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One of the great chicken-or-egg questions of our time is
this: Does the American news media mirror society as it is,
actively attempt to shape public opinion, or simply reflect its own
biases? I’m not sure there is one neat answer, but if there is my
money’s on “All of the above.”
Take the tragic cases of three recent slaying sprees.
In the first, the husband and mother of a Chicago judge were
murdered in the judge’s home February 28, sparking a days-long
manhunt that centered on a white supremacist group. The triggerman,
later discovered to be a deranged loner who had had a lawsuit
dismissed by the judge, shot himself to death after being pulled
over by police.
In the second case an accused rapist overpowered a guard
and used her gun to kill a judge and two others in an Atlanta
courthouse on March 11. It is alleged he also killed an off-duty
U.S. Customs agent March 12, hours before his capture.
On the same day, a man opened fire at a Brookfield,
Wisconsin church meeting, killing seven parishioners and himself,
more victims than the two other tragedies combined. Two of the
slain were minors; a 10-year-old girl was among the wounded.
Unless I miss my guess, most casual consumers of news
will have heard of the Chicago and Atlanta shootings but not those
in Brookfield. Few of the electronic media reports I’ve heard led
with the church story; the two March 13 newspapers I have at hand
report it on pages 10 and 17, respectively. The Atlanta story is on
the front pages of both.
I understand the newsworthiness of the Chicago and
Atlanta cases, if only for their shock value, but is the bigger
massacre at a church any less appalling? I suspect most Americans
spend more time in church than court, if only for the occasional
wedding or funeral. While I know folks for whom court is
practically a second home, most of us are more likely to be found
praying than pleading.
The Brookfield story took place on more familiar ground,
so why the heavy focus on the court-related shootings compared to
the page 17 treatment of the church killings?
The Brookfield slayings occurred at a service of the
Living Church of God, which at least one Associated Press story
described as “evangelical.” It is a small denomination, with about
6,300 members worldwide according to AP. It also holds beliefs that
vary significantly from mainstream Christian evangelical churches
and is not listed among the members of the National Association of
Evangelicals.
None of this is relevant to the calamity in Brookfield,
but the press appears to have lumped them in with conservative
Christian churches and devalued their lives accordingly. At the
very least the news value of their deaths has clearly been marked
down.
This is nothing new. Just five months after the
Columbine High School slayings in 1999, a gunman entered the
Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas and fatally shot four
teenagers and three young adults celebrating an annual nationwide
prayer event. One of the two papers now sitting on my desk reported
that story on page 17, the same placement it gave the Brookfield
shootings and apparently it’s preferred spot for massacred
Christians. The other paper didn’t report it at all until two days
after the event.
Can anyone say with a straight face that the Brookfield
and Fort Worth murders wouldn’t have knocked everything else off the
front page if they had happened at a mosque or synagogue? Or, I can
safely add, a courtroom? Whether this is bias, media meddling or
simply the way folks feel, it is cause for more than a little soul
searching.
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