TOS stunt casting the lawyer who defended Jack Ruby as a evil green space angel isn't brought up enough by the Star Trek fandom as a bizarre Star Trek moment, but it's weirder that it is brought up by David Fincher's Zodiac

Häxan — 1922 dir. Benjamin Christensen

Was there ever a news event in our lifetimes that the media fumbled more aggressively than Columbine. They genuinely got every single detail wrong

From reporting that they killed someone for saying she believed in God (a different girl who said she did survived) to not reporting that they sought out students of color while yelling racial slurs - on Hitler's birthday & a day after the anniversary of OKC and Waco - while promoting the idea that you have to watch out for loner bullied nerds. Even though later research shows that the shooters were, in fact, bullies themselves, who had a wide social circle, and they were, you know, Nazis motivated by racism and not the video game Doom (1993).

It's a generational fuck-up, the GOAT of bad reporting bc it's still with us. The narrative of persecution after "she said yes" is a huge reason the evangelical right is like how it is today (they made a biopic that uncritically repeated it just a couple years ago!) & they still push the idea that it's primarily victims who do that sort of thing and not aggressors & people still shared that stupid video of Marilyn Manson saying he'd "listen" until a couple years ago (though the shooters being abusive Nazi creeps would uh, not diminish Marilyn Manson's desire to befriend them, I feel)

Was there ever a news event in our lifetimes that the media fumbled more aggressively than Columbine. They genuinely got every single detail wrong

From reporting that they killed someone for saying she believed in God (they spared a different girl who said she did) to not reporting that they sought out students of color while yelling racial slurs - on Hitler's birthday & a day after the anniversary of OKC and Waco - while promoting the idea that you have to watch out for loner bullied nerds. Even though later research shows that the shooters were, in fact, bullies themselves, who had a wide social circle, and they were, you know, Nazis motivated by racism and not the video game Doom (1993).

It's a generational fuck-up, the GOAT of bad reporting bc it's still with us. The narrative of persecution after "she said yes" is a huge reason the evangelical right is like how it is today (they made a biopic that uncritically repeated it just a couple years ago!) & they still push the idea that it's primarily victims who do that sort of thing and not aggressors & people still shared that stupid video of Marilyn Manson saying he'd "listen" until a couple years ago (though the shooters being abusive Nazi creeps would uh, not diminish Marilyn Manson's desire to befriend them, I feel)

I think often of how much quiet work I had to do after to protect my sweet gentle goth students from other teachers and admin after because of the disinformation.

There was this thread (part two) at the time full of stories of schools targeting anything associated with nerds, outcasts, or loners, based on this narrative. The way the media accursed the persecuted and vulnerable as potential killers, and fed into the persecution narrative of the ones who persecuted them with the false "she said yes" story, after the event is just abhorrent to look back on

Roger Ebert once told a story about how he was interviewed for the nightly news at the time. They asked him if he thought violent movies were responsible; he said no. What about The Basketball Diaries? No, that was a flop & it's unlikely they ever saw it. He said: "Events like this, if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me." They never used the interview, and just aired a bunch of people willing to say "YES, it is Doom and horror movies!" instead. Which is just. So depressing, about what it implies about the media coverage and how devoted they were to their narrative

One odd part of the "she said yes" story is that the girl who did say she believed in God - and who walked away alive, but injured - was accused of being a copycat when she told her story. Notably, she was Catholic, and evangelical teens thought she was, like she was a Papist invader. This story is also one of the few from the time to dive into how cultish the martyrdom fantasy was at the time: teens just straight-up telling people "God has laid it on my heart that I'm going to be martyred. When I told one of my friends, he said, 'That's awesome. I wish it could happen to me.'" If you read coverage from the time a lot of it is banal "whoa, a religious revival among #teens?" stuff, and all the writing about how it supercharged evangelical's persecution complex to the point they were LARPing having to do church in secret lest they be executed.

Hard Copy - Charles Manson Online - May 18th, 1997

“He’s supposed to be behind bars, but Charles Manson is everywhere. In bookstores, on t-shirts, on record racks, and now thanks to the internet, Charlie’s gone global.”

