Mass Murder, Mass Media, and Missing Stories
Last summer, in the pages of the Nation magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich called attention to people turning to "the suicide solution" in response to the burgeoning financial crisis. Months later, major news outlets started to examine the same phenomenon. Last fall, a TomDispatch report on suicides and a range of other extreme acts - including self-inflicted injury, murder, arson, and armed self-defense - in response to foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, and layoffs, was followed, months later, by mainstream media attention to the notion of "econo-cide" - prompted, in large part, by a spate of familicides (murder/suicides in which both parents and their children die).
While it's impossible to know the myriad factors, including deeply personal ones, that contribute to people resorting to drastic measures, violent or otherwise, many press reports suggest that the global economic crisis has played no small part in a range of extreme acts.
An analysis by TomDispatch of national, regional, and local news reports in 2008 and early 2009 indicates that a silent, nationwide epidemic of drastic measures may be underway. News of such acts linked to economic woes - from armed robberies to pay the rent to financially-motivated suicides - has filtered out of cities and towns in no less than 30 states, many of which have seen multiple incidents. And since only a fraction of such acts ever receives media coverage, what is being reported, even if mostly in local newspapers, qualifies as startling.
For every Jiverly Wong, who garners days of cable-news coverage, there are untold despondent and desperate dairy farmers and retirees battered by the economy and at wits' end who respond by subjecting themselves, others, or property to violence and are hardly noticed. What follows is a sampling of such incidents, most reported locally, and organized by month - no month lacked such reports - since the beginning of this year.
Source: http://www.truthout.org/060409R 
