<\/p>\n
Our news media suffer from a terrible supply-side problem. The number of people paid to offer opinions greatly outstrips the number of things worth having an opinion about. Even now, several weeks after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, I don\u2019t think the slaughter was the kind of event toward which one can profitably form an interesting point of view. Leaving church one morning, so the story goes, the great Coolidge was asked the subject of his pastor\u2019s sermon. \u201cSin,\u201d\u009d Coolidge replied. And what did the pastor say about sin? \u201cHe said he was ag\u2019in it.\u201d\u009d Some things don\u2019t require much elaboration.<\/p>\n
In an important sense\u201d\u201din the literal sense\u201d\u201dwhat happened at Sandy Hook was unspeakable, which is why, I suppose, the public disputations that followed it were a towering jumble of non sequitur and irrelevance, a rodeo of hobby horses ridden by straw men. The disputations began even before the authorities had released a final count of victims. Indeed, at the time, good information was hard to come by. For as much as 10 hours after the first reporters arrived on the scene, print and TV journalists were misreporting the killer\u2019s name, his place of residence, his relationship to the elementary school, his mother\u2019s line of work, the types and source of the guns he used, the reaction of school officials in the immediate aftermath of the crime\u201d\u201dthe long string of mistakes we have come to expect when the compulsion to get it first overwhelms the need to get it right.<\/p>\n
The slaughter at Sandy Hook wasn’t merely a rebuke to politics or law enforcement or government regulation–it was a rebuke to our desperate hope that evil can be destroyed, or at least quarantined.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
–From the February 2013 issue of Commentary, pages 63-64<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our news media suffer from a terrible supply-side problem. The number of people paid to offer opinions greatly outstrips the number of things worth having an opinion about. Even now, several weeks after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, I don\u2019t…<\/span><\/p>\n