You know what's NOT a good bath toy for a 5 year-old?

[krispos42]

52. My premise...

...is that in the age of social media re-posting, there are many topics that become flash-in-the-pan items of discussion, concern, etc. The system that lets a fringe RW theory of objective, demonstrable, stupidity move up the food chain from a blog to Breitbart to Drudge to talk radio to Faux News to "what everybody knows" can, in a similar fashion, move other stories around out of proportion to their inherent newsworthiness.

So, there have been X documented cases this week of very young children being accidentally killed by other very young children, using guns, that is directly tied to irresponsible parenting.

Okay, fine.


How does that compare to a random week last month? Last quarter? Last year?

I don't know. Why don't we find out?


If the last week was a particularly bad week, is it the start of a trend, or it is just a statistical "burp"?


And this is why I question the media's ability to report this kind of information:

[div class=excerpt style=background:#AFEEEE]Gun crime has plunged, but Americans think it's up, says study
By Emily Alpert This post has been corrected, as indicated below.
May 7, 2013, 12:46 p.m.

Gun crime has plunged in the United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s, including gun killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two new studies of government data show.

Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew Research Center.

<snip>

Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew, which surveyed more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.

It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew found. Crime has also been a growing focus for national newscasts and morning network shows in the past five years but has become less common on local television news.

<more>

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-gun-crimes-pew-report-20130507,0,3022693.story


But, obviously, I should not question the corporate media when they report on guns. Everything else they get wrong and are biased about, except guns.