All the News That's Fit to Hide
Media Bias
| April 20, 2007
| Tim
As usual, the papers are filled with varying degrees of clueless commentary -- from "somewhat" to "amazingly".
Why has there been an increase in mass murders since the eighties? Someone named "James Alan Fox" -- having admitted these murderers have "a diminished ability to cope with life's disappointments" insists he knows the real cause:
So what has changed? For one thing, the United States has become much more dog-eat-dog, more competitive in recent years. We admire those who achieve at any cost, and it seems that we have less compassion for those who fail
Yessir, in James Alan Fox's alternate universe, our educational system has become LESS concerned with children's self-esteem than the eighties, and ever more hash and competitive. (This was published in a newspaper, mind you.)
Me, I think it's obvious that score-free soccer games, trophies for being old enough to move into the first grade, and high school diplomas for continuing to breathe have left the latest generation -- as Fox said, but completely ignored -- with "a diminshed ability" to cope with disappointment. How can you learn to deal with "disappointment" if you're never allowed to experience one?
I was sick of hearing how this was the nation's largest mass murder -- knowing full well it certainly wasn't. Finally, someone (Jawa Report) debunks that. Yet again, it takes a blogger to correct some of the nation's top newpapers. Apparently, it only counts as "mass murder" if a gun is involved.
(Maybe those "multiple layers" of checks are meant to keep relevant facts out of the papers? Who would have thought we could have achieved a Pravda-like level of accuracy with a free press?)
That "right wing" media: MRC points out what everyone but Al Gore knows:
Al Gore has complained that the media are biased against the inconvenient truth of global warming.... MRC analysts examined all 115 news stories that dealt with global warming from January 1 through April 15 on NBC’s Today, ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS’s The Early Show.... But MRC’s analysts found just four stories out of 115 (just over 3%) contained any mention of dissent from Gore’s approach to global warming — and even those stories were heavily stacked in favor of his "climate crisis" position.
Undoubtedly this is because there are simply no reputable scientists who have doubts about Al Gore's position on global warming.
I've been around over half a century, and I can assure you that every single time I've seen a media report (print or TV) about a subject I knew personally, it has been inaccurate. Usually -- though not always -- the errors were only minor ones, introduced by a reporter who lacked either the time or the inclination to truly understand the story. Or, to give the reporters their due, it might have been equally clueless editors who fouled up the story. In any case, accuracy is sacrificed to expediency: there are deadlines, and most people won't notice or care as long as we get the general flavor of the story correct.
These days, when the line between news story and editorial is blurred to nonexistence, even the general flavor is likely to be wrong. And our broad and high-speed communications network ensures the near-instant propagation of these errors all over the world.
I know for a fact that the education system spends more time behind closed doors worrying about the fragile egos of their students and not enough about teaching them actual coping skills. That's part of what I get to fight my way through on a daily basis. So I know that the media these days has gotten pretty good at presenting their own opinions as facts. Michelle Malkin posted an excellent blog that really demonstrates what you're talking about in january
http://jewishworldreview.com/michelle/malkin010307.php3
The story was about stiff prison sentences for women who have abortions in El Salvador. The orignal freelance writer was told the "facts" of the story by a pro abortion group and even visited one such prisoner. A pro life group later took the time to go through court documents and found out the woman really had killed her full term healthy newborn shortly after birth. The New York Times stood behind the story and refused to make any retractions or corrections.
Apparrently integrity, honesty, and truth are not always a reporters highest priority.
After skimming through the Jawa Report article, I thought that 9/11 was the only larger mass murder listed, in which case I would have been pedantic and worked out the semantics of "mass murder" and "terrorism". However, I then saw the the Oklahoma bombing (somewhere in between) and the HappyLand and Michigan bombings, which pretty much pull the plug on that idea.
I do think that there might be a difference between bombing/arson and gun-related crimes, as with guns, one generally sees the victims face-to-face, and there is a conscious decision made to kill specific people; bombings and arson, on the other hand, are performed to kill as many people as possible. (Generally speaking.) I don't know if that's true, but it seems likely. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
My prayers are with all those affected by the tragedy at Virginia Tech.
