We Must Do Better

As we set Friday's edition to publish, a horrible act was already happening in Newtown, Connecticut.

Twenty-eight people, including the shooter, died Friday in Newtown, the eighth major example of gun violence this year in America. Sadly, it's only one of thousands of acts of gun violence in our nation annually. Sixty-two acts of gun violence in the last thirty years have been mass shootings, killing four or more people. Fifteen of the twenty-five worst mass shootings in the world over the last fifty years took place in America, with five of them happening since 2007.

All this unnecessary death, and yet most of the time, on the topic of gun violence and gun safety, our elected officials simply stand around screaming at each other while more people die every day.

As Americans, we need to admit that our gun safety laws are garbage. The laws we have were specifically tweaked by attorneys and lobbyists to NOT work effectively. The last batch of potentially smart gun safety laws? Got shelved due to politics, that we know was influenced by one of the most powerful and feared lobbying organizations in the country. The fact is, we have too many people in America who have guns that don't respect them and don't know how to use them properly. We need better, more effective gun safety laws - something that about 85% of non-NRA gun owners agree and about 75% of NRA members agree with.

Our mental health care system also bears a great deal of responsibility of our gun violence, though thanks to ObamaCare it will be getting a great deal better over the coming years. That said, America is currently both the most heavily armed nation in the world and the most violent. Instead of pushing people to get mental health care when necessary, we still stigmatize it - and that's stupid. If you're sick, get healthy.

Neither our gun safety laws or our mental health care system have been helped by our lobbying and political finance laws. As we already noted, three quarters of NRA members want more effective gun safety laws. The NRA obviously doesn't care what their membership wants, though. As a lobbying organization, they've made it clear that their primary goal is to make millions of dollars a year to spend on political campaigns - not to make gun safety laws. We must reform the lobbying and political contribution laws, and get the money out of its prominent role.

Our media ethics are also garbage - both on the entertainment side and on the news side. We glorify violence in our entertainment media, and run like cowards in dealing with it responsibly in our news media.

Much of the time, things that are labeled as "news" aren't news at all. They're designed to look & sound like news, but at the same time not upset viewers, listeners, and advertisers. We are ashamed of how some of our news media colleagues have handled this disaster - and how they handle themselves daily. As members of the media, we must put getting it right above getting it first. If advertisers don't like that...? They can take their money and find someone else who will reach the same audiences we do. We know they won't be able to do that.

As for our entertainment colleagues, they also share responsibility in many of these shootings. According to the coroners' reports in Connecticut, the shooter shot the kids accurately from a distance. Other reports make it clear the shooter had significantly less training than is considered necessary to be as chillingly effective as he was. How did he attain those skills? Likely, video games. It's how we improve our professionals in the military. But we'll let anyone - even the mentally ill - play the same training games at home.

Finally, while our economy is improving, we can't ignore the the toll the recession has take on families over the past few years. We have parents who work three jobs, who can barely keep a roof above the heads of their families, let alone parent well. Being able to earn a living wage - and give parents the time to guide their children properly - should be an American right, not an unreachable goal.

As we've said in these pages before, and as President Obama himself reiterated last night during his address in Newtown, America can and must do better. To throw up our hands and say "This is just the price we pay for having lots of guns," is a cowardly and ignorant way of living.

America can do better.

Friday Funday: All We Want Is A Brand New Death Star

About this time of year every year, even though our staff members are all fully-grown adults, we usually begin to notice that special holiday spark in ourselves. It's like our inner children coming out to play, as we begin to think about the toys and games of our past. This annual change of mindset seems to be a common effect that crosses borders, languages, and religions too.

Call it the spirit of the season, or the Santa effect.

That's not to say that all of humankind is suddenly acting like happy, well-behaved cherubs this month. There are still plenty of people playing politics right now, just in Washington, DC. The fiscal curb talks remain at a standstill, as the GOP continues their farcical attempts at looking like Santa, while acting like Scrooge.

There was also what we believe was an amazingly wise and unselfish act on Thursday, as Ambassador Susan Rice withdrew her own name from consideration for Secretary of State. She clearly chose to put the best interests of the nation above her own ambitions - something we're pretty sure earns her a spot on Santa's "good" list.

As Jonathan Bernstein noted almost immediately after Rice's announcement, "Absolutely everyone who voiced any objection (conservative lawmakers and media, for instance) will have an interest in claiming that he or she was the one who derailed the nomination. Doesn’t make it true." Last night's sad and disgusting cable news coverage of Rice's actions proved this true.

