Shoplifting Is Big News; Stealing Millions From Workers Is Not
JULY 19, 2021
STEVEN KEEHNER
Urban crime is the golden child of local media, as recent FAIR coverage (6/21/21) has shown. But as FAIRs Julie Hollar recently noted, the amount of attention given to a topic does not always reflect the seriousness of the situation.
An alleged crime surge at Walgreens drugstores in San Francisco was a hot topic for Bay Area news outlets in the early months of 2021. When Lyanne Melendez, a reporter for the ABC-owned KGO-TV in San Francisco, tweeted out a cellphone video of a brazen shoplifter, it elevated this narrative into a nationwide story. The video purports to show a man apparently filling a garbage bag with items before riding a bicycle out of the store, as two people, one of whom seems to be a store security guard, record him.
FAIR identified 309 published pieces on the 21-second video, using a combination of Nexis and Google advanced search to find every article published by a news outlet, from the videos publication on June 14 to July 12a 28-day timeframe.
Compare this to another Walgreens-related theft story: the November settlement of a wage theft and labor law violation class-action lawsuit against Walgreens, filed by employees in California for $4.5 million.
A multimillion-dollar settlement coming after a two-year legal struggle, this should have been a national news story, not to mention a major topic in local California outlets. But FAIR was unable to find a single general news outlet that covered the settlement, looking from November 2020 to July 2021, using the same search parameters as the aforementioned shoplifting video.
More:
https://fair.org/home/shoplifting-is-big-news-stealing-millions-from-workers-is-not/
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,001 posts)Bernardo de La Paz
(49,001 posts)LT Barclay
(2,598 posts)Property crime is a about $266 million.
Reported wage theft $4-6 billion.
Sorry, don't remember the source.