I don’t have cable. I can’t bear witness to the bobbleheads on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and the rest spewing bunkum into the universe. Unfortunately, sometimes some of it seeps through my filters and reaches me. That happened with the Kathryn Steinle case.
If you haven’t heard, Kathryn Steinle was a woman cut down in her prime on a San Francisco pier, the victim of a random act of violence on July 1, 2015. That’s unfortunate enough. However, her injuries didn’t stop there. Some 24-hour newstainment organizations quickly picked up the story and twisted it to fit their narrative of a society circling the drain as a result of naive liberals enabling dangerous immigrants and minorities to run wild in the streets raping and killing our women and children.
Without further adieu , I give you what I promised:
A DIY guide to exploiting the dead – the Kathryn Steinle edition
- Find a victim, any victim, but preferably someone pretty with the same skin pigmentation as you. Oh, and make sure they’re dead before you start speaking for them.
Kathryn Steinle - Pick a villain. If at all possible, make it some abstract, ominous evil force (because it’s okay to hate abstractions) rather than a living, breathing human being. Failing that, make sure the villain at least superficially fits whatever stereotypes you’re promoting. And they should probably be ugly; at the very least, they should be less attractive than your victim. And their skin should be at least two shades darker than yours.
Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez - Hack away at the actual events and people involved. Think of your victim as Cinderella and your villain as the wicked step mother and nip and tuck and tape and sew until those square pegs fit the nice round holes you’ve cut for them.
Nancy Grace & Dan Simon (I’d like to point out that HLN is referring to a 32-year-old woman as a “girl”.) - Sell the bejesus out of it. It’s not enough to have one bobblehead babbling. You really need to hold a meeting at the beginning of the day, compare scripts, make sure everybody is on the same page. Don’t think of your newspeople as professionals, as journalists; think of them as parrots in clown costumes with painted on smiles and simple, rehearsed lines to repeat over and over and over ad nauseam.
- Never apologize. Never backtrack. You don’t need to. A nice thing about the 24/7 news cycle is you can just skip from one sinking boat to the next in the sea of bullshit you’ve generated and no one will have the time or attention span to notice all those hollow hulls in the ever-rising, stinking tide.
