Delayed, Distracted, Discouraged, Disinformed - Deliberate?

This was good when it first ran in the paper; it is still good here, now.
Why? Because we are becoming numb to gun violence and gun tragedies. Look at this cartoon, and then follow the article below. The tragedy was in the middle of last month; President Obama directed Vice President Biden to have recommendations in January.

It's January, and I for one will not forget that this needs to change for the better, and that won't happen if we sink back into apathy.

In contrast, the first legislative bill in the house was introduced by CD6 bimbo, Michele Bachmann; she isn't even trying to pretend anymore that she is a serious member of Congress.  That first bill? an expensive piece of political theater to repeal the Affordable care act, aka Obamacare, for the 34th time, instead of doing something useful - like the Hurricane Sandy relief or passing the Violence Against Women Act.  Because the reality is that Obamacare is the law of the land, and people are liking it NOT WANTING TO REPEAL IT.  Michele Bachmann has yet to propose legislation that gets passed; most of her nutty ideas never make it out of committee, so it is not like this is some aberration in her bad job performance.  We are better off when she doesn't bother to attend Congress - which is more of the time than anyone else from the Minnesota delegation. Far worse in terms of cost of this failure to attend to real congressional business, is these attempts at legislative theater have cost the country $50 million dollars, tax dollars that could be better spent on legitimate legislative activity. This crap is NOT what we send people to Congress to do.

This only serves to underline how badly partisan the right is, how utterly out of touch with America, and why they have the worst disapproval ratings in history in Congress. It is the kind of distraction that detracts from serious issues.  It's no wonder we have apathy, it is no wonder we have a short attention span when we have deliberate attempts to distract us, to discourage us, to misinform and disinform us.  Disinformation differs from misinformation in being intended to deceive.

Humor, sometimes dark humor, like that of Steve Sack, STrib cartoonist, pushes back against the distraction, serving to refresh focus. That is my purpose in sharing it here. We need to focus on what is important; we need to remember.


The news media has ironically noted about itself that the media will forget.

That should not happen, not again.

The Washington Post aka the WaPo for short did this excellent research into our attention span on this topic.

The media will quickly forget about guns — unless Washington stops them

Within hours of the murder Friday of 26 schoolchildren, staff and a principal in Newtown, Conn., the political debate had been joined. President Obama, speaking through tears, called for “meaningful action” to prevent future horrors like the one witnessed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Advocates of gun control have demanded new legislation, and now.
The challenges for gun control proponents are formidable. There is the influence of the gun lobby on Capitol Hill. And in particular, a public that in recent years has not only grown less supportive of more gun restrictions, at least in the abstract, but also doesn’t care about the issue. In a post-election Gallup survey, fewer than one-half of one percent of Americans said that guns were the nation’s “most important problem.”
One reason the issue lacks salience is that citizens tend to take their cues from the media. When news outlets devote significant attention to an issue – health care or national security, for example – the public comes to view those problems as pressing. With the deluge of economic news over the last year, it’s no surprise that 64 percent of the Gallup respondents said the economy was the nation’s most important problem.
But as Brad Plumer and Dylan Byers have pointed out, news coverage of gun control is rare and particularly sporadic, even in the aftermath of widely publicized mass shootings. And that makes the prospects for a renewed public debate over gun control dim, although not extinguished entirely.
Consider the graph below. It displays the number of news stories that contained the phrase “gun control” in the weeks surrounding three shootings: the April 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, the January 2011 Arizona attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and the July 2012 assault at a theater in Aurora, Colo. The data come from a search of more than 500 news outlets in the “U.S. Newspapers & Wires” index of LexisNexis.





Not surprisingly, each incident resulted in a spike in articles about gun control. For instance, in the week of the Virginia Tech shooting, 945 news stories in the database mentioned the issue. But as time went on, gun control received less and less attention. Within five weeks, coverage was nearly back to where it had been before the shooting. The pattern is similar for the Tucson and Aurora attacks.

This phenomenon – the media’s intense interest in, and subsequent boredom with, a public policy problem – is known as the “issue-attention cycle.” A dramatic event, such as a shooting, brings an issue to the media’s attention, prompts an avalanche of news, and then an inevitable decline in coverage. Coverage of natural disasters is a particularly good example. Unless new events continue to draw journalists’ attention, they move on to other, fresher stories. The public then turns its concerns elsewhere, too.

But might this time be different? Perhaps. After all, the slaughter of innocent schoolchildren has no doubt gripped the media and public in a way that even the attempted murder of a member of Congress didn’t.

In time, however, the images of Sandy Hook will fade. And if gun control remains in the headlines a month from now, it will likely be only because Obama and the Democrats have taken up the political fight.

The media find it difficult to construct a compelling narrative around consensus, so policy issues tend to receive sustained attention only when the parties are engaged in loud, public conflict. That’s a big reason why the “wild political donnybrook” over health care was the top story in the news for much of 2009 and 2010.


A health care-esque debate over gun control is unlikely. But whether and when politicians in Washington take up the issue in a serious way will determine how quickly gun control recedes from the news pages.

And that, ultimately, is what will determine whether Americans’ sadness and anger over the tragedy in Newtown leads to broader public concern with guns.