In our post-ironic world, Greg Gutfeld of Fox News earned footnote status Thursday when he opined during the humdrum ensemble show, The Five, that “the thing that bothers me most is that we have to dial back this relentless coverage” of the latest school massacre. “It’s vast, it’s emotional, it’s not rational at times,” he continued. “I don’t think it’s healthy. We are marketing and advertising infamy every time we show this guy’s face . . . We are animals who are vulnerable to persuasion. That’s why we have advertising.”
This cri de coeur was soon interrupted by—what else?—coverage of the Parkland, Florida massacre and the press conference of a law-enforcement official. And, then, of course, came advertising. Because whether or not we’re animals given to persuasion, there are satellite feeds to pay for, not to mention salaries of cable-news-ensemble panelists. “We have to look at ourselves and our coverage” Gutfeld concluded his peroration, “and ask ourselves, ‘Are we part of this?’”
Answer: yes. Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio and Fox host, long ago (so long ago that she was hosting a morning show at MSNBC, would you believe) acerbically coined the term “tragedy TV,” to poke fun at the Pavlovian programming structure of media coverage of such horrors. The trigger then was the wall-to-wall dissection of the 1996 murder case of child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey, one of the last major media spectacles of the pre-Internet age. The familiar, grim monotony of the post-tragedy playbook persists all these decades later: the initial sketchy reports, the TV anchors jetting to the scene from New York, the instant, amateur psychoanalysis, the awful pain of families, the mournful background music in and out of commercial breaks, the debates over guns and security, and on and on.
In Parkland, echoes of past tragic cycles seemed to cumulate Friday as spokespeople from other horrors—most notably the Sandy Hook massacre of 2012—resurfaced outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to make the case for tougher gun laws and increased security. Here again, the impulse to say “never again” came up against the sickening reality that nothing had been done. As CNN’s Alisyn Camerota interviewed Sandy Hook parent Nicole Hockley, the journalist noted how so many thought “Sandy Hook was the final straw.”
Elsewhere, as in all matters involving Trump, the sublime collided with the obscene. On Fox & Friends, there was Paula White, who is said to be a “spiritual adviser” to the president, telling a co-host how the nation is experiencing a true spiritual awakening. The chyron at the bottom of the screen, without a smidgen of sarcasm, said this of the man whose lawyer paid porn icon Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair: “President Turns to Scripture After Tragedy.” Whether he was turning to scripture, or to the links as he headed to Mar-a-Lago for the long weekend, Trump certainly wasn’t turning to the bully pulpit, having made merely a brief statement Thursday that mentioned mental health, but not guns.
I sat in the White House briefing room on multiple occasions, from President Barack Obama’s heartfelt and even stirring responses to the latest gun tragedy. During his tenure, it started with 13 killed at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, and was followed by four Israelis killed in the West Bank on September 1, 2010; Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shot, and six killed in Tucson on January 8, 2011; two U.S. airmen killed in Frankfurt, Germany on March 2, 2011; and Trayvon Martin killed on February 26, 2012.
There were many more: Aurora, Colorado (12 killed, 70 injured in a movie theater); the Wisconsin Sikh Temple (six killed); Sandy Hook (20 students, six adults killed); the Washington Navy Yard (12 killed); Ford Hood, Texas (four killed); a Kansas Jewish community center (3 killed); and Ferguson, Missouri (Michael Brown). And more after that. Each time, Obama, increasingly deflated and frustrated over his inability to have any impact, came out, waxed eloquent and exited.
I routinely contact very smart people about these incidents, about the issues of guns and presidential oratory, and it’s all of a monotonous piece—at times as repetitious as the media coverage. No surprise, one George Washington University academic took a pass Friday, saying he just had nothing more to say.
Matthew Baum, a public-policy expert at the Harvard Kennedy School, said he hadn’t been watching much of the coverage since it’s too upsetting. To the extent he’s surveyed much, he’s more troubled by the usual political response than what the journalists are doing. “The problem continues to be that while majorities of the public support a variety of relatively modest gun-control measures that collectively might make a bit of a difference, the issue is just not consistently salient enough to ‘minimalist’ gun-control supporters to override the intense salience of the issue among pro-gun people,” he told me. “There apparently are more of them than there are intense gun-control advocates, or at least more of them in electorally critical places. Unless legislators from non-solid-blue areas fear losing office if they oppose gun control, nothing much is likely to happen."
It is a strange fact of American life that legislation as overwhelmingly popular as gun control can be held hostage by the peculiarities of county lines and population density. The apportionment rules in the Constitution, Baum reminded me, tend to give greater political power to those sparse and rural areas that are more pro gun, leaving the Senate mostly divided on an issue where the majority supports change.
It is a reminder, too, that the ultimate redress for grievances in our republic is the vote, which too few people choose to exercise. “Pro-gun groups have also been much more successful in getting their views represented in state houses, most of which are now controlled by Republicans,” he explained. “This allows pro-gun Republicans to gerrymander House elections, and prevents gun-control measures from passing in a great many states as well as nationally.”
As Greg Gutfeld and Fox News might say about guns, and not just the ensuing coverage of their victims, it’s all vast, emotional, and irrational.
