Amid all its political correctness and ideological distortion, one thing often overlooked concerning the mainstream media is its essential strangeness, its near-total separation from any behavior, attitudes, or ideas that could be defined as "normal".

We find yet another example of this in the treatment of Adam Lanza, the Newtown CT shooter. A photograph released by the wire services reveals a delicate-looking kid with a shy smile and a goofy haircut.

The standard reader's reaction would amount to a shake of the head and a "what could have made such a nice kid do it?"

But there's another photo extant as well, one that has not seen such wide circulation:

Apart from the fact that it would scare the hell out of Hannibal Lector, this shot leaves no doubt as to "why he did it": because he was as crazy as they come.

This stratagem involving photographs immediately calls to mind the Zimmerman shooting, when the media released, and heavily played up, photos showing Trayvon Martin as a sweet-faced twelve-year-old rather than the hulking seventeen-year-old tough faced by George Zimmerman.

Given the leftist slant of the media, using that shot made sense. The media circus surrounding that shooting was intended to create a racial incident, to keep the pot boiling in light of the upcoming electoral campaign. That photo did its work well -- most people still picture Trayvon Martin as the innocent twelve-year-old as opposed to the drug-addled teen he became.

But what are we to make of this Lanza photo? What is the thinking here? Why the effort to clean up the image of a murderer who killed twenty children and seven adults? Is the media so estranged from commonplace reality that they automatically reach for the cheapest, most sentimental interpretation of an event as a matter of instinct? Or is it yet another case of ideological subterfuge, an effort to deny the shooter any form of agency, instead transferring responsibility to the demonic weapon he used? To transform him into simply another victim, driven to his crime by a force beyond his control?

Whatever the case, the end result is to rob the incident of its actual meaning: the fact that a maniac shot a group of innocents for no other reason than pure spite.

Establishment journalism is so removed from normality that nothing whatsoever can be expected from it. There are many reasons to despise the current American media.

Hat tip: Mara ZN

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