No Guns, No Press
The August 10 attack by Buford Furrow against children at a Jewish
community center in Los Angeles received enormous media attention. The case
also set off further demands for gun control and hate-crime laws.
Farrow's crime was atrocious and certainly merited coverage. But was the
fact that guns were involved a major reason for the massive media coverage?
If Furrow had used a car, instead of a gun, to commit his assault, would
his crime have received as much attention?
"We don't have to suppose," reports Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby
"Less than four months ago, just such an enormity took place. The media
scarcely blinked.
"On May 3, Steven Abrams drove past the Southcoast Early Childhood Learning
Center in Costa Mesa, Calif., where 40 small children were frolicking
noisily in the playground. Deciding, as he later told police, 'to execute
those children,' he pulled a U-turn, headed back toward the playground, and
floored the accelerator. The car - a 1967 Cadillac sedan - tore through the
chain-link fence, sent the jungle-gym flying, and plowed into the crowd of
children. It stopped only when it ran into a tree."
Abrams was unhurt, but he killed two children and injured four children and
a teacher. In contrast, Furrow wounded five children, killing none.
"Two dead, five injured -- Abrams's violence was far more grisly than
Furrow's, and led to a grimmer body count," Jacoby writes. "The sheer
horror of the crime, if nothing else, should have attracted frenzied media
attention. But it didn't involve guns, and it wasn't fueled by racial or
ethnic bigotry, so it attracted almost none.
"On May 5, many papers around the country ran an Associated Press story on
the Costa Mesa massacre. Perhaps half a dozen ran a follow-up, also from
the AP, on May 9.
And that was it. No drumbeat of daily coverage, no flood of editorials and
opinion columns, no army of reporters flying out to see for themselves. The
story was fully reported in California. It was virtually ignored everywhere
else.
"Does a homicidal attack on toddlers only make it to the front page when
the killer uses a gun? Is attempted mass murder only newsworthy when the
victims belong to an official minority group? Perhaps the nation's editors
and producers have a sound journalistic reason for paying so much attention
to Buford Furrow when they had paid so little to Steven Abrams. But none
comes to mind."
(Source: Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, 08/23/99)
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