Like one of my friends said, "Dear journalists -- there is a club on every other block in this city. If someone is shot on the same block, they are not shot at the club on that block, nor does that club's name need to be in your article. Thanks."
But hey, San Francisco Chronicle, thanks so much for saying "near a San Francisco nightclub" in the first sentence, and then waiting until the third paragraph before bothering to mention that "The shooting happened near the Ruby Skye nightclub, but police say it was unrelated to the club because it was closed that night."
Whoever you are, anonymous author of that article, you are an incompetent ass.
I, for one, am sick and tired of all these people getting shot near convenience stores, banks and churches. When are the police going to shut down those problem churches so we can all be safe again?
6 Responses:
There must be some mistake. No city with anti-2nd amendment laws as extreme as San Franciso's could possibly have any shootings.
KRON morning news: A night of two nightclub shootings. Blah blah... name of second club .....
Finally, one sentence: police say it probably had nothing to do with the club which was closed at the time.
Next sentence: Recently San Francisco gave the entertainment commission new powers to shut down clubs to help fight the wave of crime.......
They didn't just bury the lede: they smothered it.
Too much time spent working as a proofreader: I notice silly things even when I don't try. :) You forgot to update the date field on that post, so it shows as Sat 7-Aug, even though the navigation buttons on the previous post point to 9 Aug.
"Four people were shot near Academy of Art buildings in just 36 hours this weekend..."
You have competing narratives. Your Starbucks gun crime narrative is currently not as good, because Starbucks makes the audience think about drinking coffee, whereas a club is that scary place with loud music and young people. What you need is a completely unrelated bloody rampage at a Starbucks. Then the narrative works, you only need one data point to draw a curve in journalism, the rest of the pattern can be completely invented.
Actually what the news media have inadvertently highlighted by their switch to purveyors of fiction is that we were always heavily swayed by fiction anyway. CSI influences what victims of crime expect from an investigator, but also how criminals act. When Hollywood tapes a bunch of cats together, it actually changes how we imagine horses. Say "Russian submarine captain" and a substantial fraction of people are visualising a Scotsman. Show a suicide, and people will go out and duplicate the method. The inevitable demise of mass media won't actually make these effects go away (at least, not in most cases) but it will make them harder to spot.
You're right, I never think of Starbucks as a scary place with loud music and young people.