Wednesday, April 23, 2008

WGCI stops the hits to address Chicago violence

Doing what they should be doing when a community in is crisis, WGCI-FM abruptly stopped playing music this afternoon and evening to address the shootings and killings that has plagued Chicago's minority communities over the past week. The impromptu move came after five people were gunned down inside a house on Chicago's South Side this afternoon.

WGCI invited leaders from the African-American community to talk to callers and discuss their stories, and try to increase the peace in some of the city's worst neighborhoods.

The shootings and killings have also brought something Chicago's leaders clearly didn't want: A national public relations nightmare, especially with the city competing for the 2016 Olympics.

Yours truly will address the local and national media's handling of the violence in a future Think Tank.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm glad you'll be looking at the media's coverage of this topic - I wish it had more hard facts about how large the problem is, as well as some contextualizing about positive trends.

For example, the percentage of students who carried a weapon in the last 30 days declined substantially from 1991-2005: 44% of boys and 23% of girls had done so in 1991, but these numbers fell to 22% for boys and 16% for girls by 2005. Despite this decline, that's a lot of kids carrying weapons. There are more figures from Chicago over at my site if you're interested.