Thursday, April 13, 2017

Our Broken Media: Flash! Boom! Edition


Another week, another display of the broken media's infatuation with things that go flash! boom! Last week, it was the almost orgasmic display of fascination with the sea-launched Tomahawk missile attack on a Syrian military airfield. Today, it's the distracting spectacle of a massive super bomb -- the "Massive Ordinance Air Blast" or MOAB -- that was dropped on a subsurface facility used by an ISIS affiliated organization. It's the first use of that weapon by the U.S.

Leaving aside the military efficacy of the attack -- we'll be seeing damage assessments later -- and the deserving target, we're focusing on the media's almost childlike awe at the exploding bomb. We observed panels on CNN and MSNBC dropping what they were discussing to slip into their keyboard kommando uniforms to gush about the size and explosive power of the bomb, with the attack video itself on a continuous loop along with images of the weapon. Is it news? Of course, but it's the giddy approach to it that many in the broken media take. Some observers had more thoughtful reactions:






All of this on a day, as we note below, there is confirmation that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents during the election. But as long as there's no massive explosion involved, nothing to see here.

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