Shot by a crossbow - the media twists

MJS

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I was just going to post the story itself, but when I read all the various twists and spins the media put on the story, I decided to post about that instead...

Here's the deal. A couple kids were throwing rocks at passing cars from an overpass in San Diego. Someone shot one of the kids in the stomach with a crossbow bolt from one of the cars they were throwing rocks at. Kid is in the hospital with non life-threatening wounds, no one has been arrested for anything as of yet.

Please understand if you did not know already that people can and have been killed by rocks thrown from overpasses; it happens all the time. So even if it's a 'prank', it can and has been deadly. This is not joke, it's life-threatening if you have a rock thrown down on your car as you drive underneath at high speed. We're not talking broken windshield and scratched paint, we're talking rock through the windshield and dead person inside.

Now read the headlines. Ranges everywhere from 'child shot with arrow in drive-by shooting' to 'crossbow attack' to 'child shot for throwing rocks at a car'. All of them paint the child as the victim. Not that I think it is appropriate to shoot anyone with a crossbow for throwing rocks from an overpass, but none of them see to spend much time discussing what it was that this child was doing that would have resulted in being shot with a crossbow...

Yeah, the media never slants anything...


http://news.google.com/news/more?hl...sult&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CDgQqgIwAA

Yup, this is why 99.99% of what we read in the paper and see on the news should be taken with a grain of salt. Amazing how they twist those words, as you said, to make it sound like theres some nut driving in around in a car, taking random shots at people with a crossbow. Not the case at all, so either the media is too stupid to see how this sounds, or they just want to make the kid the victim, which they're doing a good job of.

Should this have happened? Of course not. I'd rather have read that the driver stopped and beat the **** out of the little bastard, rather than shooting him. No, I'm not saying this was right at all. These kids have zero idea of how dangerous their actions were. Yet in many stories like this, its the driver thats the bad guy, and the kids are innocent angels. No, in this case, ALL parties were in the wrong.
 

MJS

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Piss poor coverage, but, let's face it, 'teen throws rocks at cars, gets shot' is 'dog bites man' level head line, and 'teen shot with crossbow' is 'man bites dog'. The media doesn't need to report, it needs to SELL.

Agreed. Its just sad that they have to fabricate and make changes, to make those sales.
 

punisher73

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(in ten seconds I can empty the clip of my 9mm)

Magazine. Rifles have clips, not handguns.

Sorry, we had to do LOTS of pushups if we ever called our 'magazine' a 'clip' in the academy. :ak47:
 
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Bill Mattocks

Bill Mattocks

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Magazine. Rifles have clips, not handguns.

Sorry, we had to do LOTS of pushups if we ever called our 'magazine' a 'clip' in the academy. :ak47:

A magazine is the appropriate term for a metal box that has a spring in it and holds ammunition for either a rifle or a pistol. A clip is a device that holds ammunition together but does not have a spring to push each round up to be fed into the weapon. An M1 Garand has a clip. An M16 has a magazine. Most pistols have magazines also.

http://www.thegunzone.com/clips-mags.html
 

punisher73

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Nothing new with the media and how they twist things for their political views.

I remember watching a program that was aired during the first round of Congressional hearings about "assault rifles". They showed a watermelon getting shot with an AK-47 round and you see this HUGE exit hole and the melon pretty much exploded on impact to show how "deadly" these weapons were. The problem? It was later found out that when the melon was shot with the AK-47 it didn't do any visible damage really because the round was so fast with it's passthrough, the footage shown was what happened when the melon was shot with a 12 gauge shotgun. They purposely switched the footage to suit their purposes and story.

One of our own local channels (very anti-police) did this with a news clip awhile ago also. A dark colored sedan is driving towards a police car and starts shooting at the officer. He spins the car around and attempts to give pursuit and calls in other units. He looses the car while making the turn around and makes a guess at which way the car went and sees a dark colored sedan in a driveway with the passenger door open, engine on. The car you see in the drive looks to be the same make and model that was shooting at the police. The officers give several commands for the woman to exit the vehicle and she refuses to comply. Eventually, the officer starts to lose his cool and uses a couple of swear words in telling her to exit the car and get on the ground. The officers end up storming the vehicle with guns drawn and quickly remove her and put her on the ground. It was eventually found out that the car was the same kind they were looking for, but wasn't the actual suspect vehicle. The first time the clips was shown at the morning news show they showed everything and wasn't much public outcry because people understood the mistake and the woman became beligerent before it got escalated. The evening news story (same channel) cut out all the previous footage of the story and only ran it as the police swearing at her and pulling her out of her car at gunpoint with no mention of the preceeding events.

