Repeat, ch-ch, Repeat, ch-ch, Repeat, ch-ch, Repeat.....

Last night I sat here in my den, reading a book, minding my own business.

In the background, the TV was on. I glanced up at the screen and put my book down to look at the screen. It was Nancy Grace, a media figure who ordinarily annoys me but the story caught my attention.

The story involved two minimum wage employees who were caught on surveillance tape in a nursing home, beating helpless residents. In one case, a 50-year-old autistic woman was being beaten with a shoe. In yet another, the screen showed tape of a bedridden man being repeatedly hit and punched as he lay helpless.

That was appalling in and of itself.. but it would also be another topic.

Where I am going with this is that the show continually looped a video of these two events, on a 15-second basis. It repeated at the minimum twenty times. Again and again, my television screen was filled with these two images.

Perhaps it would appear on the surface that the purpose was to make people angry, to cause outrage.

It actually has the potential of the opposite effect: desensitization.

This is a method used in training sessions for people who are first responders, people who must see these kinds of horrible things in order to do their jobs. It's done in the military. It's done when treating people for PTSD.

It's based on the premise that the more we see something, the less we will react to it.

Now that thought scared the heck out of me since I've noticed most of the news channels do this very same thing. They will loop a video endlessly for the entire duration of the coverage. Usually a ten-second clip of video will be repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated.

Conspiracy theory? Maybe. I must admit I thought rather seriously about it during the day though.

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