Les Jones

News > 86% of Suicides Boys; No One Cares

Helen Smith notes a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed about teen suicide that report 86% of all adolescent suicides are boys. Says the editorialist:

It occurred to me that if 86 percent of adolescent suicides were girls, there would be a national commission to find out why. There'd be front-page stories and Oprah shows and nonprofit foundations throwing money at sociologists and psychologists to study female self-destruction. My feminist sisters and I would be asking, rightly, "What's wrong with a culture that drives girls, much more than boys, to take their own lives?"

There's the old joke about how different papers would cover the end of the world. For the New York Times the joke goes that the headline would be "World to End; Women, Minorities Hardest Hit." This is one of those jokes that has a ring of truth to it. The NYT's built-in story filter seems to be that anything involving women or minorities is news, anything else is a maybe. That's true for a lot of other news outfits, too.

Here's a New York Times headline from last Friday: Report Highlights AIDS Risk to Black Men and Women. When some of us see that headline, the first thing we think is "World to End; Women, Minorities Hardest Hit." Covering news that affects women and minorities is important, but one wonders if some organization's news filters are pushing those stories to the forefront at the expense of other equally worthy stories.