If the media are going to keep wailing about how vital a free press is, could they start reporting stuff?
There's a remarkable number of dangling facts about Stephen Paddock's mass murder in Las Vegas, which the media have shown little inclination to investigate. It's almost as if they're worried that too much investigation will ruin it.
For example:
Who was the woman shouting, "YOU'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!" right before the concert? Is any reporter interested in finding out? Probably a random crazy lady, but that's not typical pre-concert behavior.
Why is it taking so long to find out if anyone else went into Paddock's hotel room since he checked in last Thursday? I'm perfectly prepared to accept that he was the only one who entered that room, but can we see the surveillance video?
The sum-total of the information we know about Marilou Danley, the woman who's been living with Paddock for years is the following: She was out of the country at the time of the attack. She's not involved.
Paddock had apparently assembled an enormous arsenal of weapons. Did she know about it? Did he tell her why? Had his behavior changed recently? Why wasn't he with her on her trip? Had they broken up? And why did Paddock recently wire $100,000 to the Philippines?
Within hours of the first indictments in the Duke lacrosse case -- later, all thrown out -- the media was bristling with information about the players' parents, the homes they grew up in, the ritziness of their neighborhoods, and the tuition at their Catholic high schools. Doesn't any reporter want to ask Danley anything?
Do we know yet why Paddock broke two windows? What were his recent winnings or losses at gambling?
I don't know if any of this would change the basic narrative. But the media don't know, either, and they seem strangely reluctant to ask. As Sherlock Holmes said: First, you exclude the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Our media isn't doing the reporting that would allow us to exclude anything. And then they wonder why conspiracy theories develop.
The media's idea of hard-hitting investigative reporting is to taunt gun-owners and white men. Making snarky political remarks is Job No. 1 of reporters. Apparently, it's also the new job description for late-night comics. As long as we're looking for jobs that Americans just won't do, maybe we could find some immigrants to tell jokes and report news.
We're getting a lot of smirky, celebratory headlines, like these:
AMERICA'S WHITE MAN PROBLEM
HOW AMERICA HAS SILENTLY ACCEPTED THE RAGE OF WHITE MEN
THE WHITE PRIVILEGE OF THE "LONE WOLF" SHOOTER
While it's great that liberals have finally found a mass murder that they don't think can be defeated with a "Je Suis Charlie" hashtag, they're either lying or they don't know what they're talking about. Blacks and Hispanics are extremely well-represented as perpetrators of mass shootings, Muslims are over-represented, and surprisingly, even the usually law-abiding Asians more than hold their own.
Typical Reporter: Yeah, we decided not to go with the mass shootings at the Tennessee church, the Washington Navy Yard, San Bernardino, the Pulse nightclub, Fort Hood, the LIRR, the Carson City IHOP, the Trolley Square Shopping Mall, the Windy City Core Supply warehouse, Virginia Tech, the Binghamton Civic Center, the Hartford Distributors, the hunting tract in Wisconsin, the Appalachian School of Law … and on and on and on.
And those are just a few of the famous ones! It's hard to notice what's not there, so it's especially annoying that the journalist's method of illustrating mass murderers is to assemble pictures of all the mass shooters, but then only show the white guys.
There was one characteristic of white men in abundant evidence at the Las Vegas massacre. They're awfully chivalrous, these white male country music fans. Twenty-two thousand people came under sustained, high-powered gunfire and few people, if any, were stomped to death -- something you can't say for a Black Friday sale at a Long Island mall.
At the Las Vegas concert, men died protecting women, using their bodies as shields and standing up in the middle of gunfire to direct the women to safety. The New York Post reports that one woman said she "was running away and a couple of guys said, 'Hey, come stand behind us,' and boom, they went down.” Heather Melton has described how she felt her husband, Sonny, being shot in the back, fatally, as he shielded her from the rain of bullets.
Without many facts to go on, the only sweeping conclusion we can make so far is that there's a reason feminism didn't emerge from the country music community.