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Last week I wrote about the NYT’s coverage of the Minneapolis school shooting, where the headline and article repeatedly used “Ms.” and “her” for the shooter, Robin Westman. That may follow their style guide, but in the context of a mass killing, it reads less like neutral reporting and more like ideological signaling. The pronouns end up being the story, while two murdered children fade into the background.
Now there’s the coverage of the truly awful video released of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a Charlotte train. There are familiar editorial fingerprints from the ‘style guide’. The NYT capitalizes “Black” but leaves “white” lowercase. Elon Musk pointed this out and it’s getting traction. This is a policy shift the NYT, AP, and others made in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, with the reasoning that “Black” marks shared cultural identity, while capitalizing “White” risks feeding white-identity politics.
That may be defensible as a policy, but applied in a case where a Black suspect kills a white victim, it lands as bias whether intended or not. The style guide twice now ends up louder than the tragedy itself.
When editorial rules like these are applied without reflection, they pull focus from the human story. It truly makes me upset because these were horrific events. There’s no reason to show off your liberal bona fides at all. Just show compassion for the victims and don’t preemptively build up scaffolding for when it will be used as culture war fuel.
Frankly, I think that articles like this make race relations in America worse. I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all. It’s about violence in America, which is so insanely out of control. I think cloaking it in platitudes about decreasing crime rate stats also shows how scared of second-order effects news organizations are.
I read a book recently about the history of imprisonment in Texas. It talks about restorative justice and prison labor etc. I don’t know what else you’re supposed to do besides reassure the public that this man (or anyone inflicting evil on others) will never see the light of day again
I'm mildly surprised that I haven't yet seen talking heads complaining about the coverage of the murder and protesting that "black women also get murdered and nobody cares," etc. (This may be happening but I have yet to read it personally.)
Years ago when I first heard of "missing white woman syndrome" coined I guess 20 years ago by a TV anchor, I thought "Hm, that's interesting." But it's less-and-less interesting to me now. Now, whenever I hear people throw it out it seems to be yet another tedious effort to downplay criminality and make every god-damned thing a zero-sum-game involving race.
I'm not sure the implied criticism by this is wrong: the media really does spend disproportionate air time on "cute" victims (Natalee Holloway got a lot of press coverage). See this thread happening now, and not for Debrina Kawam who was lit on fire and killed by an illegal immigrant: the latter was homeless at the time. (Or a recent stabbing murder on a bus in my city. Or the guy arrested recently for threatening bus passengers with a machete.) There really is less media coverage of crimes against Black victims for what I see as complex and circular reasons: for better or worse, nobody really cares about murders in "the hood" and they're hardly rare, so there is comparatively little advocacy for actually stopping it (similarly, "gun violence" advocates care a lot more about school shootings, and seemingly almost not at all about inner-city gang violence) --- and what advocacy there is ends up ineffective IMO partially because it politically ignores some of the causes of that violence, although in the past it's maybe swung the other direction in being callously ham-fisted. I don't think the problems here, or the solutions to it, are easy. And so the cycle continues.
IMO the headline-worthiness bias of "man bites dog" really does the world a disservice by skewing perceptions of the world. If you only follow the news and don't go outside, you'd think dogs were really at high risk of man-bites.
No new thing; from the 1940 novel "Farewell, My Lovely" by Raymond Chandler where a policeman is disappointed to be the one lumbered with a killing (by a white guy) of the black manager of a bar, because he needs a big case and nobody cares about this sort of crime (warning for period language, as per the best publications*):
*"The original short stories reprinted in the British Library Tales of the Weird series were written and published in a period ranging across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are many elements of these stories which continue to entertain modern readers; however, in some cases there are also uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today. We acknowledge therefore that some elements in the stories selected for reprinting may continue to make uncomfortable reading for some of our audience."
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Would be hard to pull off with people sharing "George Floyd vs. Iryna Zarutska search result hits" memes.
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