Joe Dunman on media failures and the Great Mall Riot of 2015.

"I was shocked to hear about the Mall of St. Matthews. I couldn't believe people still shopped at malls." 
-- a clever friend of ours

Saturday, December 26, will be remembered as the Bloody Mall St. Matthews Riot.

Yeah, right.

Estimates of the rioters began in the thousands, and have been dropping each day since the incident began being reported completely out of proportion. Give it another couple of weeks, and it will turn out the mall was completely empty at the time.

Dunman dissects the story/non-story, refers to "local media stenographers" (my heart grew three sizes, natch), and ends with a nod to The Who.

Commentary: Uncritical reporting of one-sided police accounts sparks fear over ‘riot’ at Mall St. Matthews, by Joe Dunman (Insider Louisville).

... Despite a nationwide decline, some malls remain prime gathering places for young people. A policy that youth would no longer be welcome in a mall unless they have a focused shopping agenda or are tethered to a chaperone is absurd, not to mention unenforceable. What would mall security need to do? Search the pockets of every entrant for cash, credit cards, and shopping lists? Tail every teen to ensure they remain securely under the helicopter watch of their parents?

Britain: "Decades of individualism, competition and state-encouraged selfishness ... "

She's writing about London, not America ... right? After all, the richest Americans are better off than the poorest to a greater factor than 100, aren't they?

There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored, by Nina Power (Guardian).

... Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.