More Vigilante Madness?...this time in Texas

[alcibiades_mystery]

15. Here is a basic fact about news that every media study in the last 40 years demonstrates

If an incident makes the news in a big way, similar incidents will also make the news in the weeks that follow. The same incidents could happen all the time, but they suddenly become "newsworthy" when they can be linked to another big news story. I think the classic study on this had to do with mine accidents in Britain. It was shown definitively that the rate of these accidents never changed, nor had their severity. But after a single major mine accident made news, the next several weeks of newspaper coverage had stories on multiple minor accidents that would have been otherwise ignored. It was also shown that previous attempts to get coverage for mine accidents were also failures, and that the editorial decision-making was aware of the possibility of mine accident stories, but didn't accept these as legitimate news until after the major mine accident. Point being: what you're witnessing is a fairly predictable news effect: because of the Martin story, these other stories will be amplified, will come across your media radar. But this type of shit happens all the time, like the mine accidents. The increase is a media effect, not an objective increase. The rate of racist vigilanteism is likely constant over the past several years, if not decades.