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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

A flip side to this is that you can go here to see archives of newspapers:

https://news.google.com/newspapers

After reviewing lots of southern papers during the 1960s, shockingly (!) entire months are gone. I was really hoping to read their editorials saying what they thought MLK really was at that time, and then see what they wrote today. I figured this would be more fun than paying attention to Trump on inauguration day, which weirdly falls on the same day as MLK day.

Let's be frank, there probably isn't ad revenue for old crime stories that aren't sensationalized. So, the newspapers owners are not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, or their thoughts on the criminal justice system.

How about instead, they agree moving forward to not publish crime stories about poor people at all? That I could get excited about.

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What would happen to people’s perception of crime if only the crime perpetuated by the rich and powerful was reported on?

It's probably just me, but it feels like reporting on crime is very lopsided and slanted against the powerless.

The powerless are usually the victims, not the criminals. Criminals are by definition exerting their power (usually through physical violence) over people who have even less "power."

Not everything is about power dynamics, and crime rarely is. Far more often it is about selfishness.

Again, would love to be proved wrong, but I think physical violence is far and away the majority of crime reported, but the minority (in my own definition) of crimes committed.

As an example, I think RealPage and the rent collusion they were doing clearly is illegal. And, has impacted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.. But, you'll see a lot more reporting on a shooting in every newspaper, even though in most cases that would directly impact only a few people.

I suspect the majority of crime committed to be civil infractions and petty crime (speeding, parking violations, minor theft, vandalism, then on to things like drug use and DUI). Then you get to violent crime. By sheer quantity, I'd guess there are more violent crimes than fraud.

Fraud may impact far more people at once, but there are a lot fewer instances of it than of violence, if we're talking quantity of commission and not quantity of victims.

i’ve seen tons of reporting on realpage relative to pretty much any shooting other than the Luigi Mangione thing. if you mean you see shootings reported on more overall, well yeah - the magnitude of impact of all shootings in the US is greater than realpage

Hackers are down voting your comment, but anybody who has been "on the inside" in dealing with criminal cases knows you are speaking the truth. Criminals usually seek out their victims among the people with the least power: Children, youths, addicts, isolated people, mentally weak.

This is just CRT nonsense.

Where in my comment did I bring up race?

The comment I was replying to claimed criminals were criminals because they were powerless. I think most criminals are criminals because they're bad people (the opposite of CRT's Marxist analysis).

for national news i strongly feel like it is the opposite, it’s mostly high profile white collar crime

I only hear about poor people committing crimes usually on the local news.

Everything else is billionaire did this, politician did that, corporation did both of those and more.

Sure, you don't read other places' local news. But those places' residents do.

It’s just you.

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