Chicago has a drug problem, America has a drug problem.
Fifty-nine people were shot in Chicago, including seven fatally, over the weekend in mostly poor, black neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides. But as the nation grieved over the mass shooting rampages in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that left 31 dead, the daily tragedy of gun violence in the nation’s third largest city – which recorded 42 homicides in the first 28 days of July – made hardly a blip with national news outlets and cable networks.
For anti-violence activists and social scientists on the frontlines of studying and combating the scourge of gun violence, it was hardly surprising that the national media all but ignored the bloodshed in the Windy City. Still, it doesn't sting any less. “They’re all related,” said Tamar Manasseh, founder of the Chicago-based anti-gun violence initiative Mothers/Men Against Senseless Killings. “Dayton. El Paso. Brooklyn. Chicago. We kind of separate this to our peril. It weakens us as Americans. It weakens our fight against the NRA and gun violence when you separate urban and rural shootings, suburban and street shootings," Manasseh said.
Manasseh said in an interview that the media too often treats gun violence differently based on the race of those involved. While black-on-black violence is considered "normal," white-on-white crime is believed to be "something that shouldn't happen," Manasseh said.
James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University in Boston, attributes the difference in media coverage to the nature of the attacks.
"Death is different," Fox said . "Mass shootings in which there are large numbers of injured victims are certainly not inconsequential, but they do not reflect the same level of severity than ones in which significant numbers of victims lose their lives."
“These cases are underreported in the media, and that has to do with the audience,” Fox said. “Most Americans don’t feel threatened by a gang because they’re not in a gang. But they are threatened by a random shooting.”
Gary Slutkin, founder of Cure Violence, an organization that fights violence as a health epidemic, suggests that the El Paso and Dayton shootings received more attention, because of their political salience. Several candidates vying for the 2020 presidential nomination immediately blamed President Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric towards undocumented migrants for stoking the resentments espoused by the El Paso shooter.
A survey of recent media coverage by The Trace, a nonprofit organization covering gun-related news, found that major national media outlets dedicated space and airtime to last month’s mass shooting in Gilroy, California, but largely ignored another terrifying shooting incident at community event in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a predominantly African American enclave, that took place less than 24 hours earlier.
The incident at the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting left three people dead and at least 12 wounded.
The shooting near a Brownsville park left one dead and 11 wounded. While the Brownsville shooting was covered by two national news website homepages for several hours, the Gilroy shooting received an average of 14 hours on the homepages of six national news websites, as well as 20 times more broadcast time, The Trace found. New York City Public Defender Rebecca Kavanagh took to Twitter to express her frustration with the lack of media attention for the Brownsville shooting.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 920237001/
K9s mentioned the shooting at a Mississippi Walmart that got little coverage, a disgruntled employee that didn't get much attention.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Good one!
