I haven’t really been closely following the trial of George Zimmerman, but it’s hard to get away from it when it consumes so much establishment media bandwidth.

I’m sure the story coming out through the testimony is detailed and consuming for many people, but what struck me most was the fact that during the testimony, the sound kept dropping out on my TV.  I was basically watching a bobbing head silently mouthing words.  It actually took me several seconds to figure out that this was the network silencing the words they didn’t want their audience to hear.

CNN was blocking all the naughty language so it wouldn’t offend sensitive listeners, permanently traumatizing them.  So, here we have a trial of a man accused of intentionally gunning down an innocent 17-year-old kid in cold blood, but the story is dumbed down for the least common denominator in the audience.  CNN, as well as other cable stations covering the story, are essentially filtering the testimony because they believe their audience is too timid to be faced with something so brutal as the profanity and racial slurs that were spoken in the course of a fucking  homicide for Christ’s sake!

To me, this is not only insulting, it shows a stunningly misdirected grasp of the character, integrity, and maturity of the audience they claim to serve.  You can’t help but wonder if they feel compelled to shield their audience from course language, what other raw truth do they feel called on to “protect” Americans from?

This is one reason why alternative news outlets have been catching on so quickly.  While they haven’t been able to break into the one-size-fits-all establishment controlled broadcast and cable media, alternative news sources have flourished on the web.  If you want to get the raw data, you have to go to the web because the establishment media in the U.S. doesn’t think you can handle it.

When the Zimmerman trial started with the opening statements, it was all the cable news networks could talk about.  The entire day, they kept repeating the first few words out of the prosecutor’s mouth followed with discussion and experts weighing in on the startling impact of those words, almost as if the trial was already won.  And yet the audience never got to hear the words because they needed to be protected.   For anyone with a brain capable of questioning the merit of TV news coverage, this goes past laughable and ridiculous right out into the the far reaches of the Twilight Zone.

If you want to hear those words, where do you go?  Youtube. Specifically at 34:28.

Americans, even when speaking among adults, have established code words like “the F-word” or “the N-word” to be used as substitutes in conversation.  Even in a discussion about the words themselves, we cannot come right out and actually utter them.  This is lunacy.

For the most part, civil society has quit making any distinction between the context of a word and the mere arrangement of it’s letters.  The simple arrangement of the letters, F-U-C-K, has been condemned, which makes no more sense than condemning the color blue.

In the court room, the jurors get to hear it all because someone’s future hangs in the balance.  The court, doesn’t shield the jury from some of the evidence and then tell them to judge the facts.  (Well, actually they do, but that’s a different subject.)

I fail to understand why most people don’t reject establishment news outright.  Considering their low regard for their audiences, turning on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, network news, and almost all local news stations is not much more than an exercise in self flagellation because these programs make it so obvious how stupid they think you are.

Combine the disdain that establishment media has toward the American public with it’s heavily vested interest in the statist quo and ignorance is an unavoidable consequence for anyone who relies heavily on them to learn about what’s going on in the world.

[update]  I’m a fan of the Discovery Channel’s show called Mythbusters.  During the commercials they advertise their new reality show called Naked and Afraid.  This is show about survivalist experts turned loose in the wild with no clothes.  But, because nudity is taboo in the U.S., the video is strategically blurred to avoid threatening the sensibilities of an audience steeped in a culture that defines nudity as shameful.  This has to rank pretty high on the list of stupid things on TV.