This is a great read for anyone who has been suffering through national news coverage for the last couple of weeks (apropos of my rants yesterday). Further, Collins makes a trenchant point about relativity that I did not think to make:
The shrieking headlines on paper and screen tell another story, one of relativity. In the span of time in which the sniper has killed 10 people, what detectives call “traditional homicides” have killed 21 in the same metropolitan district. It is what the Washington Post calls “everyday violence”: car-jackings, knifings, drive-by shootings. Backpage stuff, even the robbery-killing of a man whose mother was killed in the crash of the American Airlines plane into the Pentagon. But “traditional homicides” are old hat. There’ve been 203 in the District of Columbia so far this year. No Chief Moose to decry their deaths. No interest in the caliber or the degree of difficulty of the shot.
Good stuff.
As a retired Fire Officer from New York City I can understand the lack of interest in “traditional homicides”. I was in one of the busiest companies in the world in the sixties and seventies. The only reports of fires and fire deaths that got mentioned were “glamoropus ones” where multiple children died, whole families were wiped out or fires around Christmas or some other holiday.
Other than that, the reporters would show up and ask, did anyone die? If not, they left even though the department would be there for days after. I call it “selective reporting”. Naturally if there was a racial slant it would get more attention than, say a white family or even if a fireman was killed. That didn’t count.
Just multiply what I am saying for the rest of the country and you will understand why the average American won’t get a true picture of what is relly happening. (See Reid Collins article on the anti war rally in Washington, D.C.–same thing.)