Bad Bad Interracial Crime, Minimal Press Coverage: Media Bias In Play?

Great Debates
1

I agree with Snopes’s discussion of celebrity crimes getting more coverage than murders of non-celebs. I also know that there is no scientific meter for just how much press coverage any given event merits, for what does and doesn’t deserve to go from local tragedy to national cause celebre, or for what precise degree of outrage any particular enormity calls for.

But still; having participated in the Duke Hoax fun-fest in the Pit – here’s an orders-of-magnitude more lurid crime, which actually and indisputably did happen, with all the sexual and racial aspects that the media found so titillating (even when not substantiated) in the lacrosse story. And it’s front page news in the hills and hollers but not really anywhere else?

My theory is not that active, ideologically-driven suppression by the media is going on. It’s more that most national reporters are (a) really not too smart and (b) fairly liberal, and that these traits imprint upon them certain paradigms (and a limited number of paradigms, at that). One is that whites being mean to (lynching, raping, discriminating against) blacks is a Big Problem and that reporting on or combating this Problem is an Important Priority. Fair enough and who can argue? But does that lead to over-emphasizing even dubious instances (Crystal Mangum/Duke) of whites-being-mean and under-covering the events for which there is no paradigm in the reporters’ little brains? I suspect this case indicates that maybe it does, but I’d welcome arguments for why this case really didn’t merit the saturation coverage that Duke or James Byrd got.

2

The answer is right there in your OP. “which actually and indisputably did happen”. The Duke case was anything but indisputable. All of the coverage I saw was covering the controversy, did they do it, was she a liar, first she said this, then she said that, people supporting the DA, people slamming the DA, etc. Had the Duke players done it, been arrested, and gone to jail it would have been case closed, and lets get back to what’s up with Britney this week.

How should the media cover it, should they saturate the airwaves with the nonevents in what certainly seems to be an open and shut case? Yep, they’re still in jail, and all the evidence points to their guilt. Join us tomorrow for the same update. Now, if the perpetrators were to escape, then you’d see some press, that’s for sure, but otherwise what’s the hook?

If the killer of JonBenet Ramsey had been caught in three days not a person in 100 would have even heard her name, and not one in 10,000 would have remembered it 10 years later. It’s the not knowing that makes it a story.

3

I know right - this is already quite the internet meme, but what exactly are people envisioning coverage wise in their fantasies?

4

News people don’t operate in a vaccuum when they decide how much play a story will get. They are constantly gauging the interest of their viewers/readers/listeners. Some stories take on a life of their own because people are interested. Most stories don’t “have legs” because nobody seems engaged. None of this is quantifiable or predictable, yet it’s real.

5

Charlie Daniels has sounded off on this topic also - thank goodness for his moral guidance.

Without making too many big generalizations, I’ll say this: most people agree, as you do, that racism is a problem. The Duke case did address those, and part of the problem with the case was that people insisted on seeing it as a metaphor for social issues. How many people think this crime indicates a trend or a social problem?

If this was getting tons of coverage, people here and elsewhere would be complaining, too- they’d say the crime was only being covered because it’s so grotesque and maybe because it played to white people’s latent fear of black people. I say that not to accuse anybody of hypocrisy, I’m just saying that you can’t satisfy everybody. I don’t see some compelling need for papers outside of Tennessee to cover this case.

6

I suspect people who circulated that e-mail, or at least some of them, would like to see some soul-searching articles about the “epidemic of black on white crime” or “what is it about the culture of these black criminals that leads them to victimize innocent whites,” along the lines of what we got in the early days of the Duke “case.”

It’s not going to happen, for a variety of reasons, even if perpetrators of violent crime (or,. of violent crime against whites) did turn out to be disproportionately black. There’s no journalistic paradigm or template for that sort of story, nor is one likely to emerge in this era, in the mainstream media. The templates the media uses/permits for discussiing black involvement with crime range from discussing “crime,” “root causes of crime,” “the plight of young black men who get involved in crime,” and “the tragedy of black on black crime.”

