Can we stop?

I need to rewatch the clip over a hundred times to find anything that I can interpret into a conspiracy theory.

Yesterday I had the ABC News blog up, that updated any time a piece of information was released by the authorities.

Mostly, I wanted to hear “Yes, two deaths are confirmed but everyone else is alive and will recover, even the guy who lost his legs, and they found the perpetrator who went willingly into custody where they will be tried for their actions, and this is a singular attack by a crazy person who snapped, and in no way connected to politically motivated domestic or international terrorism”

Because I can dream, can’t I?

When one is shocked and processing, it helps you take it in to see it over and over again. Eventually, after nothing new is reported (how could they know anything so soon?), when you hear the same information over and over again, you can turn it off.

What is interesting to me is how wrong the media is, The JFK Library incident now seems unrelated. No other devices were found after all. So you can’t expect accuracy ion early reporting, but everyone wants to know something.

The media have a collective hard on for stories involving death & destruction, so much so I think they’d prefer the death toll to rise, gives their saturated coverage more gravitas.
I watched coverage as the story broke & will show interest in the story when further developments arise.

in not ion

What’s the most shocking is that things like this probably happen daily in other countries.

I changed the channel (I usually have the news on in the background at some point during the day when I’m doing housework) and came to Fluther and Facebook hoping for an escape. It looks like I’ll have to shut everything off if I don’t want to hear about Boston. I’d go outside but it’s raining.

I heard bits and pieces at work, but didn’t have time to stop and seek the information, so when I got home I turned on CNN for awhile to get the ‘full’ story, then later for the updated numbers.

Like @marinelife says, sometimes it helps you wrap your head around a situation like this, like 9/11 coverage.

Watched it immediately afterward. Have not looked back except for a search to see if we were anywhere past the speculative phase. I want facts, not talking heads filling air time.

Dirty Laundry

“It’s interesting when people die…” Don Henley

I watched online coverage for about an hour after it first happened, hoping for new information. After that, I only checked in once more, much later in the day.

But I remember watching/listening pretty much non-stop on 9/11, as did just about everyone else. I can’t rationally explain why I did that, but it may have had something to do with my then-husband having worked at the Pentagon not long before the event and that my mother was working in DC at the time. We lived near enough to DC that I went and got my kids out of school early, worried about massive traffic snarls as they evacuated the city. It hit too close to home, I think. It was very hard to wrap my head around it.

I asked myself this when cable news stations like CNN first started out. There just isn’t enough news to fill that many hours, so they have to do this crazy, endless rumination over the same few revelations available to them. It is not worth our time. This is one of the reasons I do not miss having cable.

People turn on their news at different times throughout the day. Our news reporters kept saying “for those of you who have just tuned in”, and it is very reasonable to see that there were new viewers every 15 or 20 minutes.

During the first few hours, new information was coming in on a regular basis, along with new videos and photos.

Can we stop? Not unless we ran out of time to spend watching it relentlessly or something pulls us away from these media devices like for example…a job.