It's taken from Media Scout a "morning briefing of what's leading, what's buried and waht's falling between the cracks of Canada's top media www.maissonneuve.org/media scout.
Far too often the when investigating "controversial" topics -- such as teenage violence, which needs to be examined deeply and as a wound with a grief process attached for victims, families and the community -- reporters rush in with sociological analysis. Daniel Casey has a truly excellent focus on what's wrong with the media's rush to judgment.
A BLURRY PICTURE OF GUN VIOLENCE
by Daniel Casey
June 11, 2007Toronto seems to lose too many of its young men to gun violence,
but the reality of their lives and deaths is too often obscured by
incoherent reporting on these tragic episodes and their aftermath. The Star and CBC
Sunday Night lead while CTV News goes inside with the latest such sad event, this time in the
Rexdale section of northwestern Toronto where four men were shot on
Saturday afternoon. CTV News reports that among the few details released
by Toronto police yesterday were the names of the victims. While Jose
Hierro-Saez was killed, Paddy McFrinn, Moustaffa Omar and Matthew Dale
survived the sudden fusillade that came without warning from a silver
Mercedes SUV. Yet the media abhor an information vacuum, and the Star
seems determined to fill it with suspicion and surmise. After making the
rounds of the victims' houses and hospital rooms and failing to elicit
useful quotes from their shocked relatives and friends, the Star
determines that “the code of silence quickly fell about the
violence.” In the absence of any evidence that the shooting was
gang-related, the Star's Rosie DiManno decides to go after gangs anyway.
DiManno looks around Rexdale and unsurprisingly fails to find an obvious
explanation for the violence from what she can see: physical objects that
don't normally open fire on people, such as “schools, strip malls,
[a] community centre, and a clot of public housing.” She takes time,
however, to take swipes at the "clot" and its residents, handing out disses
to the neighbourhood itself (“mind-numbingly suburban”) and the
oft-cited "some parents" who must have “tragically failed to instil
proper values in their kids.”
systems, and a decreasing (but still high) proportion of the population
that incorrectly believes that crime is on the rise. Yet as earlier deaths
come into perspective, new victims come into view. The news cycle
imperfectly matches the cycle of violence that it reports, and the result
is a fuzzy media picture of the causes and effects of gun violence, making
it all the more difficult to determine just what exactly is happening and
how to prevent it. In one example of this, CBC Sunday Night runs a single
story on its broadcast that is split into three separate items online. The
main event of the broadcast story was Sunday's antiviolence demonstration
through the rough north-end neighbourhood around Jane and Finch, with CBC
Sunday Night juxtaposing previous pro-gun comments from federal Public
Security minister Stockwell Day with images of mourning mothers on the
march. Downtown, the province announced an extra $5 million to police an upscale entertainment district, even as Toronto police chief Bill Blair cited a 40 percent decrease in the number of gun incidents in the city since 2005. Back at the city's northern
fringe, police identified the four young victims—the oldest merely 20 years old—of
Saturday's daylight shooting. Three separate events in three different
neighbourhoods, jostling for space within the same broadcast segment,
start blurring into one another. The victims would be better served by an
examination of their stories outside of the vague cloud of sadness and
confusion that surrounds these events; we can't even begin to think about
gun policy and gang violence unless the surrounding issues and media
responses come into better focus as well.
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