Are we ignoring New Orleans?

This is a good point. People who want solutions need to hope the media will stay away, rather than fucking it up with fallacies, factual errors, etc., that only hurt the effort.

 

Well they did re-elect Ray Nagins and William Jefferson, and the national media will never point out that if they want to improve, they might want to start with getting some leadership.

 

bunch of savages in new orleans.

 

Death doesn't make for a good design package.

 

It doesn't make for good MNF pregaming, either. I think I'm going to need 96-pound Kornheiser to put all this in perspective for me.

 

Imagine this thread. People in sports who understand better what's going on than the news media. Instead of posting to a thread, why not go across the newsroom and ask what's being done about coverage of New Orleans murder rates? Wonder what the response will be after asking Mr. Editor?

"How does that fit in with our readership studies?"

That's why it doesn't get covered better.

 

We aren't just ignoring New Orleans, and I hate to say "we" because I neither live nor work in New Orleans, anyway I was researching something else and I stumbled across a scholarly report on violent crime and news coverage in the South.
Key points that I remember...
Every major city in the South has a crime problem, but the vast majority of that crime is contained to the "bad part" of town. Quite literally, 60 percent or more of the violent crime in most places was specific to one zip code.
"If it bleeds, it leads" is true for TV and print news. Violent crime got a larger percentage of coverage than white collar crime in most Southern cities. But any kind of crime didn't get the sustained, explaining why it happens coverage.
The study said that newspapers tend not to have large readerships in the poor parts of town. So the newsrooms don't get the community pressure to explain things. Those parts of the community aren't represented at the paper anyway with reporters and editors who grew up in the ghetto/barrio/etc. And extended crime coverage wasn't the kind of thing that wins awards on a regular basis since most violent crime can be easily explained. Drugs lead to gangs and gangs lead to violent crime.
So it is a nice little circle that feeds itself. The study didn't draw any conclussions outside of slamming news coverage and that it takes a city-wide effort to make things better.

 

Hopefully not the same people who proclaim they don't need proof, though. That kind of thing might shoot down credibility. You know, if anyone in the newsroom worried about something like that.

 

A piece from today's T-P about the couple....

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1168069740297680.xml&coll=1

This story is absolutely heart-breaking. I love N.O., but I'm not sure it's possible to save it at this point short of a federal takeover and martial law. The idiots who re-elected Nagin and Jefferson robbed the city of whatever good will the vast majority of the country had for it.

 

Hell, you could also ask, are we ignoring Houston? The murder rate there skyrocketed thanks directly to the refugees who stayed their after they evacuated NOLA.