The Yellowstone attack: The facts

www.americanthinker.com

It’s good to keep in mind that the legacy media don’t lie only about politics; they lie about everything.

There was a story making the rounds the past week, with video, concerning a shocking incident that occurred at Yellowstone.

Sixty-five-year-old Carl McDaniel was relaxing at Yellowstone with his grandson, taking pictures of the wildlife, when they foolishly goaded a resting bison into rearing up and setting off after them. The panicked McDaniel was caught by the bison while attempting to flee and was tossed almost ten feet in the air. He lay there seriously wounded while the bison trotted away.

That’s more or less the way it was reported in most major media outlets, which featured the video without much at all in the way of context or backstory. So the response was what you’d expect: silly tourists refusing to follow the rules, harassing the animals until their patience at last snapped and they gave the human pests what they deserved. Old story, heard it a thousand times. Or more, for that matter. The story went viral on social media, generating comments in the tens of thousands, almost all of which took the same tack, berating McDaniel and his grandson and pontificating on the rules of animal safety.

Only… that’s not what happened.

What actually happened, according to an eyewitness account from Mike Macleod, the photographer who took the video footage, was that McDaniel and his grandson followed all the rules. They remained a hundred yards away from the bison, standing beside a tree so as not to call attention to themselves. They had finished taking their shots and were starting to move away when the animal charged. Far from panicked flight, McDaniel deliberately led the bison away from his grandson, ending up badly injured while his grandson remained unharmed.

Why did the bison charge? It seems that someone in a white truck (clearly visible in the video) beeped its horn at the bison as it drove past. There doesn’t seem to have been any reason for this, since the animal was not in the truck’s path in the first place. But it annoyed the bison enough so that it rose to its feet, and missing the truck, which had already moved on, attacked the first thing it saw.

“If it bleeds, it leads.” We’ve all heard that one. Some of us have also seen Nightcrawler, likely the most ghastly artistic expression of that philosophy. There’s no real debate as to whether or not the 21st century media is pathological or not, or even as to what level. What we don’t hear is any discussion about what the limits may be, or what can be done to change this.

McDaniel, following his heroic action, is recovering from a broken femur, a potentially fatal injury. There remain, no doubt, tens of thousands who will never hear the real story, and will persist in thinking that he’s a fool who got what was coming. One more innocent victim of rogue media.