By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
You may have noticed something new, as of late, in news reporting on the drug trade: Whenever the mainstream media reports that another cartel boat has been sunk by American forces, they are now including a running tally of the drug-runners thus terminated.
A Friday report by CBS News, for example, said “At least 43 people have been killed in the strikes as of Friday, Oct. 24, according to the numbers released by the Trump administration.”
Notice anything unusual, there?
It’s certainly not odd to report the number of innocents killed by a natural disaster or a criminal attack. The count of affected people is often what makes a story newsworthy, so it makes sense for reporters to track them. How many innocent lives were lost in a car crash, how many innocents were killed by a building fire or a factory explosion, and so forth. This is normal news coverage.
More challenging is the question of running totals, as a news room makes the editorial choice to string different stories together and report the cumulative deaths caused by a class of incident as the days go by.
How many individual innocent lives have thus far been claimed by Jack the Ripper, by the Son of Sam, by John Gacy? As the running total increases, the public feels that much more compassion for the victims and their families, and rightly so.
How many homicides have there been this year in Chicago, in New Orleans, in Baltimore, in Los Angeles? That’s worth tracking, in the interest of focusing public policy on the issue of violent crime in our cities.
How many deaths have resulted from highway deaths this year, in Illinois, in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in any state that puts those road signs up with safety warnings? That running total is worth tracking too, in the interest of reminding every driver on the road of the very real dangers all around him.
So we must ask ourselves: Why count the number of drug traffickers killed by the bombings of cartel boats on the high seas – not the innocent, this time, but the guilty?
Every few days since this current project began around Labor Day, the US Government has sunk another boat full of drugs, sometimes sharing photos or video with the press.
In addition to the obvious immediate benefits of sinking these boats – destroying countless millions of dollars’ worth of illicit drugs, killing the criminals involved, costing the cartels both their people and their transportation, as well as their inventory – such publicity will make it harder for the cartels to recruit people for such jobs going forward. Maybe it will even drive the cartels into other lines of work, or at least, drive them into other markets.
Thus it has always been with law enforcement: if the criminal justice system is tough enough, and punishment certain enough, it will scare the criminals out of the territory, if not out of the business entirely.
It’s hard to make that point better than public video seeing your crooked cousin, neighbor, or employee blown out of the water by a missile or drone strike. Suddenly, earning an honest living by running a restaurant or auto mechanic shop becomes much more appealing.
Are there running totals worth reporting, in this context? Sure.
How many millions of dollars’ worth of fentanyl and other drugs were estimated to be destroyed? How many cartel boats have been destroyed?
Best of all, how many innocent lives have been saved by keeping all those drugs off our streets? Now, that would be worthy statistic to share, even if it would have to be an estimate.
But no, the press is instead sharing a running total of how many traffickers – how many human operators of these drug boats – have been killed in these strikes so far. If that doesn’t sound odd to you, it should.
We track innocents killed on the highways, innocents killed by murders and drive-bys, innocents killed by natural disasters – and now we track the incredibly guilty drug traffickers targeted by this high seas policing program.
If these reporters aren’t trying to get the public to feel a little compassion for these vermin, I can’t imagine what they’re doing it for.
Every time we shoot, drown, or blow to smithereens another of these drug runners, it’s a net positive in so many ways, not just for the United States but for the world – but because it’s the Trump administration doing it, the natural inclination of the press is to find fault with it.
However much you may distrust the mainstream media, you don’t distrust them enough.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
