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Doghouse Riley also has a piece that alludes to disparate news coverage. Instead of dead penguins versus murdered humans, he scrutinizes the coverage of “The First Little Columbine of Spring” wherein the pitchforks and torches were out for four Johnson County students, three of whom were special education students, one of the students’ fantasy about killing his principal and holding the school hostage. That story apparently got screaming headlines and press conferences.

Meanwhile, getting the back page treatment apparently, are allegations that members of the Center Grove High School football team held a freshman football player down while they struck and kicked him and one of the dropped his pants and rubbed his ass in the boy’s face before attempting to insert a metal rod into the boy’s rectum.

Mr. Riley concludes as follows:

We’ve had thirteen murders in Indianapolis in the last four days, and I didn’t expect this sort of thing to push that sort of thing off the front pages. What I do expect is that it be given the proper amount of attention given all the excitement last spring. Your kid and my kid are a lot more likely to be bullied at school than they are to be blown up by autistic pipe-bomb builders. But that’s not the way the newspapers think you see it.

This sort of media critique gets me to wondering how much more dangerous the world actually is than it was in years past. Are we afraid of the world as it is or are we afraid of the world as we read about it? Perception has a way of becoming reality, I suspect. As we become more afraid and surround ourselves with metal detectors and surveillance cameras, we become more distrustful of and isolated from each other. This distrust and isolation begets more antisocial behavior which begets more fear which begets more distrust and isolation.

That’s my theory anyway. FDR may have been on to something with that bit about fearing fear itself.