A group of protesters shut down Interstate 93 in Boston yesterday (New England Cable News) by chaining themselves to 1200-lb. barrels filled with concrete. This was right in the middle of the morning rush hour and yet many local friends were unaware of the multi-hour traffic stoppage.
From this we can conclude that a massive traffic jam preventing people in Eastern Massachusetts from getting to work is so common that it is not newsworthy!
The theme of the protest was “Black Lives Matter,” which, again judging by the lack of news coverage and public awareness of the event, is not true for the average Bostonian. And it also seems to be an uncommon belief nationally, to judge from the coverage of the global jihad last week. A variety of people around the world died in the name of Islam. The white Christians at Charlie Hebdo received a lot of press coverage. The Parisian Jews who died in the immediate aftermath received about 1/1000th as much ink. The black Nigerian victims of Boko Haram received about 1/1000th as much ink as did the Parisian Jews (perhaps less, if adjusted for body count).
Separately, if highway shutdowns become more common I wonder when the government will start investigating to what extent the helicopter industry is funding the protesters. Certainly yesterday was a great advertisement for Boston Medflight (background: Guidestar says that this non-profit org has roughly $25 million in annual revenue and that Suzanne Wedel, the CEO, is paid about $250,000 per year), though this story says that the weather at the time was not conducive to flying.
Related:
There may be reasons why the slain Charlie Hebdo cartoonists received more media attention than the slain shoppers in the Paris supermarket, other than their racial and religious heritage. Cartoonists are media professionals. The media professionals who create the news are unsurprisingly very interested in their story. Daniel Pearl, a murdered journalist with a Jewish background, may illustrate this effect. His case did receive a decent amount of publicity – Angelina Jolie played his wife in a Hollywood movie. Getting murdered while working as an investigative journalist or a provocative cartoonist is more interesting to the media than getting murdered buying knishes, for some reason.
Fortunately, our culture conditions us to be very upset when people we don’t know have their freedoms of expression taken.
Unfortunately, our culture conditions us to be apathetic when people we don’t know have their lives taken.