MMMM # 216 -- Equal Justice/Equal Reporting

     An Alabama Appeals Court has ordered a hearing for a male inmate's complaint that the state forces male inmates to wait longer to be admitted to a supervised "re-entry" program than women...resulting in men spending more time behind bars than women for the same crimes.
     There has always been an element of sexism in crime and punishment, and if the facts posted by some men's rights bloggers are correct, it spans across the U.S. Justice System. It was only six months ago that the U.S. Justice department changed almost two century's worth of law by defining rape as a crime in which both men and women can be victims.
     And there is also a disparity in the reporting of crime stories too. I've been in enough newsrooms in previous jobs to expect snickers about adult female teachers being charged with having consensual (but illegal) sex with minor students. The snickers come mostly from the male reporters who have the "where was that hot teacher when I was in school" attitude. Reverse the genders, a male teacher and a female student victim and there would be little or no humor. Make it a same-sex event and there's a universal disdain for the adult.
     There's a similar disconnect in reporting domestic violence stories when it is a woman accused of assaulting her husband. A smirk here, a chuckle there.
     Much of the sexism in reporting is probably unconscious and maybe innocent, though wrong nonetheless.
     Now that Jerry Sandusky has been convicted, ask yourself if the decade of abuse by the assistant coach would have occurred if it had been a ten year old girl witnessed  in the shower with Sandusky, instead of a boy.

[ALSO: Read Leonard Pitts column about the prospect of bloggers and "citizen journalists" replacing the people who work full-time in the business now...fewer and fewer of them that there are. Not so fast, he writes.]

[PLUS: John Archibald's column yesterday in The Birmingham News covers some new ground in the ongoing APT turmoil.]

[AND: I read some grains of information about this Fall's transition to the three-day-a week newspaper print schedule in a column in The Huntsville Times by the newly named head of online content for those papers. For one, all of the week's comics will be grouped:

"So, on Wednesdays, our plan is to give readers Wednesday and Thursday comics, puzzles and games. On Friday, readers get Friday and Saturday. Etc."

I think we have seen the beginning of the end for big newspapers in print.]

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of www.timlennox.com]