Newsbusters makes a big deal out of the major TV networks failing to cover the serious murder epidemic in Chicago, see their article for details. To be sure, the right would like it if the MSM embarrassed Mayor Rahm Emanuel with this information. But not reporting it is nothing new.
Before he married my father worked alongside police and sheriff deputies in the greater L.A. area, in a variety of investigative capacities. I suppose I was maybe 11 or 12 when he told me there were murders almost every night in the poor sections of L.A., murders that never made their way into the pages of the Chandlers' L.A. Times or Hearst's Examiner.
I remember asking him why this was so. He said it was because no one beyond the victims' immediate families cared. Implicit in his comment was the editorial belief that few people in those communities read the papers and other folks simply didn't want to know. So not reporting inner city shootings "above the fold" is business as usual, going back 100 years.
