Man holds hostages in Discovery building
This story is newsworthy for many reasons. First, there is public intrest. Discovery TV is a station that many people are already familiar with. If you have cable you have the Discovery channel, or at least one of the channels own by Discovery. So when people read this story they'll look at the headline and already see something familiar to them! That's usually all it takes for a headline to attract someones attention besides violence, but this story had both of those things.
Which brings me to my second point, violence. People love to hear about violence for some reason. It's probably all the movies we watch as a society. This story has violence so there is more public inttrest. Also, the people in the neighborhood where this happened deserve to know what's been going on in their backyard.
People like reading about other people, and James J Lee is a person that all of us can laugh at. The more we read about Lee the more we are convinced he is crazy. There were the police reports about him paying homeless people to protest with him outside of the Discovery Building two years earlier. Then there was the quote from his blog where he criticised Discovery TV for not being "green" enough! Then he walks into the Discovery Headquarters with a gun and takes hostages. Something obviously threw him off his rocker... but he was obviously crazy to begin with. I mean, come on, who has the balls to say that Discovery channel isn't "green" enough?! It seems to me they couldn't be greener! They do shows about nature and about how human behings keep screwing up the planet! How much greener could they get?! I'm just not entirely sure what exactly he wanted them to improve on! What the hell did he mean when he said that Discovery's show, Planet Green, is just another show about "more products to make money"? I understand the quote may have been taken out of context but still, the man has obvously been mislead. If he really had a problem with Discovery's programing maybe he should of went to college and majored in Buisness/Telemedia and then started up his own media company devoted to saving the enviroment. But no, that was obviously too hard for him. . . This guy has really thrown me into a rant, but that proves my point. Lee is someone that we can read about and then reflect on our lives and say to ourselves, "I'm really glad I'm not that guy."
Another thing it does is stir up controversy. I am sure that there is a conservative out there somewhere who read this story, and I am sure that after reading it his paranoia towards liberals and environmentalists was strengthened. And I am also sure that there were a few environmentalists that read this story, viewed Lee's actions and shook their head in shame. "Another asshole who has tainted the image of enviromentalsist everywhere," they might have said.
But Lee's points of view is what makes this story relevant to us. (That and the fact that he threatened peoples lives because of them.) He is concerned about the environment, something that people have been arguing the importance of for decades.
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