Does attention to shooting miss the mark?

Back Bay homicide draws coverage galore

YESTERDAY’S DAYTIME FATAL SHOOTING of a taxi driver near the Prudential Center in Boston was the top story among local media outlets throughout the day and it’s the lead front-page story in both Boston daily newspapers this morning.

The argument for the flood-the-zone coverage, of course, is that the more out of the ordinary an event, the more newsworthy it is.

By that measure, it’s certainly true that daytime shootings in the Back Bay are unusual. But it’s hard to ignore the obvious disparity between this coverage and that given to the dozens of other homicides that occur in the city each year, and hard to avoid the sense, at least as projected by media attention, that gun mayhem is to be expected in crime-prone neighborhoods and lives lost to it there are cheaper.

The Globe account of yesterday’s killing listed no fewer than nine reporters who contributed to the story. The story in the Herald, with its depleted newsroom ranks, had three reporters in the byline.

The Herald identified the victim as Luckinson Oruma, a 60-year-old devoted father of five, who labored long hours behind the wheel to send all his children to college. A 34-year-old Rhode Island man was arrested nearby and is expected to be arraigned on charges of murder, armed carjacking, and unlawful possession of a firearm.

“It’s shocking because in Boston, it doesn’t happen,” Joe Litvack, treasure of the Independent Taxi Operators Association, told the Globe. “This type of thing just doesn’t happen here, it’s not the usual thing for cab drivers anymore to have worry about this type of thing.”

It’s certainly true that such attacks on cab drivers are not common in the city. But the high-profile coverage of the killing seemed as much driven by its daytime occurrence and its location — in a downtown area filled with shoppers, tourists, and white-collar workers who don’t expect gunshots as background sounds of the city.

There was an echo in Tuesday’s incident to a shooting 20 years ago in very nearly the same spot. In January 1999, a 15-year-old Roxbury teen was shot and wounded in the glass walkway to the Copley Place mall. A 14-year-old was arrested.

Even the Boston clergy working then on the frontlines to stem youth violence were taken aback by the location of the shooting.

“The unspoken rule of the terms of engagement has been broken,” Rev. Eugene Rivers, cofounder of Boston’s Ten Point Coalition, told the Globe.”There is general understanding the neighborhood-based violence is contained, although [not] accepted,” he said, “and you don’t bring violence and mayhem in neutral areas.”

The fact is that we have normalized “neighborhood-based violence” — as long as it occurs in certain neighborhoods.

Meet the Author

Michael Jonas

Executive Editor, CommonWealth

About Michael Jonas

Michael Jonas has worked in journalism in Massachusetts since the early 1980s. Before joining the CommonWealth staff in early 2001, he was a contributing writer for the magazine for two years. His cover story in CommonWealth's Fall 1999 issue on Boston youth outreach workers was selected for a PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Michael got his start in journalism at the Dorchester Community News, a community newspaper serving Boston's largest neighborhood, where he covered a range of urban issues. Since the late 1980s, he has been a regular contributor to the Boston Globe. For 15 years he wrote a weekly column on local politics for the Boston Sunday Globe's City Weekly section.

Michael has also worked in broadcast journalism. In 1989, he was a co-producer for "The AIDS Quarterly," a national PBS series produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, and in the early 1990s, he worked as a producer for "Our Times," a weekly magazine program on WHDH-TV (Ch. 7) in Boston.

Michael lives in Dorchester with his wife and their two daughters.

About Michael Jonas

Michael Jonas has worked in journalism in Massachusetts since the early 1980s. Before joining the CommonWealth staff in early 2001, he was a contributing writer for the magazine for two years. His cover story in CommonWealth's Fall 1999 issue on Boston youth outreach workers was selected for a PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Michael got his start in journalism at the Dorchester Community News, a community newspaper serving Boston's largest neighborhood, where he covered a range of urban issues. Since the late 1980s, he has been a regular contributor to the Boston Globe. For 15 years he wrote a weekly column on local politics for the Boston Sunday Globe's City Weekly section.

Michael has also worked in broadcast journalism. In 1989, he was a co-producer for "The AIDS Quarterly," a national PBS series produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, and in the early 1990s, he worked as a producer for "Our Times," a weekly magazine program on WHDH-TV (Ch. 7) in Boston.

Michael lives in Dorchester with his wife and their two daughters.

Following last week’s killing of 12 people at a Virginia Beach municipal office, Democratic presidential candidates Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren both pushed back at the outsized attention given to mass shootings, which account for only a tiny share of gun deaths in the US.

Booker said on CNN on Sunday that the killings were “a tragedy today, but every day in the aggregate we have mass shootings that go on in neighborhoods like mine … an inner-city black and brown community. We are not helpless to stop this. This is a uniquely American problem. We have carnage in our country that no other nation sees.”

Warren was asked about the Virginia Beach shootings on Saturday at a state Democratic Party convention in California. “It’s not just mass shootings,” she said, adding that each day in America, gun violence occurs “on sidewalks and playgrounds and people’s backyards. It’s happening family by family across the country. And it doesn’t get the same headlines. And that is wrong.”