MucheDumbre

I’m not going to get into the story because we’ve all heard everything there is to hear, but I can’t stay silent on one glaring problem with people today.

Shannon Burke accused of shooting of dog, wife

Notice anything?

Shannon Burke arrested for shooting dog, grazing wife

Here is the first few sentences from another news site

Who else gets angry at their dog and threatens to shoot it?

Cops say Burke got ticked at his dog, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. His solution: Pick up a handgun and threaten to shoot it.

The gun discharged, and the bullet went through the dog’s leg. The same bullet struck his wife Catherine on the side of her head, reports WESH News.

It takes that writer 53 words to finally mention the wife that was also shot, 53 words before she can get a quick nod in her direction. The entire piece is about the poor dog, what kind of dog, the threatening and shooting of the dog and Oh by the way his wife was shot in the head too.

After the Orlando Sentinel released photos of Catherine Burke and  her dog,  the Monsters of the Morning, the morning show on WTKS 104.1 took calls on the whole fiasco because they understood the need for people to vent their feelings on this. They also understood that all other locals news and radio programs were going to take advantage of the situation and talk about it so  they decided why not let the people hear and say what they want from the station at the center of the controversy.

Here’s the problem. I can’t count how many calls or how many posts on the muchedumbre forum have lamented over the dog first and then if she’s lucky, over Catherine.  There is even a thread titled

Burke fired…he injured his dog and wife but killed his career at REAL radio

In another thread, a post that reads..

What a class guy. What’s a king charles wiegh, 5 maybe 10 lbs.

Nothing about the his wife Catherine at all, just the dog.

One caller to the Monsters said Shannon Burke was on the same level as Richard McTear. Who is Richard McTear? Oh well he’s the scum-bag asshole who  after getting into a fight with his 17 year old girlfriend, grabbed their 3 month old baby and threw him on the concrete and then kidnapped him. As if that wasn’t enough, while driving down  I-275 he threw the baby out the window of his car killing him.  Now, why did this caller equate Shannon Burke to this reptile?  Because he shot his dog. Not because he also shot his wife, but because he shot the dog (the dog lived by the way). When called on this  by Dirty Jim the caller replied that the dog was innocent, the wife though…. well she could have left at anytime.

The dog.. was innocent… meaning what? That Catherine  deserved what she got because she didn’t leave? I really don’t know if that’s what people mean when they say something like that but it is a valid question that I would like someone to answer because I really don’t know of another way to take that kind of statement.

I am not excusing what Burke did in any way. But I am questioning the headlines when they read “Radio personalty shoots dog and wife” and even more I question why there seems to be so little outrage over the shooting of his wife Catherine? Even the Orlando Sentinel when putting the photos up on their website, put the dog’s photos up first!

We love our pets, we think of them like our children…but what Shannon did is not on the same level as the man who threw his own baby onto the concrete and then chucked him out of his car window while he was driving down the interstate. One is the horrific death of an infant, the other is a dog who was shot in the leg and lost it’s tail.  They are both sad, but they do not carry the same weight.

Maybe it’s all kind of like they say in Hollywood, never work with children and animals. Well, never get shot in the head by your husband after he shoots the dog because the dog will get the sympathy because it was innocent and you? Well you could have left.

I think we need to re-arrange some priorities here…

Normally I just subscribe to the Sunday edition of the Orlando Sentinel.  Like most Americans, I get much of my news from television and the internet fills in the gaps.  So I don’t usually have the time or inclination to fool with a regular Monday through Saturday subscription.  However leave it to my wife to answer the phone one day (I’m going to have to put a stop to that) and agree to a seven day subscription to the Sentinel.  The extra six day subscription was free, which if it’s any indication, probably means print newspapers have maybe five years left.

So why do a feel burdened by a free subscription?  I dunno, some sort of OCD maybe.  I feel compelled to go through, if not read thoroughly, all of these newspapers hitting the side of the house at 5:30 am.  Add a few days of working OT, being out of town for a week, and some really good quality television, and they start to pile up.

