Apparently, if we can go by what Barry himself said
in a recent interview with Vox, when it comes to how many of us view the threat
posed against this nation by murderous Muslim terrorists, the only reason that
we feel the way that we do is because the national media choses to cover
terrorism in a such a way that makes clear that their primary interest is only in
creating ratings for themselves. It was
during this interview that Barry was asked whether he thinks the media
“sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism as
opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic diseases.” Barry very enthusiastically responded by
saying, “Absolutely.”
Barry went on to say, “I don’t blame the media for
that. What’s the famous saying about local news casts, if it bleeds it leads.” And he said, “You show crime stories and you
show fires. That’s what folks watch. It’s all about ratings.” Barry continued, saying, “The problems of
terrorism and dysfunction and chaos along with plane crashes, that’s the
equivalent when it comes to covering international affairs.” “There is just not going to be a lot of
interest in a headline story that we have cut infant mortality, or that extreme
poverty has been slashed.” And it was
then that he brought up another favorite topic if his, when he said, “climate
change is happening at such a broad scale” that it’s “a hard story for the
media to tell.”
While Barry did say that terror groups like the
Islamic State should be covered, at the same time he seemed to try to
trivialize the level of violence committed by this group, as well as others, by
equating it to an attempt to lower our crime rate. He said, “It is entirely legitimate for the
American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent,
vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli
in Paris.” And he then went on to say, “We
devote enormous resources to that, and it is right and appropriate for us to be
vigilant and aggressive in trying to deal with that — the same way a big city
mayor’s got to cut the crime rate down if he wants that city to thrive.”
During the domestic policy portion of the interview,
when asked about political polarization, Barry chose to blame gerrymandering,
the Senate filibuster and a fragmented news media. He said, “The balkanization of the media
means that we just don’t have a common place where we get common facts and a
common worldview the way we did 20, 30 years ago, and that just keeps on
accelerating, you know, and I’m not the first to observe this.” He added, “You’ve got the Fox News/Rush
Limbaugh folks and then you’ve got the MSNBC folks and the — I don’t know where
Vox falls into that, but you guys are, I guess, for the brainiac-nerd types.
But the point is that technology which brings the world to us also allows us to
narrow our point of view. That’s contributed to it.”
So then, I’m guessing, if we are to follow Barry’s
rather simplistic logic to what would be its natural conclusion, then I can
only assume that if were it not for many in our various media organizations most
Americans would not now be giving these radical Muslim extremists so much as even
a second thought. And according to
Barry, news organizations purposely choose to overstate the dangers posed to
this country when reporting on terrorist events only as a way of boosting their
ratings. But who is that Barry is
talking about? He can’t be referencing most
of those in the state-controlled media, because they spend most of their time bending
over backwards in their effort to downplay any threat we may face from these
murdering fanatics.
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