In the weekly Friday afternoon roundtable with Cam Edwards at NRANews.com, he brought up three stories he had seen that he doubted had received much national media attention:
1. AP reported a sports-and-politics story from Puerto Rico: "While Cuba played the Netherlands in the World Baseball Classic, a spectator in the stands raised a sign saying: "Down With Fidel," sparking an international incident that escalated Friday with fastball velocity." A Castro stooge was upset with a man with an anti-Castro sign. He was lectured on free speech by the local police.
2. Frank Greve of Knight-Ridder had an unusual story: chronicling something that didn't happen: a teen crime wave predicted by "conservative criminologist John DiIulio." Greve also notes he wrote a book on it with Bill Bennett. Neither man had comment. But there's still a good-news-for-Bush angle in it: "Americans are experiencing the sharpest decline in teen crime in modern history. Schools today are as safe as they were in the 1960s, according to Justice Department figures."
Greve reports that decline in teen crime was leveling off in 2002 and 2003, the newest years for figures. Still, this trend should get more attention after all the hyperbole and breast-beating after Columbine. I would suggest that Greve leaves out one potential factor in the decline: welfare reform, which made the adults in teenagers' lives more responsible.
3. For Cam & Company, the last one cuts closer to home: the NRA's legal action against New Orleans officials for gun confiscations in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Susan Jones at CNSNews.com reported it: "The city leaders have refused to comply with a federal injunction to stop illegal gun confiscations and return all seized firearms to their rightful owners." Last week, the media spent a lot of time in New Orleans at the six-month mark. Did you see any of them locate the gun-confiscation story?
