For the most part, I find the BBC’s news web site far superior to American fare such as CNN or any of the American news networks, especially for coverage of international news. Unfortunately with its coverage of the horrific shooting of 7 people in Massachussetts, the BBC seems more than willing to emulate the shoddy reporting so common to American media.
In, Terror in the Workplace, for example, the BBC claims,
The shooting of seven people at an Internet company in Wakefield Massachusetts is the latest reminder that workplace killings are depressingly common in the US.
The only problem is that the BBC doesn’t bother to back this claim up. It lists a grand total of 12 incidents involving violence in the work place dating back to 1997 as if a mere enumeration of anecdotes is more than enough to prove that “workplace killings are depressingly common in the US.”
Lets gets some facts in here, courtsey of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which visited this topic in 1998’s “Workplace Violence, 1992-96.”
- There are approximately 2 million acts of violence or threats of violence against Americans in the workplace each year.
- Almost all of those are directed against people who work with the public. Retail sales clerks, law enforcement personnel, teachers, medical personnel, transportation personnel (cab drivers, bus drivers, etc.), and private security forces bear the brunt of workplace violence.
- Although the BBC is hitting the gun angle heavily, guns are used in workplace assaults only about 7.5 percent of the time, with knives, clubs, bottles, and other weapons being 12 percent of the time. Eighty percent of the deaths from workplace assaults, however, were caused by guns, with the other 20 percent being caused by knives and other weapons.
- Based on 1992 to 1996 data, the killing in Massachussetts was atypical. From 1992 to 1996 about 1,000 people were murdered on the job. Of those, about 760 each year were murdered as part of a robbery attempt. Only about 11 percent of workplace murders were the result of assaults by co-workers and/or legitimate customers.
- Workplace violence, like violence in general in the United States, is declining. Workplace homicides fell 13 percent from 1992 to 1996, and have almost certainly fell even further over the last four years. What hasn’t fallen is media hyperpublicity over such events.