Earlier this week, Chicago witnessed its deadliest day of gun violence in 13 years, with 19 people shot and nine killed. One victim, 10-year-old Tavon Tanner, remains in critical condition.

Earlier in the summer, the New York Times featured a vivid report of 64 shootings and six deaths over Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, most on the city's predominantly black South and West sides.

For those of us who live in thriving areas of Chicago, it is easy to tune out such reports, resolving to avoid certain areas and make it home before dark.

An alarming visual narrative of what has become a tragic new normal in these Chicago neighborhoods, the NYT report was harder to tune out. It felt like an instance of parachute journalism, where reporters drop in for a short period of time to capture intimate images and stories. Providing a detailed and brutal accounting of each shooting and its aftermath, this approach also limits understanding of the problems that drive gun violence, including inequality.

In her book "The South Side," Natalie Moore pinpoints the issue with this brand of journalism: “The blanket Chicago South Side image in many white minds equals pathological ghetto. Reporters often enable that stereotype by only covering crime when they deign to venture to the South Side.”

Much of the media coverage and discussion of Chicago's gun violence focuses on “bad neighborhoods” instead of taking a step back to consider underlying conditions that produce violence in isolated pockets in most major U.S. cities.

While this type of reporting keeps us focused on the violence, it also invites readers to play the role of cultural tourist. We watch the action unfold—from a distance—in a handful of neighborhoods where the rates of gun violence are higher than in the rest of the city. And verite-style reporting has a specific effect: It isolates the gun violence in these neighborhoods from the gun violence problem in the rest of Chicago and across the United States.

What do we learn? Not much. The scope and scale of the problem are already well-known. A holistic approach to reporting on this issue would examine the uneven distribution of gun violence across the city and the ease with which guns are attained across the state line in Indiana. It would consider the racial segregation and growing income inequality that divides Chicago, along with home foreclosures and joblessness; mass closing and neglect of public schools; and the flight of black middle-class families to the nearby suburbs.

Humanizing media stories about gun violence are less common than tragic ones, but they do exist. Recently, the Chicago Tribune focused on a few families in the city's vulnerable neighborhoods and what they do to stay safe in public parks over holiday weekends. What parent can't relate to a story about a mother dressing her child in a brightly colored T-shirt for split-second visibility?

Up-close media reports should provoke us to acknowledge the complexity and gravity of gun violence. But media outlets can also play a different role, committing resources to sustained efforts by communities working to unravel and solve these problems. Chicago artist LaToya Ruby Frazier takes this approach, using documentary images to examine conditions that perpetuate inequality through generations of family history. Her photographs provide an insider's view on daily life in Braddock, Pa., a town hard hit by economic and social decline.

Media coverage of gun violence in any U.S. city should reject, by context, the pathologizing notion that gun violence is isolated and inevitable. And we need more stories about Chicago that help us see the gun violence problem in this city as a symptom of a national epidemic.