If the news is that three people died in a shooting, would you not be better informed by knowing the context that they were drug dealers in a conflict over territory?
Personally I would prefer reporters to stick with known accurate information rather than what whoever they spoke with believed to be accurate context. Shootouts between drug dealers could be over territory, or just about anything else. Unless they spoke with the people actually involved it’s all supposition.
I don't think that it is difficult to determine the scope of the violence, eg: 'gang on gang' compared to 'an angry mentally ill person shooting random people'... which is typically peoples main concern, and you can explain that in a matter of seconds.
It seems like the lack of context gets used to skew peoples perception of an issue just as often as false information, for example classifying gang violence and robberies as "mass shootings" without giving any other details. This can be applied to just about any topic out there. It's easier to leave out details and use esoteric language, than it is to lie about what happened. People can at-least deduce bias/flaws given enough narrative, and a track record of inaccurate context damages an organization's reputation.
The root issue is I don’t want reporters to guess and report what something probably is. Flight 123 an Airbus XYZ crashed at on takeoff from location Z. Fine that’s all verifiable, what the cause was isn’t known don’t even guess you’re just wasting my time.
Most shootings that look like ‘gang in gang’ are probably ‘gang on gang’ violence. But, that doesn’t mean a specific shooting was actually ‘gang on gang’ violence. Gang members also shoot people for personal reasons unrelated to being a gang member. And they also get shot for reasons unrelated to being a gang member. If the assumption is it’s always ‘gang in gang’ and it’s always reported as such then that’s a lot of biased and often incorrect information being reported as fact.
It’s not uncommon for gang members to just go out and randomly shoot stuff the same way young rednecks shoot at road signs. The difference is gang members in cites are vastly more likely to randomly hit someone due to population density.
