What We Read and Where

Others have observed, more coherently than I can, that the scourge of regular, daily gun deaths across the country deserves some of the same attention and outrage that has been (rightfully) paid to the terrible mass shootings of 2012.

A solid look at gun violence in Chicago – with 506 homicides in 2012 – in today’s New York Times made me consider the role of local media in any disparity of public outrage.  While national media may be scorned for giving less attention to chronic gun violence than to its random outbursts (the abovementioned NYT piece is an exception, obviously), perhaps people in the communities most affected by chronic gun violence are being well-served by their media.

Newspaper readers in Detroit and Chicago are much more likely to encounter stories about chronic gun violence in their local press than are readers in more affluent or rural areas. So even if big-city media is underreporting gun violence (by whatever standard) they are almost surely covering it more than in cities less affected by such violence.  That difference in coverage could explain why chronic gun violence simply isn’t on the public issue radar screen of Americans in many parts of the country.