I mentioned that my wife's students were more than a little puzzled about the relative lack of coverage of the Red Lake shootings. My long-suffering readers chimed in with the reasons. I'll add mine.
Yes, they were all geared up on Schiavo, with its exciting opportunity to pander to the religious right, but I think Red Lake fell uncomfortably outside the script, which has become increasingly out-of-date to begin with. Faced with the earlier rash of school shootings, which were happening in white suburban schools, not the failing inner-city hellholes big media would have preferred, and with the inescapable conclusion that the crux of the matter was easy access to guns, which big media wasn't gonna get anywhere near, the script evolved into the Internet-using-death-rock-and-violent-videogame-fan story we all know. And Red Lake isn't white, or suburban, and every student in America is on at least one of the internets now, and even CNN has heard that rap is popular. Plus, Weise turns out to have been more than a little familiar with some Nazi sites, which is a topic I don't recall every seeing on teevee news, not that I watch it much.
No, it's not a simple racial equation, but had this been another middle-class white district the Schiavo wall-to-wall would have been interrupted a bit more and the old script given a thorough dusting off. In the event it plays as a serious problem and not an easy morality tale. And big media does not demand Republicans actually solve problems, unless the Republicans were the ones who pointed them out in the first place.
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