February 2018

Overkill

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The live television coverage of the Parkland shooting yesterday, while the shooter was still at large and then in the hours after he was apprehended, was everything coverage of such incidents should't be yet always is: repetition after repetition of limited known facts, spiraling speculation and conjecture, continuing statements of the obvious, endless loops of the same few videos. It's bad journalism and does not well serve the public except as grotesque entertainment, the further 'OJ-ification' of the news.

We would all be best served by cable news channels NOT going live wall-to-wall, by us as viewers not WANTING to watch it live wall-to-wall, by us as news consumers and citizens WAITING until the incident is buckled up and the big immediate facts are in. This acceleration of news delivery is not always a good thing, either for journalism or society at large. Slow can be good.

Shots

Bruce 10 04 2017 RGB

If the National Rifle Association is not itself a domestic terrorist organization, at the very least it aids and abets domestic terrorism in the United States.

Every single politician who takes money from the National Rifle Association and does nothing to stop the American epidemic of guns and gun violence is an accomplice of the Parkland shooter. This is a simple and obvious truth.

Editorial cartoon by Bruce MacKinnon in the Halifax Chronicle Herald, published following the October 1 2017 Las Vegas shooting.