Okay. I wasn't planning to post more from this show, but I pulled up a VHS rip off Youtube out of curiosity, and the first story was a scare piece about Charles Manson being MORE DANGEROUS THAN EVER because he can recruit on his WEBSITE! And because 90s hipsters say he's, like, the best folk singer ever, maaaaan

The second segment is a story about transgender people that is...oddly positive??? Profiling trans men and trans women and a trans radio show in 90s Boston, with a "they can be normal too!" bent, profiling trans engineers, doctors, and cops.

This is surprising bc if you don't know Rock Bottom from The Simpsons is an incredibly spot-on parody of this terrible, sleazy show. It is Exactly Like This

I'd be weird to recap a segment about trans people on the paranormal blog but shout out to these folks who went on the sleaziest show of the 90s and came out the better. Nancy Nangeroni, who hosted her show until 2006 and is 72 today, managed to get a "TRANSSEXUAL MENACE" t-shirt on national TV in 1997

That being said, this segment does exist to "prove" trans people aren't all like Shalimar Seiuli, a trans sex worker caught with Eddie Murphy. Which, gross.

HARD COPY - Snuff Film in Michigan? - March 3rd, 1991

“It wasn’t the type of crime a cop based in East Lansing, Michigan is used to dealing with – it was something that comes from the big city. But Paul Wood has to chuckle now and then as he remembers how the mysterious crime scene wound up on his desk…”

“The Chicago Police got a tip that helped identify the victim in the case. As it turned out, his name was Trent Reznor...”

Absolute classic of a tabloid news segment about a farmer who discovered a mysterious Super 8 camera attached to weather balloons; on it? An apparent snuff film from Chicago. Or was it?

Dig how this sleazy ass tabloid show about murders - one that has a weird fantasy interlude imagining an artist painting a nude model just to give some sex in there - tries to stoke moral panic about the Nine Inch Nails and their lead singer, Trent Resnor, having rings in his nose and calling the cops who couldn't identify that the film wasn't real stupid.

I hope at least if the angry cops are still alive today, they can take their grandkids to a wholesome Disney film. Now to look up who composed the score and - no! No!!

I think the 'Fruit Sniffer' will be big on here

Thinking about when a New York Times culture editor admitted that he had no clue what No Kings was or where it had come from, openly wondered "wait, am I in a bubble because I spend all my time on a website run by Elon Musk?", and then he and every other media reporter stayed on Twitter (he spends his time complaining that Bluesky users are misunderstanding his post by saying he only thinks this bc he's on Twitter, which he said in the post. Yeah man you did, then you went right back to using Twitter and nothing but Twitter)

Reporters see a historically narrow 1.5% victory as not just a mandate but enshrining him as The Voice of the People bc they badly wanted to but also bc they spend all of their time on a website that's an echo chamber for Nazis (all while chortling about those loser libs in their echo chamber at Bluesky). Addicted to phone & addicted to the app on the phone that used to have all the famous people on it but is now a place where the Top Minds are Catturd and NotANazi1488 but where we have to pretend it still has all the famous people on it

A hell of a lot of Serious Pundits predicted that no average person would care about the East Wing being torn down for a ballroom bc they have bigger things to worry about, putting food on their family, that sort of thing. Then polls kept coming out showing "average" people were, in fact, deeply outraged by it. And I have to wonder if it isn't a factor that to so many people in their media their view of "average" people, already heavily tilted in favor of rural conservatives (since we still consider living in a city some kind of boutique experience as if the majority of people don't live in one; the only Real Americans are white evangelical conservative men, forever), was tilted even more by the fact that the average people they interact with Online is now MAGATradCath34, who loves the ballroom but is mad that the "globalists" are going to change the logo of Chick-Fil-A or whatever

(they're also unwilling to see that all the issues are inter-related in those people's eyes. They're not evaluating everything separately, they're thinking "how dare he tear down the White House to build a ballroom while starving people" bc they correctly see it as one connected event and not as a set of discrete topics that exist to be polled on)

recency bias is worse now than it ever has been before