Bad press

imafritz

imafritz

Joined
Dec 30, 2008
Messages
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I know this has been hit before, but I was watching the news and a stabbing story comes on.

Guess that the stabbing file picture is,



Buck 119- Just not fair
 
Ya there was one here recently also that used the 119 picture, however I didn't see the story to know if that was the actual knife or not. I don't see why they think they have to post a picture of a knife if it wasn't the one used, and suprised they don't use one of the zombie killn or fantasy knives as the prop.
 
I don't think they're intentionally picking on Buck, it's just that the 119 looks exactly like what everybody thinks a hunting knife looks like. It's an icon people will "read" and comprehend in 1/4 second or less — the visual shorthand that says "scary, dangerous knife." (And yes, it's circularly reinforcing.)

A zombie or fantasy knife (or a Buck Thug, for that matter) wouldn't work as well as a TV news image because it's too far from the iconic shape. People's attention would focus on the unusual knife profile to the point where they'd tune out the news report. That's bad, if you're in the TV news business, and your job involves guiding people to respond in a certain way that reinforces a meta-narrative about modern society and its problems.

Humans are intensely visual: we "read" images far faster than we process language. (This is why commercials, action movies, and music videos can use a sequence of shots that run less than a second each to tell a mini-story.) Humans also tend to give greater weight to images over words, and that goes up 10x or more when danger and threats are in play.

The immense power of images in visual storytelling is why most TV programming — and overwhelmingly that of news — amounts to propaganda.

"Bad press" indeed!
 
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I pulled this artist rendering of a Buck 119 off the website of our local news station (WITN-TV) a couple of years ago - every time WITN covers a knifing they use this artwork. OH

Buck_119_stabbing_news_story.jpg
 
Scott Hartman said:
Yep, I'd bet it was another one of those G96 knives by Jet Aer Corp, made as a Japanese import:p
Click to expand...

Did Jet-Aer make fixed-blade G96 knives? Had no idea. I have a Jet-Aer G96, but it's a folder and Buck 110 knockoff (top knife). I use it for cutting the roots of large weeds in the garden.

tumblr_mwxo5qyLbW1r4zf5xo2_1280.jpg


Looking at the folding G96's potential use as an iconic image for crime reportage, I'm not convinced that it says "dangerous knife" as clearly as a 119 would. A big part of the 119's iconic status comes from that pointy clip-point. To the general public, that detail just screams "vicious murder weapon."

And of course every time one gets used as an icon for crime reportage, the visual link gets reinforced.

Ages ago, an advertising professional named Jerry Mander (yes, his real name) wrote a book titled, Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television. His basic theme was, "...Television is a medium of summary or reductionism — it reduces everything to slogans. And that's one criticism of it, that it requires everything to be packaged and reduced and announced in a slogan-type form."

Some of his arguments have been superseded by the democratization of news reporting, thanks to widespread video- and phone-cams and the internet. But his main points about human vulnerabilities to having their emotions stirred, then steered by images is dead on.
 
Journalists aren't all that bright nowadays.Take anything they say with a grain of salt.
 
Same thing with guns, they show a Glock for any handgun event or an AR/AK for any rifle event. Whether it's a crime or not. Stupid libtard press.
 
I'm sure all of the news reporters are knife nuts, therefore they should specifically show a picture of the actual knife that was used in the crime.
 
At least they used a knife, I saw a screencap last week where the story was about a stabbing and they used a picture of a Glock
 
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