Richard Chandler states: "Are you saying it's OK to bruise a bus driver as long as you don't smack his head hard enough to give him a concussion? I certainly hope riders assaulting the driver is not a commonplace occurrence on Minneapolis buses." Of course I'm not saying it's okay to assault bus drivers. I'm saying it's not newsworthy. Metro Transit says there's about one assault per month on a driver in its system.. When a city has 14,344 assaults reported to police, as Minneapolis did in 1999, I'm arguing that assault routinely happens in the city, and an individual assault is too low a threshold for news coverage. That has nothing to do with encouraging or accepting assaults. I just don't think people want to read an average of 39 articles a day about assaults, or even one when the injuries evidently are no more serious than bruises. Like it or not, the severity of an incident determines whether it's going to get covered. Chandler suggests that "if a reporter gets shoved we hear about it for weeks." Actually, within the last couple of years, one of my colleagues was beaten while covering a story on the Prior Lake reservation. His injuries were no more serious than those to the driver, and no story was written. Steve Brandt Star Tribune