Ambassador Rice remains strong-willed and determined, and more than qualified for the position of Secretary of State. She was certainly not scared away by the propagandists on Fox or the blowhards on right-wing radio.

She may have been a bit concerned about Americans, however, who made it clear this week, in a legitimate official national petition, that they know exactly what they want for the holidays, for America: A brand new, real-life, moon-sized Death Star, just like in the Star Wars movies.

While we may be kidding about the Ambassador's motives, we are not kidding about the Death Star.

An official petition, created on the White House's official "We The People" petition website, has now gained more than 25,000 signatures, urging the Obama Administration and Congress to begin construction of a real-life, planetary-sized weapon by 2016.

Unlike the GOP's proposals on the fiscal cliff, the real-life Death Star proposal by a semi-anonymous "John D." from Longmont, Colorado has more than a few details, facts and numbers, thanks in large part to the economics blog Centives.

Earlier this year, the folks at Centives sat down to figure out exactly how much it would cost to build a real "Death Star," in current dollars, and what kind of a timetable it would take for humankind to accomplish such a massive engineering feat.

You can check out the details yourself, both on the wacky proposal, and the exact proposed specifications of the man-made planetoid. While our inner children giggled at the thought of actually being able to visit a real-life Death Star - like a space theme park, filled with lightsabers and R2D2s - we were all taken aback by the estimated completion time for such a project.

As Michael Binkley might say, a Jedi knight doesn't wait 15 years for a sequel, let alone 833,315 years for a Death Star.

Maybe we'll just have to set our holiday expectations a bit lower this year. Like gift cards for the staff to Bed, Bath, and Beyond - or Toys R Us.

Lego Death Star anyone?

Shooting The Messengers

As we've been getting ready for some of our year end activities, our staff members have been doing something most of us in the media do at this time of year - organizing and compiling stories with similar subjects from the past year, while trying to make some sense of the year as a whole.

As we noted back in October, just before Superstorm Sandy smashed into New Jersey and New York, our American media landscape has taken some serious blows this year. As we noted then, "digital journalism" jobs continue to increase in number, even while overall media jobs continue to shrink.

Just recently, we saw even more of our industry colleagues gutted in what's seemingly become an annual pre-holiday mass firing by media behemoth Clear Channel. As cruel and gutless as that annual practice has become, however, someone else in the media has sunk even lower.

Jim Romanesko posted on his website Wednesday, that the management at the Kansas City Star forced two reporters to engage in a Donner Party-like exercise this week, when Star management told experienced reporters Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann that one of them had to leave the paper - and that the reporters had to decide themselves who survived.

If there is a more gutless, cowardly way of managing journalists, we're not sure we want to know what it is.

With the Tribune Media Company about to emerge from bankruptcy, and the legendary Cleveland Plaindealer suffering its own cuts while trying to stay a daily newspaper, we're aware this isn't the easiest time to work in the media. That doesn't mean there isn't a job to do.

One of the largest stories that few seem to want to regularly deal with is the potentially long-term drought affecting nearly two-thirds of the interior of the United States. A major report yesterday made it clear: In less than half a century, the main source for water for 40 million Americans, the Colorado River, could effectively dry up. The scientists' initial idea? Tap the Missouri River, which also supports millions of Americans.

Two other major news stories that popped up this week also didn't receive nearly the coverage they should. Attorney General Eric Holder proposed that America should finally have one single voting standard for national federal elections - which could seriously eliminate false claims of voter fraud, while adding millions to the voters rolls. Meanwhile, it appears the Republican leadership in the U.S. House is attempting to quietly take apart the House ethics process - which, as Jonathan Bernstein noted was installed after the last time Republicans ran the House.

These stories all need seasoned members of the media to continue following them and reporting on them - not just untrained digital stenographers or fools who think merely blogging makes them a journalist.

There ARE other ways to make money for media companies, from gutting the salaries and benefits of overpriced executives, to selling their properties to smaller groups of investors - which would have the added benefit of diversifying the media. Sadly, most media executives have only shown a continued desire to hurt themselves and the corporations they run by getting rid of the people who actually make those companies successful - the workers.

The fact is, continuing to gut the people who do the real work, when so many have already cut their staffing back beyond ethical and honest levels, is simply no longer an option, if media companies expect to have any kind of serious future.