Hub of Controversially Publicized Gang Violence: The Hessians are coming, and they’re scared.
While bullets fly in some of Boston’s neighborhoods, bloggers discuss how to appropriately cover the carnage. Hub cop John Daley blasts the Boston Herald for irresponsible coverage of a recent gangland murder. Adam Reilly wonders if the Boston Globe’s recent reporting on a truce between two rival gangs may have helped ending it. Herald reporter Jay Fitzgerald dismisses the criticism, but his boss is apparently of a different mind.
It’s a difficult balance for media to strike: Violent crime is newsy news and as the local television news mantra has it, “if it bleeds, it leads.” It was only a few months ago, if I remember correctly, that a bunch of young people from crime-infested parts of the city complained that media only reports on the bad stuff that happens in their neighborhoods. But if media doesn’t report on the violence down there, then it will no doubt be accused of ignoring the plight of those affected.
The ramifications of how crime is and isn’t reported go far beyond the city limits. Recently I was told about a young German man who flatly refused to ride the T in Boston. Yes, he would ride the subway in Germany, but not in America, where “everybody is armed,” as he reportedly put it. I laughed, but a decade ago I was of almost exactly the same opinion, although my apprehensions were expressed differently: I almost refused to go outside after dark. In Brookline. The whole time we (me and my now wife) strolled through Brookline I was constantly looking around, expecting “wilding” (it was a popular term back then) gang members to emerge from the shadows. Isn’t that how everybody feels when they visit Coolidge Corner?
How is such stunning ignorance possible? In my case, I blame Newsweek and Time magazines, both of which I subscribed to or read at libraries in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Time and Newsweek positively loved putting guns on their covers. Their articles spoke of rampant violence in the streets and of unimaginable bloodshed. What the magazines failed to point out, for reasons that are obvious to Americans but essentially incomprehensible to Europeans, was that violence in American cities is constrained to rather small geographic areas that are not only easily avoided but in fact almost impossible for a tourist not to avoid. So while Boston has a homicide rate that’s about 10 - 15 times that of Sweden’s, the parts of the city that I roam are in virtually every way safer than the streets in, say, downtown Stockholm (most years, the murder rate in Massachusetts excluding Boston is pretty similar to Sweden’s homicide rate).
But how do you communicate this to people who don’t have the foggiest idea about the nuances of contemporary American society without upsetting or demeaning important constituencies at home? One probably can’t, so one likely won’t, and if the result is that European tourists and businessmen think Boston is one heck of a dangerous place, then so be it. Does it even matter whether German tourists are too scared to ride the T?
