Tags: Today’s Boston Globe: Police shoot bear in Newton on page A1. Police shoot man in Dorchester on page B1. Seems odd to me.
— Chuck Tanowitz (@ctanowitz) June 3, 2013
Today’s Boston Globe: Police shoot bear in Newton on page A1. Police shoot man in Dorchester on page B1. Seems odd to me.
— Chuck Tanowitz (@ctanowitz) June 3, 2013
I get the sentiment of his tweet but hopefully people understand why. First time the Newton Police shot a bear. How many times have cops had to use their weapons on people in Dorchester? Exactly. It’s actually more newsworthy to shoot a bear in Newton.
@Kim, I am guessing that Chuck T was going for irony. Of course people are far more interested in the story about police shooting a bear in Newton than they are about police shooting a man in Dorchester. It is kind of sad actually.
I don’t know the stats but I don’t believe Boston Police shoot and KILL people very often.
That’s because they usually tranquilize them and relocate them to Springfield.
@Kim,
Just to be clear, the Newton Police did not shoot the bear. The Enviornmental Police did.
You may be right that the Newton police didn’t shoot the bear, but you can still put them in the law enforcement category. This is a much bigger issue within the context of journalism and who actually runs it. Today there are stories about investigations on both sides. The Newton bear scored page B1, the Dorchester man is on page B2.
But consider these stories in the context of two recent articles on race and class in journalism. One points out the role of unpaid internships. If you want to be a journalist you need to first work for free. Who can afford to do that? The second, from The Nation, looks purely at race and class in newsrooms.
Those factors are clearly at work here.
Chuck Tanowitz — I agree w you. And today, the “race and class” context is even more complex. Bear in a city tree, vs. Russian suspect killed inside his home? We’ll question gov’t procedure w the bear.
But part of the out of town fascination w the Newton bear is that outsiders, which includes a larger population that hunts, fishes and camps (different context, they call a bear “game”), knows that Newton will react to the bear as if it too is a minority (politically correctness gone too far)