Originally posted by PeakiteThis is absolutely amazing to me. A couple of observations. These children were stabbed. Nearly as many children lost their lives in this event as happened in the Amish shooting, but those children were shot. They were also white. The four children in Louisville were Muslim.
None that I've seen.
The week prior to this the press gave blanket coverage of the school shooting in Colorado where only one child died. She was also white.
The Andrea Yates case is just yet another example of hipocracy.
Originally posted by kirksey957well then how did you hear about it?
This is absolutely amazing to me. A couple of observations. These children were stabbed. Nearly as many children lost their lives in this event as happened in the Amish shooting, but those children were shot. They were also white. The four children in Louisville were Muslim.
The week prior to this the press gave blanket coverage of the school shoo ...[text shortened]... ld died. She was also white.
The Andrea Yates case is just yet another example of hipocracy.
Originally posted by kirksey957What exactly are you implying?
This is absolutely amazing to me. A couple of observations. These children were stabbed. Nearly as many children lost their lives in this event as happened in the Amish shooting, but those children were shot. They were also white. The four children in Louisville were Muslim.
The week prior to this the press gave blanket coverage of the school shooting in Colorado where only one child died. She was also white.
The murders you describe have obviously less impact because they weren't done in a public environment. I don't think it has anything to do with religion or race at all.
Originally posted by PalynkaI agree. Murders within a family in a foreign country generally don't get much media coverage here. I hadn't heard about this case, but when I looked for it, I found a short article about it in one of the big Norwegian newspapers: http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/article1486625.ece
What exactly are you implying?
The murders you describe have obviously less impact because they weren't done in a public environment. I don't think it has anything to do with religion or race at all.
Originally posted by PalynkaI tend to think that when a white woman like Susan Smith or Andrea Yates goes crazy and has a little bit of bizarre religion to go with it, the press are all over it.
What exactly are you implying?
The murders you describe have obviously less impact because they weren't done in a public environment. I don't think it has anything to do with religion or race at all.
Originally posted by kirksey957I think you're just looking too hard for a press bias. These Louisville murders weren't religious sacrifices or had bizarre religion. (I don't know...did they?)
I tend to think that when a white woman like Susan Smith or Andrea Yates goes crazy and has a little bit of bizarre religion to go with it, the press are all over it.
I also had never heard about Susan Smith or Andrea Yates, but I don't know if you had the international press in mind, as well.
Originally posted by kirksey957I don't know -- I haven't watched much news lately. But I can tell you that school-based shootings have a direct impact on me and my classroom. In our school we're having lock-down drills. I have to teach third graders how to be safe without scaring them. We also have people in our sleepy little town who are *likely candidates* for coming in with guns, based on their past behavior at the school (both parents and former students). We worried about them BEFORE the recent death spree. School-based shootings are up close and personal for most schoolchildren and their parents and teachers.
I'm curious if there has been any coverage in your area of the murders of four young Somali children in Louisville, KY. Their father killed them.
That doesn't negate the fact that coverage of missing and murdered children is publicized according to race. Milwaukee had a missing who no one ever heard of, because she's African American.
Originally posted by kirksey957As the new appears to have only broken in the area itself yesterday, it's quite possible it was too late to make the Sunday papers over here. I'd still be surprised to see it on Monday too, but that's mainly because school shootings aside, not that many US murders get coverage here.
This is absolutely amazing to me. A couple of observations. These children were stabbed. Nearly as many children lost their lives in this event as happened in the Amish shooting, but those children were shot. They were also white. The four children in Louisville were Muslim.
The week prior to this the press gave blanket coverage of the school shoo ...[text shortened]... ld died. She was also white.
The Andrea Yates case is just yet another example of hipocracy.
Originally posted by PeakiteIt was published here on Friday evening.
As the new appears to have only broken in the area itself yesterday, it's quite possible it was too late to make the Sunday papers over here. I'd still be surprised to see it on Monday too, but that's mainly because school shootings aside, not that many US murders get coverage here.
None in Nebraska. Outside Louisville the Huntington Herald-Dispatch (West Virginia) is the only paper I found that covered it.
A few observations:
1. Even in fully assimilated American families, children are tragically more likely to be murdered by a parent, etc. than by a stranger, which makes such crimes less newsworthy. Many times they go down with hardly a ripple of press notice. School shootings are an extreme case of a stranger murdering helpless children. This helped propel the global coverage of the Amish and Colorado school shootings.
2. Didn't the story of Andrea Yates get bigger play for reasons that don't usually apply to such cases? For instance, she was under psychiatric care but it's especially hard to get off on insanity in Texas, so you get a courtroom tug-of-war (in effect three trials). Pundits anyone?
3. The Louisville stabbings happened on a Friday, a day when news frequently gets lost. If someone in the government wants to bury a story they have to put out, guess when he releases it? I think it fairly likely that some national papers will eventually pick this up, once bloggers shame them enough.
4. The family were new Somali Muslim immigrants, and new to Louisville. Our local paper doesn't report whether those arrested -- or convicted -- are immigrants, legal or not (What? A shoplifter! Me?? I'm just an undocumented shopper!!). Their being immigrants and Muslims definitely make the story more newsworthy. I'm curious too about the Somali angle. Wasn't the point of Blackhawk Down that the Muslim warlords there drove out the US and the other UN peacekeepers? Where do these Somali refugees fit in the picture, and how are they adjusting, especially compared to other national groups? Are Muslim countries taking in Somali refugees? If so, which ones, and if not, why?
A thought provoking post, kirksey.
Actually, I agree with Kirksey here. I think the coverage has a lot to do with race.
At about the same time as the natalee hollaway case, a young balck woman also went missing. Some believed she may have been kidnapped. I have no idea what happened to her because it got very little press coverage.
On the other hand, the press spent countless hours covering and speculating as to what happened to Natalee.
The "news coverage" sickened me.
Had she been killed?
Has she been raped before she was killed?
Had she been sold into slavery?
If so, where had she been sold?