Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby contrasts two news events that on July 28–the drunken driving arrest of celebrity Mel Gibson, who spewed anti-Semitic slurs, and the assault on a Seattle Jewish center by a gunman who killed one woman and wounded five. Jacoby writes, “Only one of them became, in the days that followed, the big national story about anti-Semitism. The other was treated as a serious but local matter, and drew only modest coverage around the country.”
He continued, “Which would you say was the bigger story?…By any rational calculus, Incident B was far more significant…Yet after six days, a Nexis search turned up only 236 stories mentioning Haq — one-fourth the number dealing with Gibson’s drunken outburst. Why the disparity?”
Link: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/08/06/a_tale_of_2_stories