The Sins of Omission

I see dead stories

Way back in 1999 a young Haley Joel Osment said “I see dead people”. The Sixth Sense was the big surprise hit that really made M.Night Schyamalan’s career, a psychological thriller and a ghost story combined that had one of the most impactful twist reveals in cinema history.

I feel pretty safe in not ruining it for anyone a quarter of a century later. Bruce Willis is a ghost. That’s why Haley can see him. Bruce doesn’t realise he’s a ghost until the very end.

I was suddenly reminded of the film when thinking about the way the mainstream media work and the odd way those of us not reliant on them now inhabit an entirely different reality to those of us who do get our understanding of the world purely from mainstream sources.

The mainstream media of course selectively report the news. They constantly try to focus attention in one direction, and divert attention from another direction. Everything they allow to be seen is filtered through a lens of perpetual and oppressive bias. Stories which support the worldview they want you to have are massively emphasised and exaggerated, with endless supplementary comment and discussion. Things they don’t want you to see and they don’t want to acknowledge are ignored, or massively underreported.

None of this is based on some kind of rational assessment of what is important and what is not important. It’s not even based on a commercial judgement of what will sell newspapers or interest readers. Neither the genuine significance of the event (politically, culturally, and historically) nor the desire to sell stories that will interest people and generate sales or viewership, are the considerations determining which stories run and which are swiftly dropped.

Every such choice now is solely about which news items support the pre-determined narrative, the agenda, and which don’t.

What this means is that those of us who still judge by whether an event is significant, and judge between the importance of stories and news items on old criteria like how true they are or like how many of us are affected and impacted by these events, are now in a siruation similar to that of a small boy with a sixth sense not possessed by others.

We can see dead stories.

For us, an attempted assassination of a Presidential candidate was a very big story. It’s an important story that says important things about the divisions in US society, and perhaps too about which side of those divisions is the side prone to violence and irrational behaviour. It might tell us, to some extent, which side are more innately fascistic, if for example a significant number of those people celebrate an assassination attempt or lament its failure. It might tell us which side are prone to delusions, if for example a third of them insist that the event we all saw unfold and can easily research was staged by its intended victim.

For those of us who are aware that the mainstream media apply focus only where it suits them, that assassination attempt raises a whole flurry of questions that require exactly the kind of continuing discussion and assessment that is not happening.

Some of those questions pertain to the media itself. We might note for instance that CNN had enforced a policy on itself of not reporting on Trump rallies, of ignoring these events as if the levels of support for a Presidential nominee from a main party, the things he is saying, and the enthusiasm of his backers do not matter in an election year.

That itself of course is an example of the kind of bias and selective reporting I am referring to. Trump rallies should be a matter of interest to the media. He’s the Republican nominee. He’s a former President.

And he’s been the main topic of conversation at CNN for nearly a decade. It’s not as if Trump hating liberal media does not want to talk about Trump. They are sometimes incapable of talking about anyone or anything else. They set aside 90% of their content for talking about Trump. But of course all of that content is negative.

The thing about just reporting on a rally is that simply by showing that level of support, and simply by letting the candidate speak and people hear what they have to say, you risk that attention being positive attention. People might be impressed by what they see and hear. This shouldn’t be a risk if their hate filled criticisms of Trump’s style, manner and substance are all accurate, but they still seem surprisingly reluctant to show these rallies.

It’s a reluctance that can only be based on selectivity, on bias, and that can only exist because they want every story on Trump to be a negative one.

But interestingly, the rally at which he was almost murdered was a rally CNN broke their reporting embargo for. It was a rally where several anti Trump mainstream outlets sent reporters to, contrary to their usual policy of deliberately ignoring these rallies.

Surely just an odd coincidence, that.

It can’t be that these Trump hating media organisations were expecting something particularly dramatic and interesting at this particular rally, sufficient to break their usual embargo, and sufficient to justify filming it all with….should we say, anticipation?

This of course is the territory of ‘conspiracy theory’. God forbid the idea that media organisations that have lied about everything and tried to encourage Trump’s assassination for years would also have some foreknowledge of a likely attack and a salivating desire to film his head being blown off.

What a ridiculous idea. Can you imagine the level of corruption and hate that would entail? Thank goodness we don’t live in THAT reality, but rather the one where no western liberal democracy would encourage assassinations, conduct them, or adjust security to make them easier. No sirree.

Even more reassuringly, we live in a reality where the media are simply the impartial and objective reporters of established facts, who do not routinely lie, and who do not have insanely vicious hatreds of a specific individual. No, no, honestly, we do (stop snickering at the back there).

Rowing back from these dark conspiratorial waters, we can say this much. An assassination attempt on Donald Trump is a huge story. It’s not a story that should completely disappear in three weeks, not unless it’s followed a week later by a nuclear war.

It’s a YUUGE story.

And Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race, while also very significant, should not have made the assassination attempt something that is no longer of interest.

This was the closest America has come to the murder of a President since the Reagan assassination attempt in 1981. And it’s the closest America has come to the febrile and dangerous political chaos of the 1960s, to the assassinations of John F.Kennedy (JFK), Robert ‘Bobby’ Kennedy (RFK), Martin Luther King Jnr and Malcolm X.

It was an assassination attempt on a former President at a massive rally, filmed live, preceded by security ‘blunders’ that should require months of investigation and analysis, and followed by the single most iconic visual image of recent times. That photo of Trump just after being shot clenching his raised fist, surrounded by security, and backed by the US flag, is an astonishing image.

Like or loathe Trump if you look at in terms of newsworthiness or in terms of iconic moments, this was indeed huge. That image has to be one of the greatest political photos ever taken. It’s up there with the Iwo Jima flag or with the lone protestor in front of a Chinese tank in Tiananmen Square in terms of political drama and the pure power of a political photograph.

And it was disappeared.

Time magazine picked it for a cover, and then pulled it.

It’s on pro Trump merchandise and it’s shared by people who love Trump, but as far as mainstream media is concerned that photograph (from one of their guys) never happened.

As far as mainstream media is concerned, the assassination attempt never happened. Despite there being massive questions still unanswered. Despite there being vitally significant security issues and cultural issues to analyse. Despite their obsession with Donald Trump.

They spent more time discussing how Donald Trump feeds fish than they have spent discussing the attempt on his life. They have devoted more comment to his hair than they now give to his head nearly being blown off.

In traditional Christian theology there are sins of commission (things you do that are wrong) and sins of omission (things you ought to do, but don’t do). In James 4:17 the Bible teaches us:

“Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.”

In more modern form, this becomes sentiments such as “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” (first ascribed to Edmund Burke) since that represents the effect of sins of omission on society as a whole.

It is the Catholic definition of a sin of omission that seems closest though to what the media do. That is, it is “…a failure by a person to take an action that one "ought to do", and that is within ones power, and when attentively and willfully done…”.

The media malignly and deliberately ignore news they ought to pay attention to. They bury true stories. They refuse to comment on important stories. They kill stories that go against their narrative or that might generate sympathy for their political opponents.

They make some riots “mostly peaceful”. They make others worse than Pearl Harbor. They make an assassination attempt on Donald Trump a dead story dropped after a day.

And they do this wilfully and attentively, trying to blind everyone else. Their reporting and their lack of reporting is pure propaganda and pure sin.

So that those of us who can see and wish to see, those of us using our eyes, have a sense that others have deferred to mainstream media, and that mainstream media seeks to deny. We are astonished by all the things that are not discussed.

We see dead stories everywhere.