge media rape.
Dr Paul worried on some more about how horrible the incident was for the girl. If nothing else, she's surely going to suffer "emotional trauma." Well, yeah, after enough adults go into hysterics about it and go way out of their way to make sure she knows that she's traumatized. Did I mention the part where Fox News shows the clip hundreds of times?
But no, Fox has not finished exploiting this family yet. They have their reporter on the scene on 9-21 as the mother shows up to surrender at the police station. "It's like a precision CIA operation" their reporter breathlessly explains, describing the five vehicles there to do what, see if they can get their mugs in the tv shot as the woman walks in the door?
The reporter actually acts positively PROUD that this has been made into a national story. No, not just a national but an international news story, he points out. Saddam Hussein must be laughing his ass off to watch us spending thousands of man hours on some stupid crap like this while he's busy shifting his WMDs around.
Now no doubt there will be child welfare workers. Yeah, that'll really help. Maybe they will jerk the child (and her brothers) from mom and stick them in foster care. Oh, yeah, this child's life's getting better by the minute. They've severely impacted numerous lives.
Then all the other networks jump on the bandwagon. CNN and CBS and on and on.
But hey, it's all good. There's a little bump in the ratings, and Neil Cavuto and the Fox gang have proved that they CARE about The Children.
Running down the road's just his idea of having fun
Born September 21, 1912, Chuck Jones was the star director of classic era Warner Brothers cartoon shorts, including Bugs Bunny, and he created the Road Runner.
In so doing, Mr. Jones gave us some of the most joyous and iconic celebrations of the American spirit, and a moral and morale uplift when worrying about the World Situation. Wile E Coyote's a lot more clever than Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden. It'll take a lot more than the likes of them to get the Road Runner. If they're smart at all, neither one of these guys want a piece of Bugs Bunny.
Which brings us to perhaps the greatest tribute ever to that Chuck Jones style and spirit: the last act of South Park episode 509 "Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants" in which Cartman makes likes Bugs Bunny in the Afghan desert [readily available for downloading P2P].
posted by Al at 9/21/2002 03:46:00 AM
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