-TCG
Why has there been an increase in mass murders since the eighties?
Has there been? I thought the general murder rate had decreased, (due entirely to improvements in medical technology.) So some incidents which would have been murders became assaults, since there was no death.
Also, the eighties was around the time of the crack epidemic. Have we gotten worse since then?
Of course, I've never thoroughly researched this, and murders may follow a different trend than mass murders, so it could be way off.
A source for the decrease in murder rates since 1980. The info is from a death penalty related site, but hopefully the info is still valid.
link
link
Tim: Why has there been an increase in mass murders since the eighties?
Ryan: Has there been?
I was merely summarizing the opening narrative of the author I was quoting -- not asserting I myself had any opinion on the matter.
Fox had written:
Mass murders (and, especially, mass shootings) became increasingly common... Seven of the eight largest mass shootings in modern U.S. history have occurred in the last 25 years.
I'd calculated that 2007 - 25 = 1982, and producd that paraphrase. In truth, he explicitly mentions 1966 as a turning point. Sorry for the misleading paraphrase, and thanks for the fact-check.
... Though I'd note that the fact-check itself has some problems too, since it address itself to the "murder rate", not the aforementioned rate of "mass murder", which is something entirely different.
For the record, a "mass murder" is the slaughter of many people in one short time and in one place. (e.g. VTech) A "spree killer" is someone who kills several people over a short period of time, but at different locations. (Charlie Starkweather) A "serial killer" is someone who selects and kills one or two victims at a time, spaced over a wider interval of time. (Ted Bundy)
Yes, sorry for the gap in the fact check. I was a bit delayed but wanted to post what I had. Here's what I've been able to find on mass murders;
Duwe found that the prevalence of mass murders, defined as the killing of four or more people in a 24-hour period, tends to mirror that of homicide generally. The increase in mass killings during the 1960s was accompanied by a doubling in the overall murder rate after the relatively peaceful 1940s and '50s.
link
Even though previous research has not examined mass murder prior to 1965, scholars have asserted that the mid-1960s marked the onset of an unprecedented and ever-growing mass murder wave. Using news accounts and the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) as sources of data, this study analyzes 909 mass killings that took place between 1900 and 1999. Although the mid-1960s marked the beginning of a mass murder wave, it was not unprecedented, because mass killings were nearly as common during the 1920s and 1930s. The results also show that familicides, the modal mass murder over the last several decades, were even more prevalent before the 1970s. Moreover, mass killers were older, more suicidal, and less likely to use guns in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Although some have claimed that workplace massacres represent a new "strain" in mass murder, the findings suggest that the only new type of mass killing that emerged during the 20th century was the drug-related massacre.
link
There has been little research on United States homicide rates from a long-term perspective, primarily because there has been no consistent data series on a particular place preceding the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which began its first full year in 1931. To fill this research gap, this project created a data series on homicides per capita for New York City that spans two centuries...
link
The link to the yahoo article, (which is poorly written, references the same article as the second link. Here's a free version of the whole Duwe article, if you need it. link
My previous comment was unclear.
I'd written a posting with three citations two posts up. Two of the links referenced the same article, one directly the other indirectly. Neither gave the full article text. It seemed unethical to double cite a source making it seem like I'd quoted two people rather than one. I also wanted to give the full text for the article that I cited (twice.) Hope that clears up what I've written.
Interesting stuff! Thank you, Ryan!
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I've been around over half a century, and I can assure you that every single time I've seen a media report (print or TV) about a subject I knew personally, it has been inaccurate. Usually -- though not always -- the errors were only minor ones, introduced by a reporter who lacked either the time or the inclination to truly understand the story. Or, to give the reporters their due, it might have been equally clueless editors who fouled up the story. In any case, accuracy is sacrificed to expediency: there are deadlines, and most people won't notice or care as long as we get the general flavor of the story correct.
These days, when the line between news story and editorial is blurred to nonexistence, even the general flavor is likely to be wrong. And our broad and high-speed communications network ensures the near-instant propagation of these errors all over the world.
Posted by: SursumCorda on April 22, 2007 06:38 AM