The limits of the news peg

Last week, four of the biggest problems facing America—police brutality, gun violence, the climate crisis, and the right-wing assault on voting rights and fair elections; each of them interlocked with systemic racism—appeared concurrently in the news cycle. Each was “pegged,” in media-industry parlance, to a specific recent event, or events. Derek Chauvin, the white former Minneapolis cop, was convicted of murdering George Floyd; the verdict came ten days after an officer in nearby Brooklyn...