The Press Mustn’t Ignore America’s Gang Problem

“There is a formula—unfortunately, I have noticed—when it comes to many in the reality-denying national press: Make a few accurate micro-points but use them to arrive at a conclusion that no reasonable person should believe.”

Editor’s note: The following is adapted from a speech delivered by the author at The Georgia Gang Investigators Association’s summer conference in Athens, Georgia on July 11, 2023. Also, this speech was delivered prior to the scandal involving Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

In July of 2021, while I was still writing my weekly media criticism column, I published a short essay titled “When Covering Crime, an Underreported Piece of the Puzzle,” and this piece sought to explore the reality, as I see it, that the press, particularly the national press, habitually fails to convey to readers the degree to which gangs, especially in certain jurisdictions, account for a sizable portion of all crimes committed.

Expanding on this initial premise, I further asserted that such awareness is also necessary to allow readers, who also double, of course, as voters, to understand better the pathologies that typically are associated with (or occur alongside) gangs, as well as to properly evaluate the various debates that intersect with discussions on gangs: from the reality that certain types of criminals might not be candidates for, in the parlance of the day, rehabilitation; to debates about the constitutionality or wisdom behind certain surveillance or policing practices; to the fact, as we have seen in places from Georgia to New York City to El Salvador (though that final location warrants a very separate discussion), that targeted gang crackdowns can be strikingly effective in reducing crime.

This piece “When Covering Crime, an Underreported Piece of the Puzzle,” along with the magazine I co-founded Merion West at various points featuring a number of op-eds and interviews with experts on gangs, is what I believe prompted my invitation to speak at this forum.

Now, this piece on gangs mirrored a couple of other media criticism columns I wrote during my time in that role in how it was structured. This piece was similar to another column I wrote in 2019 titled “Media’s Under-Coverage of Disease,” admittedly published before the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the concomitant, nonstop coverage on the part of the press about that virus. However, in that article on how disease is typically covered, I discussed how news stories, including ones about what kills and most gravely harms us, widely miss the mark in terms of proportionality. News story after news story is trotted out day in and day out about various negative things, and many of these negative things are negative insofar as they discuss the loss of life. But the big culprits in terms of what actually kills people, from heart disease to cancer to road accidents and falls, are chronically under discussed in favor of coverage of other things. Remember that it is always curious to evaluate what the press chooses to focus on.