Really pile up.

I’ve had to cut my magazine subscriptions down to one, which I am still behind by seven months.  With magazines my OCD is worse.  I have to read every article.  I guess this goes to my inherent cheapness.  The newspapers are free, so I can skim them, but the magazines I pay for. 

Gotta get my money’s worth.

But I can’t throw them away.  OCD, remember?  So they pile up…

But that leads to some interesting discoveries.  After work yesterday I plopped down in front of the couch with the newspaper (I try to at least read the front page daily).  One of the articles on the front page, How To Avoid Foreclosure, was about yet another victim of the housing crisis:

Carolyn Patmon has lived in what she calls her “modest little house” in Carver Shores for 38 years. At one point, she owned it free and clear. Then she took out a loan to add a sun porch. Because she was on disability and wasn’t working she was offered a mortgage rate of 14 percent.

Now for me, there are all kinds of things wrong with this, just in the first paragraph.  Besides the obvious issue of how can you get a home loan when you’re unemployed and on disability, why would you even if you could when you can’t work?  Does disability really pay that well?  Luckily for Carolyn, help was on the way:

Because Patmon went to Orlando ACORN, a nonprofit community organization with chapters nationwide, she has been able to stop the foreclosure process and is working on having her loan modified to more affordable terms.

Yah!  A happy ending!   After the suspense of not knowing what was going to happen to Carolyn, it looks like alls well that ends well, and I can go on to the rest of the A section of the newspaper.  But after finishing that, I’m lead to my pile. My Sentinel “archives” goes back almost a month.  Great.  But there is no news like old news.

The B section from July 9th was as good a place as any to start.  After breezing through the story of the Dominicans who think they are Jews,  I came across this one, Coalition Demands Health Before Profits.  Gee I wonder what slant this article is taking?

A group of Central Florida community leaders and residents announced Tuesday that they will be part of a $40 million grass-roots campaign to push for affordable health care.

Yes, there is nothing like a bunch of “community leaders’ wasting millions on lobbying, rather than actually using the 40 million to help provide affordable healthcare.

“In our vision of health-care reform, the government works for us — setting and enforcing rules so that insurance companies put our health before their profits,” said Orlando resident Carolyn Patmon, a member of ACORN — Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — a nationwide community alliance.

Hmmm… where have I heard that name before? 

Now I know the media in general is liberal.  The people who are attracted to journalism to “make a difference” far outnumber the few who are merely interested reporting events.  So I always keep that in mind when reading news articles.  It’s not just “what happened,” it’s also, “what is the reporter’s agenda?”  But I do hate being punked. And for the thousands of readers of poor foreclosure victim Carolyn Patmon, they were being punked, since the article made no mention that Patmon, whose home was saved by the intervention of ACORN, is also an activist for ACORN.  Just dumb luck of coming across that other article, written a month earlier, clued me in on it.

I googled Carolyn Patmon, and yep, she definitely works for ACORN.  She has been so busy representing the organization I wonder if it’s proper to represent her as unemployed.  It’s clearly not proper to not disclose Patmon’s relationship to the organization.

I checked out the online articles comments and it’s clear that some readers of the Sentinel do know of Patmon’s relationship to the organization.  I’m sure that will get out.  The readers of those comments must number in the tens. 

I’m glad Patmon kept her house, and if her association with ACORN had been disclosed in the article, I wouldn’t have had the case of the ass I got from discovering that by happenstance.  But Patmon was misrepresented.  The article was written long after Patmon had been active in the organization, and the writer of the article, whom I e-mailed, to ask, clearly knew of her relationship with ACORN.

There really isn’t anything to be done about it.  It’s just a cautionary tale that you can’t take the Sentinel’s stories, or most newspaper stories, at face value.

Five years may be too long to wait.