Facebook can be a bad distributor and barometer of news events. A cut, paste and click of a message, without proper vetting, can have a story spread rapidly as gospel truth. Someone claims Morgan Freeman wrote something and millions of people pass it along as truth before it is revealed he didn’t make the comment. You can’t unring the bell so quite a lot of people still believe he made the statement.

I got a message a few minutes ago that made me sad and angry. I hate when people talk about how the media hides or undercovers a story. The implication is ‘the media’ is trying to hide something. Of course, it makes no sense since the fact that they have the story from the media (in most cases) shoots down their argument. I hate this because it reeks of a ‘gotcha’ revelation. It’s always the ‘liberal’ media who is trying to hide something from the public, when in fact there can be uncomplicated reasons why something doesn’t get the coverage some individuals feel it should have.

There is a simple way of looking at what some call less covered stories. Simply put, media coverage is like YouTube. If I put out an article on YouTube I’m not guaranteed millions of people will see it. There is a possibility of that, sure, but it isn’t a guarantee. I put out a challenge to Mitt Romney during the election. Actually I put out two challenges but one in particular challenged his website to change the fact that it has no outreach to black people on it. The Obama campaign had a multitude of outreach programs for a lot of groups, even Jewish and Christian groups. In contrast the Romney website had something for Asians, for Hispanics and women, but not for blacks. (It also had nothing for LGBTQ) This was before the Republican convention. After the convention, the site was changed to include Blacks and it was mentioned on the national news.

I never got a call from any news outlet, either national, locally or even another blogger, who said thank you to me for alerting people about the Romney site lack of Black representation. No interview, no Today Show appearance, no satellite interview with Rev. Al or Rachel Maddow. Should I cry foul? Should I assume ‘the media’ is trying to suppress my crack reporting? I’ve had instances where I have posted stories and had links on my Facebook site about those stories. Days, weeks or months later I would see where friends of mine, people I actually talk to and have conversations with, will talk about the same subject I brought up but will use links from others. So while I was the one who mentioned the story to them first, they will use source material from ‘the media’ instead of mine.

The message I got on Facebook that made me angry was an inevitable comparison about the CT shooting and how ‘the media’ didn’t report a story of a similar shooting in San Antonio where an off duty police officer stopped a man from killing more people. It was supposed to illustrate the NRA’s La Pierre point that bad people with guns have to be stopped with good people with guns. On the surface I’m sure a lot of people are going to look at that story and agree with the original poster that said the press didn’t post the story because of the narrative they wanted to drive, in my local area there were shootings that happened where no police were around to prevent the killing. Does that negate the message the person on the post was trying to give?

A week after the shooting, the Huffington Post had a front page banner listing some of the killings that happened since the CT shooting. The list didn’t cover two copycat attempts at a CT style incident that were averted in my local area at the same time. They were stopped not because of a bad person with a gun being stopped by a good person with a gun, but they were stopped because the people posted their intentions on YouTube, the person running those particular channels notified the authorities (one was posted in another state and the other in another country) and the police checked on the validity of the threat. Meanwhile, last week Chicago noted its 500 murder. We’re not talking the state of Illinois but the city of Chicago had that many deaths by guns. Last I heard there were police in Chicago, so why was there no alarms sounded in the media when they hit 200, 300, or 400 killings?

Strangely enough, there were warnings. The one big lie about the biased media coverage so many are eager to throw out is there is coverage of things, even on a national level, before they hit critical mass. If it isn’t in our backyard or directly affects us we don’t concentrate on it. There are times when things like the CT shooting will move many people because of aberrations, but there are kids shot every day because of guns; sometimes innocents caught in a middle of a drive by, a casualty because of finding a gun in the home, or other reasons and we leave it as background noise. People want action to prevent this incident from happening again but in our panic to do something we are heading down a road where the cure might be worse that the issue. People on both sides of the argument are thinking about ideology rather than reality. People young and old are getting killed and making America a super police state isn’t going to solve the problem of people wanted to kill others with guns, knives, bats or fists.