WHY IS FORT HOOD NEWS?

Is Fort Hood news? Not to me. Not yet, anyway. Let me explain.

News is information relevant to the receiver which will have some effect on what he does or needs to do. For example, if you live in California and your neighbor has threatened to kill you, that is definitely news as far as you're concerned. It may be news to other neighbors, if the conclusion is that the man who made the threat is generally unstable. But to me, in Florida, it is not news. It is simply irrelevant.

Now, if I happen to see a story about your news on TV and find myself engrossed in it, it is still not news to me. It's entertainment. With all that in mind, let's look at Fort Hood.

The story is definitely news to all those directly involved, including those with whom they have important relationships. Beyond that, though, death by itself is not news, except to those who pore through the obits. If death were news, you'd need to hear about all of them.

Some deaths are considered news. But are they? If your local news does a story on a fatal traffic accident involving people you never heard of, why is that news to you? Unless there is something relevant about the way they died - like, for example, some flaw in a highway or a car, or there's alcohol involvement and so a moral to be drawn - you learn nothing useful from the story. It's pure entertainment - a horrible concept, I know, but not much different from Roman times. And if you don't care about the story, it's not even that.

If somebody murders someone in a city near you, that could be news to you if the murderer was loose and targeting people he or she didn't know, or it was a gang killing and some of the gang live in your neighborhood, etc. Short of that, that story is not news to you. If you're fascinated by it, you're being entertained.

Now - do multiple deaths make a story news? Not unless the deaths are relevant to you, or there is a lesson for you to learn. Multiple deaths as news are no different than single deaths. As entertainment sources, they're far superior.

Does the fact that the dead were soldiers make the story news? If the deaths were in combat, yes - because the story impacts on the state of the country of which you are a part. If not, why is it news? Well, if, as many people do, you believe that soldiers are a better, more worthy species of human being - somehow akin to angels - then any soldier death is news. The deaths of angels are always news. I assume this standard would not be applied to the soldier who caused the deaths.

Which brings me to my point: so far, the only smell of news (as opposed to entertainment) in this story for people who do not know the dead or injured rises from the motive of the killer. So far we don't know what that is, but speculation has it that he - a psychiatrist or psychologist who had been treating soldiers returned from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq - heard so many horrifying stories in the course of that treatment that he would rather die than be sent to Iraq, as he was due to be within a month.

So, so far as we know, this story is news because the deaths were motivated by the horrors of war. And the horrors of war is not a story that either the MSM or the power elite want to tell. So, likely, we will never get the news out of this story. We'll have to settle for being entertained.