Are Tucson killings our Tivoli incursion?

THE EDITOR, Sir:

WHEN I read Mr Kevin Sangster's letter in Tuesday's Gleaner, I couldn't help but wonder if it shouldn't have been written in a United States (US) newspaper and been about Jamaica's recent bloodbath in Tivoli Gardens, rather than the other way round and about a far less significant subject.

What do I mean? The US media has a way of making into 'mountains' news items that in essence mean very little as far as their ability to affect the course of world events (molehills) and at the same time taking potentially earth-shaking items like Jamaica's recent capital city shoot-out and rendering them all but insignificant.

For example, few major US news sources covered the Tivoli Gardens security operation or the significance of the Golding-Dudus connection in any detail at all, a set of events in which far more people died than at the Tucson Safeway and whose significance approached no less than that of the effect of a 'bloody political coup' in a democratic, Third-World nation, no less.

Not 'important' enough?

Did anyone bother during all that reporting to mention if there were any 'politically inspired' and 'misguided' young madmen, youths with psychological problems, firing from behind a makeshift barricade in those Kingston suburbs? I'm sure there was at least one and no doubt quite a few. But no, it wasn't important. That wasn't the slant they wanted on the story. That was not the way it was supposed to read.

So, when Mr Sangster says we should take heed, and The Gleaner's rates it as 'Letter of the Day', what does that really say about the news media's current contribution to our problems? What about its responsibility to know what is and isn't really important?

Do we really think no one else died from a disturbed shooter's gunfire in the US last week? And why aren't we reading their stories? Because nobody 'important' died?

I am, etc.,

Ed McCoy

mmhobo48@juno.com