I was channel surfing during a commercial break in the BCS Championship pregame coverage - one of the last examples of times the DVR is rendered useless - and somehow landed on "The Ed Show" on MSNBC.
The discussion I stumbled into - which I can only assume was the result from the weekend's shooting - was called "Is rhetoric to blame?"
As I said, I don't know for certain that this was in the context of the shootings. It's entirely possible that this referred to Phil Jackson's conversations with the media during the Lakers' recent losing streak.
However, assuming that this was indeed a discussion about gun violence and the responsibility of media in our society, it seems a bit curious that the show chose to title this segment with a lower-third graphic that read "RAPID-FIRE".
Without some sort of visual representation, it's certainly easy to argue that this was taken out of context, or that I'm forcing some sort of juxtaposition. Which is why I took the liberty of attaching a screen grab:
During this exchange - which went on for more than three minutes - everyone seemed to be completely unaware of the graphic titling the conversation (I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on this). This made it even more amusing when Bill Press said the following:
I think all those people who've used that gun filled rhetoric tonight Ed, have to do some real soul searching."
Here is how it looked on TV when Bill Press made that comment:
Mr. Press later continued:
I wrote a book about this called "toxic talk," tell you something, I listened to all of the talk radio on the right and on the left. this is 24/7, the specialty of right-wing talk radio today."
Here's what it looked like when that was said, complete with closed captioning:
Mr. Press concluded with this collective urging:
...All of us should be cooling our jets and all of us should be searching in looking at the words that we use, everybody should."
With that in mind, here is one more look at the words "The Ed Show" chose to use for their graphics, while Ed looks directly at them:
To his credit, Ed closed the segment with what was, considering the context, an incredibly insightful declaration:
My prediction is, nothing will change."
Well, maybe one thing will change: Bill Press may request lower-third approval when appearing on this program.
To view the full interview in all it's glory, see below...
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