Start Date: Late July 2025
In real estate they say it is all about “Location, location, location.”
The same can be said about media as well.
Recently, July 28, 2025, there was a mass shooting in Manhattan inside a major office building [1]. A TV journalist made the comment that some mass shootings are covered and some aren’t. I made a similar observation, with a slightly different contrast, in my essay “Mass Shooting” (https://notcommonsense.com/mass-shooting/) posted just about a year ago, July 24, 2024.
His take was that people who work in financial firms look familiar to the NY media who cover the stories, as opposed to kids that get killed from the daily criminal activity in the big cities.
That is true enough but I would add another distinction.
Location, location, location.
Here are synopses of a series of police involved casualties from 1 explosion and 5 shooting events that took place in the weeks between July 18 and August 18, 2025.
On July 18, 2025 three LASD (sheriff deputy) officers were killed by a grenade that was being transported, after a resident found it left in her storage unit in Santa Monica. The story may have gone national as it was unusual and had three deaths [2].
Ten days later was the, previously noted, bizarre shooting in Manhattan of a somewhat random array of victims [1]. A few were Wall Street types. One was an NYPD officer. And most of all, it was in Manhattan, where all important people are, or at least as the media would have it.
But in between those events, and beyond, there were other shootings of police officers of which you may not have heard.
First I must address the obvious. I don’t live in these areas and do know about the events via foxnews.com or, in one case, their cable TV coverage. But I doubt that any of these made the NYC network media or had any follow-up the likes of the shooting in Manhattan.
Here are the events.
On July 23, 2025, three police officers were shot, one fatally, in an ambush outside of Cleveland Ohio [3]. That is a major tragedy for law enforcement and part of the reason they are increasingly leaving the job. Did the story pop up as “Breaking News” or lead the network news? Ohio isn’t so very far. But, maybe, far enough.
Three days later on Saturday July 26, 2025, a deputy in Kansas was fatally shot when responding to a woman’s call for help with domestic violence. She was attempting to move out of her home and feared for her safety [4].
Something similar happened in NYC a few years back to two NYPD officers. Their funerals were in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Fox carried one officer’s entire service live. It was very moving. I wrote about it in an essay I titled “Social Workers” (https://notcommonsense.com/social-workers/).
Whenever you hear about politicians wanting to keep police from responding to domestic violence calls, and replacing them with social workers, there are police officers nodding and smiling. You see it is one of the most likely ways for them to get killed. But I suspect there will be few takers among the ranks of LSWs.
In any case, I would guess you may not have been informed of the passing of Officer Ming. If Cleveland isn’t “bright lights, big city” you can imagine how little relevance is accorded to Kansas.
I thought these adequate counter examples to make a point, but, then on August 7 two PA State Troopers were shot in an ambush while making a welfare check [5]. They are expected to survive despite a heavily armed shooter. This was in the farthest northeastern corner of PA, i.e. roughly nowhere, albeit beautiful country.
Oh no! I hadn’t gotten this to post when this morning (August 18, 2025) there is news of another shooting of police (3 shot, two killed), actually 4 shot including the K-9 [6]. It was in Utah. Probably didn’t lead Nightly News.
I chose police shootings so the discriminator would be location only. Though we really need to stop and think about 14 law enforcement officers shot or killed in a month. Policing our nation should not be like fighting in Fallujah.
Back to location. If something happens in NY, even a 3.0 earthquake, it is national news. I will grant you an L.A weatherman once referred to annual rainfall of 30-some inches as “of biblical proportions”, probably laughable to someone in Houston where that is a bad week, just as the 3.0 earthquake is “any given Tuesday” in L.A.
We all have our regional sensitivities. But if you are in the center of national media you have the power to project them on the nation while disregarding the rest of what is known as “flyover country”, resulting in skew of what matters
In 2001 Bernard Goldberg wrote a book about media bias [7]. One can imagine that much of the issue must be the insular nature of the coastal elite media. Large newsrooms in NY have zero difference of opinion about what would nationally be controversial.
I have seen him in interviews tell a story about the 1972 presidential election. Richard Nixon won re-election by 49 states. Mr. Goldberg spoke of a conversation with a woman in Manhattan who didn’t believe Nixon won, because she didn’t know anyone who voted for him. The key point was that she didn’t know anyone outside of Manhattan, so how could she?
The truth is the coasts are in many ways the most parochial places in the nation.
if you live in CA/NYC your media day could be: multiple hours of morning TV from NY. Then your local (CA/NY) lunch time news, then an afternoon of “talk’ TV from the coasts, then your local evening program, then the network news from NY, followed by Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, and then finally the late night shows from NY. Augment that with TV and movies from L.A.and your entire life becomes an echo chamber. (Yes, I am speaking to an older audience whose intake is not all podcasts)
But if you live in Missoula Montana, or Tulsa Oklahoma, or Montgomery Alabama you will also have a smattering of locally relevant reporting. Farms, corn prices, ranches, water rights, things that matter. Also they have their community churches, synagogues, schools, 4-H clubs, and parades. So they hear all the chatter from the Big Media all day long. But they also have the grounding of their local community. Collectively they have the ability to be more aware of America as a whole than those lost in isolation.
The old adage of journalism was to ask “Who”, “What”, “When’, “Where” and “Why”.
I suppose that when the great financier Warren Buffet (The Oracle of Omaha) dies some journalists might find their way to Nebraska, but for police and other ordinary rank and file Americans, the “Where” seems to determine whether your story is worth covering.
Location, location, location.
REFERENCES
[1] Morris, Kaitlyn, Stone, Alex, Looft, Chris, Inal, Kerem, Charalambous, Peter, “What we know about Midtown Manhattan mass shooting suspect Shane Devon Tamura”, July 29, 2025, https://abcnews.go.com/US/shane-devon-tamura-suspect-midtown-manhattan-shooting/story?id=124159125
[2] Munoz, Anabel, “Device that exploded and killed 3 Los Angeles sheriff’s detectives was a grenade, department says”, July 22, 2025, https://6abc.com/post/los-angeles-county-sheriffs-department-explosion-device-exploded-killed-3-detectives-was-grenade-officials-say/17241688/
[3] Deliso, Meredith, “Officer dies after gunman opens fire in ‘ambush attack’ in Ohio ” July 24, 2025, https://abcnews.go.com/US/lorain-ohio-officers-shot-ambush/story?id=124016578
[4] Byrd, Katie, Shriner, Zoe, Powell, Akim, “Deeply saddened’: Deputy shot, killed after responding to 911 call”, July 27, 2025, https://www.wtvm.com/2025/07/27/deeply-saddened-deputy-shot-killed-after-responding-911-call/
[5] Price, Stephany, “Suspect who ‘ambushed’ 2 Pennsylvania state troopers identified after being shot and killed”, August 7, 2025, https://www.foxnews.com/us/suspect-who-ambushed-2-pennsylvania-state-troopers-identified-after-being-shot-killed
[6] “Suspect arrested after shooting three police officers, killing two, in Tremonton”, Fox13 News, Aug 17, 2025
[7] Goldberg, Bernard, “Bias”, Regency Publishing, 2001