That a network news show makes a news decision to run a crawl that reports the guns deaths in America while another story is being reported on during a nightly network or cable news show. The idea is to assign an off camera reporter/producer to compile the gun deaths in America during a given time period - day or week for example - and then run a crawl with the summary of those gun deaths.
An example crawl would be, ‘For the week March 1 through March 7, a total of 560 Americans were killed by guns. Of that 32 Americans were killed in mass shootings, 25 were thought to have committed suicide. Three hundred murderers were reported, 17 accidental gun deaths were reported. A total of 40 children under the age of 12.’ (or another cutoff age).
The mass killings of Kalamazoo and small town Kansas are receding. The murder of a first day on the job female police office has seized the most recent news cycles, but that too will fade. In each of these stories the networks did their news thing - devoting 2, 4, 6 news cycles to the story and then it was back to reporting on Trump’s follies. There will always be another mass shooting coming up in the next week or two for the networks to jump on.
President Obama has lamented that mass killings are becoming routine. They are routine, but what has dropped beneath even the routine coverage on the national news shows is the accumulative gun death going on in America. The mayhem is so common and pervasive that it is never reported.
And it should be reported. We have become too numb to it. The local media reports the stories as they come up. ‘Two people in Minneapolis were killed in gun violence last night…..A father killed his two daughters in Colorado Springs…..A nurse getting off work was killed in…….A distraught veteran killed himself with a shotgun in Tucumcari last night……..A wife killed her husband with a gun before turning the weapon on herself.’ All fictitious examples but we know gun deaths like this are happening every hour, every day, every week in America.
The local media does it’s dutiful reporting but the enormity of this gun slaughter is not reported in the context of what’s happening nationally when it is all added up. It’s been going on for decades. Therefore, the average news consumer doesn’t regularly comprehend this relentless slaughter.
This size of this relentless slaughter in our modern gun dystopia is big news if it is aggregated and then reported on a national news platform. I still remember the weekly body counts reported at the height of the Vietnam War - X thousand of enemy and Y hundreds of American soldiers killed each and every week. When it comes to gun violence deaths, those body counts are happening every week in America. News organizations should report this big story.
One news crawl a week on a network news show for a minute or two - that’s all I’d hope for. That’s not that much to ask. As TV is trying to drive eyeballs to their websites, the crawl could suggest that for more detailed information on gun deaths viewers could click on their news website. There the gun death data could be sliced and diced every which way. Be it in time periods of deaths - days, months, years. It could display the locations of deaths, age of victims, etc. Compelling stories from victims could be linked - even stories from local affiliates. That kind of link might encourage local stations to put even more resources on the gun death beat.
No need to editorialize, the facts are powerful enough. Gun murder has become so mundane that it is not reported on a national basis. It should be reported. It is big news.
CBS, NBC, ABC there is a big story here. CNN or MSNBC could do it. Somebody, anybody - how about it Rachel?