Nor do I think the why-are-blacks-killing-whites discussion necessarily needs to happen. If we take the Snopes angle that “well, there’s a lot of horrible crimes every day, and when they don’t involve celebs, they won’t necessarily get covered,” the lesson to be learned here is a negative one: neither should they be nationally covered just because there is a paradigm-suiting element such as white people allegedly victimizing blacks, i.e., subtract the race card entirely from crime reporting (if we’re not going to play it even-handedly in every case where it obtains)?

Alternatively and more realistically, given that we have the sensationalist media that we do – I do somewhat wonder why this hasn’t leaped to the headlines, and do understand the suspicion that there are external reasons it hasn’t been taken up (even though I suspect media ignorance is a sufficient explanation). True crime is hot. Sex crimes are hot. Murder is hot. Hot young blonde co-eds in peril are way hot in the currency of today’s news. Then you’ve got the bonuses: allegations of mutilation and torture and, yes, the racial angle, but couldn’t you sell some papers with this story even absent it?

I don’t agree with the argument that because the facts are so open-and-shut, there’s no motivation to report. James Byrd’s murder was pretty open and shut, and the Klan-tattooed perps. were arrested shortly after the deed. Didn’t mean people stopped talking about it in the press, and not to debate whodunnit either. With Duke, while later discussion focused on Nifong’s spectacular malfeasance and Crystal’s lack of credibility, at least until the initial DNA came up negative, many in the press seemed to take the allegation as read – why else go forward with discussions about “jock culture” or the “campus race relations,” which would only be relevant if it were pretty clear a racially-motivated crime by jock rapists had probably occurred?

7

Having discussed specifically the Duke lacrosse players story with my colleagues in the media, I’ve concluded that the “priveleged white kids” angle first gave that story its impetus. I’ve worked in enough newsrooms to know that college athletes are not held in very high esteem by the geekish types who report the news. The only sympathy athletes get is from former jocks who work on sports desks, and despite the apparent on-air jocularity of the anchor team, even these guys aren’t very popular in the newsroom. Yes, there is a bias – not against whites, but against priveleged white athletes. That angle of the story was played up over and over in the days and weeks immediately following the alleged incident. Much less noise was made over the case utterly falling apart because the media people were disappointed that the story wasn’t the indictment against trust fund babies they had originally thought – hoped – it was.

The Newson-Christian murders, on the other hand, were just two more murders in America. They were no more gruesome than the 3-year-old boy beaten to death by a stepdad who paused during the beating to rest his arm, or the 25-year-old woman beaten to death with a rock and left to die in an outhouse along a hiking trail (pieces of her skull were found wrapped in tissue and shoved into a pocket of her dress); or the 66-year-old woman whose throat was slashed and who was left to “bleed out” in a remote mountain stream; or the 22-year-old man who had a shotgun stuck against his throat and his head nearly blown off while his horrified girlfriend watched. All of these crimes occurred in Boulder County in the early 1980s, all were covered extensively by the Longmont Times-Call and/or Boulder Camera, and none made more than a one-day or two-day mention in the Denver dailies just 30 miles away.

Some stories are just more “local” than others. And some stories play to reporters’ individual but universal biases.

8

There is no shortage of crimes, even more heinous than that one, that go unremarked in the media.

If you want to cry foul about biased media coverage, why don’t you complain about the fact that white victims, regardless of the perpetrator’s race, are much more likely to get media coverage than non-white victims? Just because a bunch of black guys did horrible things to two whites doesn’t make this story any more print-worthy than it would be if everyone involved was the same race.

The last thing we need is more sensationalized reporting about crimes, particularly interracial ones. It serves no purpose except to fuel recreational outrage and promote racial tension.

9

You’ll see I’ve suggested something like that supra, but it’s not going to happen, at least for the crimes and allegations that suit the existing journalistic paradigms and are deemed acceptable to discuss.

10

I’m not sure that the OP made it all the way through the snopes article. I would recommend that he go back and read the last two paragraphs.

11

This is a dead non-celebrity one, not one in peril like Amanda Smart or Natalee Holloway. Slight difference.

12

I don’t understand why the OP thinks this deserves national coverage. Horrific crimes of violence are commonplace. What is particularly noteworthy about this one? The victims were white? so what? I haven’t seen anything to suggest that race was a motivation in the crime.