Some of the best advice I ever got in college from one professor was anytime you get a newspaper to read (this would apply to news channels now as well) read/watch the editorial pieces and you can quickly see which way the slant will go on all the news stories.
 

granfire

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Nothing new with the media and how they twist things for their political views.

I remember watching a program that was aired during the first round of Congressional hearings about "assault rifles". They showed a watermelon getting shot with an AK-47 round and you see this HUGE exit hole and the melon pretty much exploded on impact to show how "deadly" these weapons were. The problem? It was later found out that when the melon was shot with the AK-47 it didn't do any visible damage really because the round was so fast with it's passthrough, the footage shown was what happened when the melon was shot with a 12 gauge shotgun. They purposely switched the footage to suit their purposes and story.

One of our own local channels (very anti-police) did this with a news clip awhile ago also. A dark colored sedan is driving towards a police car and starts shooting at the officer. He spins the car around and attempts to give pursuit and calls in other units. He looses the car while making the turn around and makes a guess at which way the car went and sees a dark colored sedan in a driveway with the passenger door open, engine on. The car you see in the drive looks to be the same make and model that was shooting at the police. The officers give several commands for the woman to exit the vehicle and she refuses to comply. Eventually, the officer starts to lose his cool and uses a couple of swear words in telling her to exit the car and get on the ground. The officers end up storming the vehicle with guns drawn and quickly remove her and put her on the ground. It was eventually found out that the car was the same kind they were looking for, but wasn't the actual suspect vehicle. The first time the clips was shown at the morning news show they showed everything and wasn't much public outcry because people understood the mistake and the woman became beligerent before it got escalated. The evening news story (same channel) cut out all the previous footage of the story and only ran it as the police swearing at her and pulling her out of her car at gunpoint with no mention of the preceeding events.

Some of the best advice I ever got in college from one professor was anytime you get a newspaper to read (this would apply to news channels now as well) read/watch the editorial pieces and you can quickly see which way the slant will go on all the news stories.


yeah, media...

We had a case back home.
In one of the popular rags they had a story of a guy from the next village...the poor sap, somebody blew his house of the foundation while the family was on a camping trip. How mean everybody in the village was to them, etc, complete with the sad face picture....

The real story:
The man was one of 8 candidates for the last lot in a new subdevision, across from the soccer field and the multi purpose center. He got is because he was a local....
he build his house, imposing on the soccer club many times for water for the construction site, they had to drag his drunk butt home several times int hat period...
As soon as the house was finished all hell broke lose: Too much traffic for the sporting events and the multi purpose hall. People parking too close or what not.
The kicker came when he tried to slap an injunction on the annual Fastnacht/Carneval dance! The whole village hated him! The local supermarket made him persona non grata, he was not to come through the door representing the company he was a salesman for. THAT bad.
he had the according nickname in town, too :D Leineweber turned into Schweineleber - pork liver....

I can only imagine the est of the village laughing at the magazine article.
Taught me to never believe such sap ever again! :lfao:
 

Em MacIntosh

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A politician's primary job is to tell people what they want to hear so they can keep their job. This severely interferes with formulating and implementing effective policy and governance, which should be their job but it's the people's fault they shoot the messenger for bearing bad news.

It's the same thing with media. Without sensationalism, the story is usually bland. If the media reported the news without bias, few would identify with it and they would lose ratings. It's the people who listen to/with their hearts and not their heads. This creates a self-propogating pattern of support for biased media. With only so much space for the taking and with biased media recieving more support than unbiased media honesty loses market share. With the increasingly polar political climate it's going to get worse before it gets better.
 

David43515

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(in ten seconds I can empty the clip of my 9mm)

I was imagining ten seconds to pull the car over, put it in park, grab the bow, cock it, insert the bolt and be ready to fire. In your case just change that to park,change gears, grab an empty pistol, insert the mag, and work the slide. For both of us the time to pull the trigger would be the same Gran. You`d have more shots, I`d have better long rang accuracy (statistically speaking, nothing against your skill as a shooter).
 

granfire

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I was imagining ten seconds to pull the car over, put it in park, grab the bow, cock it, insert the bolt and be ready to fire. In your case just change that to park,change gears, grab an empty pistol, insert the mag, and work the slide. For both of us the time to pull the trigger would be the same Gran. You`d have more shots, I`d have better long rang accuracy (statistically speaking, nothing against your skill as a shooter).
LOL I said empty, I didn't say hit anything! ^_^ (my pistol is a good one, but the operator is a rogue beginner)
 

Nomad

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Thought this was a beautiful addition to the thread this morning from my good buddies over at Fail Blog (with the ad from Amazon coming in):

epic-fail-photos-ad-placement-fail.jpg
 
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