{"id":58039,"date":"2020-08-11T04:08:39","date_gmt":"2020-08-11T09:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=58039"},"modified":"2020-08-11T04:08:39","modified_gmt":"2020-08-11T09:08:39","slug":"58039","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=58039","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Why? Because Black people shooting other Black people in outbreaks of gang violence remains strictly \u201clocal news.\u201d It\u2019s not of interest to the national media because it doesn\u2019t fit the narratives mentioned above. Nearly all gang shootings are done with illegal, unregistered handguns, so it doesn\u2019t work for the gun control angle. And if it\u2019s not a White person shooting people it doesn\u2019t work for the rest of the current messaging plan. So down the memory hole it goes.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Worst Mass Shooting You Never Heard About (This Year, Anyway)<\/a><\/p>\n

In the early hours of the morning yesterday[Sunday], there was a massive party taking place on the 3300 block of Dubois Place in Southeast Washington, D.C. The good times came screeching to a halt when sustained gunfire broke out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When the smoke cleared, one 17-year-old male was dead and another twenty people had been shot. Among them was an off-duty police officer who had responded to the violence and was left \u201cfighting for her life.\u201d No suspects have been identified.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the curious part about this horrible tale. Unless you happened to live in the District and were watching the local news, you probably didn\u2019t hear about it. If we all put our heads together, we might be able to figure out why. (WJLA News, ABC7, Washington)<\/p>\n

\n

A teenage father is dead and 20 people were shot including an off-duty D.C. police officer early Sunday morning at a block party in Southeast Washington.<\/p>\n

The victim has been identified as 17-year-old Christopher Brown.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really don\u2019t understand how my child\u2019s life is gone. 17, my oldest, I have five boys. Just an innocent king\u2019s life is taken for whatever the reason,\u201d the teen\u2019s mother said Sunday.<\/p>\n

His mother says Brown\u2019s family isn\u2019t handling the news of his passing well and the teen\u2019s aunt told reporters that he has a 1-year-old son and another child on the way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Multiple people were hospitalized, but none were listed as having life-threatening injuries aside from the off-duty police officer. Perhaps it\u2019s a minor blessing that only one person was killed, but this was still a serious bloodbath. I\u2019ve been searching the 2020 news archives this morning and as near as I can tell this is the worst mass shooting of the year. (Well\u2026\u00a0so far<\/em>, anyway. Fingers crossed.)<\/p>\n

One might imagine that this would be big news. I\u2019m old enough to remember when our major cable news outlets and newspapers were fixated on mass shootings. Or at least the ones that fit the matching narratives of \u201ctoo many guns in America\u201d and \u201cdangerous white men at war with non-Asian minorities.\u201d This was particularly true in 2015 and 2016 in the runup to the last presidential election. But perhaps the media circus has packed up its tent and moved on.<\/p>\n

Because of the nature of my job, I tend to have CNN on in my home office (with the sound muted) most of the day so I can keep an eye on the chyron. I suppose it\u2019s possible that I missed it but I haven\u2019t seen one segment covering this event yet. They do have\u00a0one article<\/a>\u00a0up on their website with a few paragraphs worth of details, so if you knew enough details to search for it you could find something there. Not so at MSNBC. No videos of coverage of the story were found and\u00a0searches of the victim\u2019s name<\/a>\u00a0or even the phrase \u201cmass shooting\u201d returned no results. The same goes for\u00a0the main NBC News website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To their credit, ABC News has\u00a0a duplicate of the article<\/a>\u00a0published by their local affiliate ABC7 News on their website, but no additional coverage or commentary. I was doing a radio hit this morning on WTIC in Connecticut and I brought this story up. The host, who covers news such as this for a living, hadn\u2019t even heard about it. There\u2019s pretty much a media blackout of this story going on.<\/p>\n

This is reminiscent of another, similar event that I was beating the drum about back in December of 2017. Mass shootings were all over the news that year, with the two biggest being the San Bernardino massacre and the Waco, Texas biker gang shootout. But the third-largest took place in Bunny Friend Park in New Orleans. Seventeen people were shot at the live filming of a music video, including a ten-year-old boy who was projected to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life after taking a round in the spine. And unless you were a subscriber to the Times-Picayune newspaper or watched the local news stations,\u00a0you probably never heard about it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Why? Because Black people shooting other Black people in outbreaks of gang violence remains strictly \u201clocal news.\u201d It\u2019s not of interest to the national media because it doesn\u2019t fit the narratives mentioned above. Nearly all gang shootings are done with illegal, unregistered handguns, so it doesn\u2019t work for the gun control angle. And if it\u2019s not a White person shooting people it doesn\u2019t work for the rest of the current messaging plan. So down the memory hole it goes. Please send your prayers to the family of 17-year-old Christopher Brown who already had one child with another on the way. Somebody should at least remember\u00a0his<\/em>\u00a0name.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why? Because Black people shooting other Black people in outbreaks of gang violence remains strictly \u201clocal news.\u201d It\u2019s not of interest to the national media because it doesn\u2019t fit the narratives mentioned above. Nearly all gang shootings are done with illegal, unregistered handguns, so it doesn\u2019t work for the gun control angle. And if it\u2019s … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hypocrisy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58040,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58039\/revisions\/58040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}