The Duke story got national coverage mostly because it involved a major university sports team. This story does not involve any nationally known personalities or organizations, nor does it contain any details which (unfortunately) could be considered particularly extraordinary or unusual.

What does the OP want, for the media to wring its hands and bemoan the oppression of white people? Color me unsympathetic (to imagined white oppression, not to the victims).

If these guys are convicted, I hope they rot in jail forever and they probably will. What else does the OP want?

13

No, I saw it, and acknowledged there is some truth to the assessment, esp. on the celeb angle. And as I’m not even frontally accusing the media of deliberate bias, I’m certainly not doing so with Snopes, just weighing the facts (and, weighing my knowledge to a moral certainty that if the races had been reversed here, national coverage of some sort, probably a 24/7 sort, would have ensued). As several have suggested, that would not necessarily have been a good or desirable outcome then either, but it would have been the outcome.

14

Never said I did. Came close to saying the opposite (local crimes or allegations don’t deserve national coverage based on the race of the participants, but they get said coverage for a particular subset of victim-perp. combos).

I don’t know if it was or wasn’t. I know if the races were reversed, this issue would be prominently addressed, with a presumption that race was a motive.

Geez. You must live in one rough neighborhood if those are your standards for murder. Most male murder victims don’t get gang ass-raped and gelded prior to being killed. Most female murder victims don’t have their breast cut off. As I acknowledged, there is no infallible scale for outrage (to go off on a tangent, I’ve never understood why the Kitty Genovese murder was so heavily covered, as it seemed, I hate to use the phrase in talking of someone’s life being ended, fairly run of the mill). But unless mutilation and gang rape killings are a lot more common than I hope they are, this seems something more gruesome than the “average” murder (I know, no such thing), and showing a more depraved indifference to human life than others.

15

I guarantee you there have been plenty of cases of white people doing horrific things to black people that have not made the national news. You just haven’t heard about them cause they didn’t make the national news.

16

Amen to that. One thing I’ll give the media credit for is weighing exactly this issue in their coverage. Predominantly liberal, they know that pointing out that blacks perpetrated a grisly murder of white victims has a good chance of blowing up in their faces with accusations of anti-black bias and making racial tensions in the community worse.

17

Not only that, but such reporting contributes to anti-black bias.

The underreporting of non-white victimization coupled with the overreporting of non-white perpretation tends to skew society’s perception of reality in harmful ways.

18

Alright, I’ll give you that the news media is destructively patronizing towards blacks (and admit that I immediately assumed that you were trying to claim that the media was hostile towards whites because they don’t sensationalize stuff like this) - but why would you think that that’s something that can’t be rectified?

19

I see black crime get a lot of play in the news. Especially black-on-white crime. (Black-on-black crime, maybe not so much, but I have no cites.)

20

One of my friends and I have discussed this case.

[Background note : In the early to mid 1990s, he lived in a predominantly Black neighborhood, was harrassed to the point that he tried to get the local news involved, but they backed out of covering the story when they discovered that he was white and the bullies/harrassers were black! Wrong combination! The “racial injustice”/“moral outrage” angle simply could not be played up in this instance! Political correctness squelched the story!

This incident led him to become somewhat of a “white nationalist”-lite type. He frequents the www.amren.com “American Renaissance” website, I forget if he has actually posted his story there or not! He used to be very liberal in regards to race, but now he says he is a “race realist”, due to this and other incidents, and reading some racial literature online, etc. He actually is a pretty nice fellow in many respects, he is just a bit embittered at getting treated badly by people he thought he could trust!]

He said that this was a case of “dog bites man” versus “man bites dog” stories. His contention is that, when blacks murder whites in particularly heinous ways, they tend to “stay local” in the sense of not getting picked up by the national press. It is a common enough occurence that it registers as a “dog bites man” incident.

However, when whites do something terrible to a black person, it tends to resonate with reporters, who tend to be liberals, and reminds them that they should publicize the story in order to combat and defeat racism. These incidents tend to be rare enough (nowadays, anyway!) to be “man bites dog”-type incidents!
Does any of this make sense to any one on the board?