WRONG!!!!! Nooz Totally Blows Huge Shooting Story

I hate going to bed with one set of facts and waking up the next morning to find out they were all wrong.

Oh, they got one thing right. Someone shot up a university campus. That's about all they reported accurately. In the evening, the shooter was a Chinese national on a student visa who had entered through San Francisco a few months ago, and who didn't attend the university.

We all know what THAT means. I would imagine that by now the the Nooz would be calling it terrorism. Anything to shift the blame away from our relentlessly violent culture, giving an excuse for months of punditry about the shortcomings of someone else's culture. Fortunately for us, and for China, the media had apparently made it up as they went along.

On the bloody morning after, the cops identified the shooter as a Korean-American English major living on campus, who had lived in the US for many years as a resident alien. Oh, and he was so quiet...

After 24 hours, the various Nooz types still can't agree on a body count. 33? 24? 30? Some don't count the shooter. Dunno, he looks pretty dead. At least make the goddamn phone call and get the numbers from the local authorities. How hard can that be? It's called reporting, and lots of people do it every day.

Then you have the inevitable feeding frenzy on this stricken campus. Look at all the satellite dishes lined up in front of what until yesterday was the engineering school. They should send the EE students down there for some practical observation of the misuse of what they're learning to design.

Meanwhile, the cable channels have their various photogenic stand-up talent running around trying to corner the shocked and grief-stricken students, who they like to call "kids." You just know the Nooz just wants to stick cameras and mikes in their faces, getting in extra close on their reactions to all the usual tacky Nooz questions like, "How does it FEEL to see your entire Fluid Dynamics 102B class gunned down right before your eyes?" (Hint: pretty shitty.)

Fortunately, no one seems to be talking to them. This is a good thing. It saves us from having to watch what should be private, and it gives the anchors more time to make up facts.

Then there is CNN. There is always CNN. Alas, poor CNN, I knew it well (when it was good and had the International Hour and actually tried to get the facts straight).

One SO hates to pick on poor benighted CNN. It's like stealing a blind person's dog. In this case, though, CNN is making the whole world blind, so they're fair game.

The lowlight definitely had to be Wolf Blitzer (who still insists that's his real name) counting the gun shots on that cell phone video they may never stop looping. He actually put up a score board on his whoopy doo 8-screen video wall thing.

A score board. Like at the hockey game.

And so on the left, here's the video, immediate as hell, if not very revealing. On the right, here's a large, funereal number, over a lurid reddish-purplish background that suggests someone's internal organs falling out. And Wolf goes "There were TWENTY-SEVEN, count them, TWENTY-SEVEN gun shots heard on this video!"

Here we go, carnage fans: Bang. 1. Bang bang. 2, 3. Bang. 4. Pause to reload. Bang bang bang bang bang. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And so it goes.

Too bad Vonnegut wasn't alive to see THIS one. It would surely have inspired his next novel.

After this, it got better. Wolf's next victim, oops I mean guest, was apparently some expert on how they train SWAT teams. Wolf made him listen to the shots on the video, reminding us that they were 27 count em 27 of them and you can hear them too, right there on CNN Situation Room. Then he asks, what in your expert opinion do you hear?

The answer was distant gun shots.

When pressed hard by Mr. Blitzer, he theorized (just to avoid dead air) that maybe it was police ordnance going off, in return fire. Wrong. The police didn't fire any shots at the shooter, though the one big bang at the end does most certainly sound like the chained doors being breached.

Today, the university community was supposed to come together for a convocation/ service to start the healing process. Our fine "president" had already made the obligatory statement of shock and dismay in a White House room nicely decorated for the occasion. Unfortunately, he subsequently decided this convocation might also be a good way to continue the media process. Therefore, he and the vivacious, intelligent Laura plan to show up.

Now, the President of the United States does not show up anywhere without hijacking the event. Something about helicopters, armored limos, snipers, a press bus, and a zillion feds in dark suits with handguns of their own tends to change the character of the day a little. Apparently even mass expressions of community grief are no longer excluded from the photo-op list. This borders on ghoulish, but then ghoulish is what America seems to do best.

Today the cable channels have had time to get their graphics in gear. After all, this isn't a war, where typically there have been a few weeks to get all those subliminally unsettling AMERICA GOES APE SHIT graphics together in all their orange and black glory. Yesterday, then, was refreshingly graphics-free. Today, though, they've gotten up an appropriately creepy MASSACRE ON CAMPUS over ghostly blurred whatever, and maybe the occasional cross hairs depending on context.

You know, anyone who watches this stuff every day must be crazy by now. One gun owners' association has already started making the talk show rounds saying that the solution is for every man, woman, and child to pack heat at all times. Unfortunately, the poor deteriorating United States is so amped on violence that I seriously doubt such an armed society would actually be the promised polite society. It would probably just be a dead society.

All in all, what we have here is the best shot (no pun intended) in a long time for an event to finally surpass OJ as the historical US media low point. There's a long way to go, but we've only started.

I need to take a long walk now.