What sort of media attention should be devoted to the survivors and perpetrators of a mass shooting at a parade, where 19 people were injured? American media answers with deafening silence.
Good news, everyone, one of the suspects has been apprehended. After a city-wide manhunt in which the police and FBI shut down all public transportation and most businesses in the area, a suspect been taken into custody. Everyone can breathe a deep sigh of relief and detach themselves from their televisions and computers where we were following moment by moment coverage of the tragedy and the aftermath. The television networks can move onto a new news cycle and talk about more partisan issues, like the real IRS scandal and the fake Benghazi scandal. And all the politicians can finally stop weighing in on what sort of policies need to be put in place to prevent this tragedy from happening again.
Oh, that’s right, absolutely none of that happened (except for the part where one of the suspects is apprehended). In New Orleans on Mother’s Day someone fired into a parade, injuring 19 people, some critically. I found out about it because a few of the people I follow in Twitter mentioned it, and that’s it. When the Boston bombing happened, my Facebook and Twitter feed were inundated with messages about it and links to articles about it. The 24 hour news stations all covered the story to such an extent, they actually over-covered it (but that’s another issue). Hell, news outlets are still writing about the Boston bombing and Tsarnaev’s suspected motive.
The New Orleans’ tragedy, on the other hand, received none of that media attention. In fact, it looks like the local news outlets didn’t even cover it extensively. Travis Dewys has a friend living near New Orleans, so he called her when he heard about the shooting. He says that, “She informed me that she was ok, and that the news outlets there were not even covering it. Sad indeed. She flipped on her tv and didn’t see it on the local channels. Not sure how hard she looked, but it def was not like the Boston bombing where you could not find a station NOT covering it.” And as the Guardian article points out, I have yet to hear a politician try to use this tragedy as leverage for their stance on gun control. This is a national tragedy so ignored even the politicians aren’t paying attention to it to try to spin it. No one is talking about it, and that’s a whole other tragedy.
Part of the disparity in coverage and attention the New Orleans’ shooting got when compared to the Boston bombing lies in the different ways in which America views shootings versus bombings. In a lot of American minds, guns are the weapon of American criminals, whereas bombs are the weapons of foreign terrorists. And there is a whole extra level of fear of the foreigner that contributes to how America talks about a bombing as opposed to a shooting. The suspected perpetrator just didn’t use the ‘right’ weapon or come from the ‘right’ religion or ethnicity for this to gain national coverage.
The other reason this hasn’t gained much attention is because the victims weren’t middle class white people in an affluent city. They were “urban,” which is just another way of saying poor and black. This didn’t happen in the ‘right’ neighbourhood or happen to the ‘right’ sort of people to garner media attention. To quote my very cynical cousin, Alex, “The victims weren’t white people engaged in recreational running and the shooter only had a kind of funny sounding name. This can’t be used as a way to fan the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment, and America already hates black people just enough.”
I don’t understand how this tragedy relates to this site.
Saw this every night on the news since it happened on both national and local news.
I think this wasnt covered mainly because the perpetrator and the victims were black. Some conservative American’s “expect” this sort of violence in minority communities and some liberal Americans aren’t comfortable calling a minority person a “monster” regardless of their actions. This is a bizarre dichotomy, but as someone who has friends and associates who range from extremely conservative to extremely progressive I see both stances and some members of both groups are absolutely blind to it. Gun control advocates would look extremely paternalistic while gun rights advocates would sure have some strange bedfellows if this was used in the… Read more »
I’ve noticed that there is always a lot more news coverage when something happens in a major East coast city vs. most of the rest of the country.