The Pittsburgh Shooting wouldn't change the results of the midterm. The same way we've left the shootings of Vegas or Manchester or hell, even the streak of shootings that happened in the last school year.
Because - besides those who are politically involved - it's something that's been left into the dust. CNN hasn't talked about the reactions to those shootings in a long time and when it comes to the Synagogue shooting, the same has happened.
Why? Because for news organizations, consistently telling you stories that matter holds a problem — the consistent part.
Analyzing the same thing, consistently plugging it in and telling listeners and readers what it means for them gets boring. They expect everyone to just know what's happened, and that's about the end of it.
Take the case for Las Vegas. The ranking source that talked about Vegas within the moth was, and wait for it...
CBS. Which talked about the city's lights dimming for the Anniversary and survivors going home after a year. Both of which were impactful enough to take place at the feature section. What I didn't see ranked on Google was the fact that not much gun legislation changed past that.
Yes, the administration hasn't changed much post-Vegas, which was in 2017. Which means that all other mass shootings beyond Vegas, including the school shootings, did relatively nothing for pursuing any updated safety legislation. Whether that be adding more intense background checks or arming more schools, not much has changed.
Voters should know this and be able to decide if that was the right or wrong move.
What that means for us is that media has simply been hyping things up higher for its audiences, talking about these events intensely for a short period of time, then soon finds something else to cover to regain the attention span. With the Tree of Life shooting that just happened, there was no reason to change how it rolled.
We've had shootings where more people have died. We've had shootings that formed a streak and no salt. We've had groups of supremacists rally in a city- which was covered for a small bit and then we never really the news shifts its focus again and again.
When it came to the Tree of Life Shooting, we need to keep in mind that midterms weren't too far away. Inevitably, the media shifted it's head to the two parties and which one you should vote for, where things are going to flip or garner their attention on something Trump did and refocus themselves on that.
Why would they do that instead of telling you what the administration has done? Because of two reasons.
The first one being the audience. If it's MSNBC, for example, any data that looks like it's more flattering to Trump they can't show it or their audience gets pissed off. Or Fox, which will struggle to talk about the lack of gun legislation or changes that the Administration has made.
The second one being the repetition. With the midterms that were looming, telling people old news tells seems more repetitive, even if it's not.
Maybe it's full of a new, hard-hitting analysis, a last-second upstate and a narrative of how the world looks like after that.
What that means for voters is that once the Tree of Life shooting left the news, people didn't really know about the true aftermath or what the Administration is doing about it.
As a result, they wouldn't have a reason to factor it into their vote. Which means, thanks to poor coverage, voters couldn't vote to the best knowledgeable extent.
