Martyrs

The bodies of victims are often what get stood on as soap-boxes. There's a tendency to see the person standing, who might make an aside here or there referring to the bodies they are using as a platform, but the spotlight is on them. This happens every single time there's ever a mass shooting.

As for the villains, I think that's part of human nature skewing a bit negative. There's a focus on the negative for many reasons: who committed these atrocities? Why did they do what they did? Have they been brought to justice? How might we stop this from happening again?

Anne Frank was not a public figure. Hitler was. Other martyrs like Ghandi are remembered just as well as an evil counterpart like Hitler.

It reflects the goals of the Nazis, which were to wipe Jews and other "undesirables" from the planet, and thus from history.

Stalin said something to the effect of "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic".

There seems to be more curiosity around who committed the crime, why in the Hell did they do it, how did they do it, rather than "who were the victims and what kind of lives did they lead". At the end of the day, I think the victims matter the most only to those directly impacted by their loss. The rest of the world wants to know how to not join the victims, not what their name, occupation, hobbies and interests were.

Think of the disparity between which victims are focused on and which are not. Somebody who dies at the hands of the police (whether their death was justified, accidental, or a murder, is irrelevant to the point I'm making) versus a police officer who dies at the hands of a criminal.

There's not only disparity between how much limelight perpetrators get compared to their victims. There is disparity among victims, and it all has to do with what narratives corporate media want to push. It's an inconvenience when a police officer is murdered in the line of duty because the narrative they want to push is that police officers are the second-coming of the SS. Trying to garner sympathy for someone who died serving the country is uncool.

I'm well aware of the White Rose society and the quote "your heads will fall too," but yeah, I can't name any of them.

I can name Klaus von Stauffenberg but I don't think he counts.

The first step toward not letting the media dictate what is important, like which victims, is to stop believing they have such power in the first place.

As it relates to your blog post here, I began to see that media was way more about hyper-partisan causes and special interests than about respecting the victims and their friends, families, and communities. It was about divisive activism than about what the known facts are, and what facts are still being determined; they'd sooner jump to conclusions and write a half-ass, brief "correction" 24-48 hours later.

It's never a dispassionate explanation of an event to genuinely inform people. It's about finding another fucking crusade, stoking the fires, and making money. They don't need to try and scare me and tell me anti-asian racism is on the rise if they just published raw, organic stories of racism against asians from around the US. Instead, we are ass-blasted with the same tragic event for over a month. And then they go and ask politicians about it for some arguments from "authority", with confirmation-bias they find people and groups who agree with them and cover their marches, and they catch skeptical or dispassionate politicians in "gotcha!" moments. Anything that, again, supports their narrative which is no longer about the real people who were fucking murdered, but about petty politics.

They're the type of people to find a black swan, then only search and report on black swans, and scare themselves into thinking that regular swans are endangered. The issues often only exist because they say they do and because of how they decided to cover something, rather than because the issues actually exist. Confirmation + exposure bias = most news.

Maybe at different times and places in history, journalism was highly credible and respectable. I wouldn't know those times, I'm not old enough. Nowadays it's propaganda, advertising, and entertainment with the intent of shaping public perception, rather than delivering the truth and allowing the public to create its own perception. It's an arm of government and a mercenary of those who can afford its services. It's a tool only as good as its maker and operator.

If the news just started telling people *true* things tomorrow, without telling them what to think about those things, I think a lot of people would be genuinely confused as to what it is they're watching. There might even be outrage.

"I can't believe they told us about that racist who murdered those innocent asians and had the gall to not tell us it was wrong, even though we already knew that!"

(I'm ranting because I wanted to go into journalism for a while, wasted some time and money on it in university, because I thought I might make a positive change by carrying on the tradition of publishing facts, the truth, so that people could be empowered to think for themselves. I realized that today's media is all about corporate narratives, and whatever agendas the wealthy owners and investors want pushed. They publish lies, or they publish half-the-truth; only the facts and context they want you to know. It frustrates me the way that they treat victims as pawns.

That's assuming you want to do "The Big Stuff". You know, the major stories. Work for the major, national outlets. Sure, I could've just kept doing local stuff, and probably found a place where I didn't have to sell my soul. But it would've been hard living. There's no money in it, and I didn't love it enough to commit myself to making $10 a story.

Anyway. I'll spare you any more of my gratuitous diatribes.)

Certainly. I just think that they've also been used for more noble pursuits, and ought to be.

I'm going into secondary English education now.