The Culture of Fear (20 page)

On occasion the degree of attention becomes so skewed that reporters start seeing patterns where none exist—the massively publicized “wave” of tourist murders in Florida in the early 1990s being a memorable example. By chance alone every decade or two there should be an unusually high number of tourists murdered in Florida, the statistician Arnold Barnett of MIT demonstrated in a journal article. The media uproar was an “overreaction to statistical noise,” he wrote. The upturn that so caught reporters’ fancy—ten tourists killed in a year—was labeled a crime wave because the media chose to label it as such. Objectively speaking, ten murders out of 41 million visitors did not even constitute a ripple, much less a wave, especially considering that at least 97 percent of all victims of crime in Florida are Floridians. Although the Miami area had the highest crime rate in the nation during this period, it was not tourists who had most cause for worry. One study showed that British, German, and Canadian tourists who flock to Florida each year to avoid winter weather were more than 70 times more likely to be victimized at home. The typical victim of crime in Florida, though largely invisible in the news, was young, local, and black or Hispanic.
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So was the typical victim of drug violence in New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when some reporters and social scientists avidly implied otherwise. “The killing of innocent bystanders, particularly in the cross fires of this nation’s drug wars, has suddenly become a phenomenon that greatly troubles experts on crime,” began a front-page story in the
New York Times.
It is “the sense that it could happen to anybody, anywhere, like a plane crash” that makes these attacks so scary, the reporter quoted Peter Reuter from the RAND Corporation. According to the
New York Daily News,
“spillover” crime from the drug wars even affected people in “silk-stocking areas.” In fact, a
New York
magazine article revealed, thanks to a crack cocaine epidemic, “most neighborhoods in the city by now have been forced to deal with either crack or its foul by-products: if not crack houses and street dealers or users, then crackhead crimes such as purse snatchings, car break-ins, burglaries, knife-point robberies, muggings, and murders.” TV newscasts, needless to say, breathlessly reported much the same, with pictures at eleven.
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One expert eventually became skeptical of the reporting and set out to examine whether New Yorkers were truly at equal and random risk of falling victim to drug-related violence. What Henry Brownstein, a researcher with the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, found when he looked at data available from the police was almost exactly the opposite. About two out of one hundred homicides in New York City involved innocent bystanders, and most drug-related violence occurred between people connected to the drug trade itself. When innocent people did get hurt, Brownstein discovered, often they were roughed up or shot at not by drug users but by police officers in the course of ill-conceived raids and street busts.
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Drug violence, like almost every other category of violence, is not an equal opportunity danger. It principally afflicts young people from poor minority communities, and above all, young black men. But reporters and politicos never seem to lack for opportunities to perpetuate the myth of indiscriminate victimization. “Random Killings Hit a High—All Have ‘Realistic’ Chance of Being Victim, Says FBI,” read the headline in
USA Today’s
story in 1994 about a government report that received big play that year. Had the academics and elected officials who supplied reporters with brooding comments about the report looked more closely at its contents, however, they would have learned that it was misleading. As Richard Moran, a sociology professor at Mount Holyoke College, subsequently pointed out in a commentary on National Public Radio, the FBI report made random killings seem more prevalent than they are by lumping together two distinct categories of murders: those that remained unsolved, and those committed by strangers. Many an unsolved murder later turns out to have been committed by a relative or other acquaintance of the victim.
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To suggest that all Americans have a realistic chance of being a victim of homicide is to heighten already elevated anxieties among people who face little risk. In spite of the impression given by stories like the one in
Time
titled “Danger in the Safety Zone: As Violence Spreads into Small Towns, Many Americans Barricade Themselves,” which focused on random murders in several hamlets throughout the country, tens of millions of Americans live in places where there hasn’t been a
murder in years, and most of the rest of us live in towns and neighborhoods where murder is a rare occurrence.
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Who
does
stand a realistic chance of being murdered? You guessed it: minority males. A black man is about eighteen times more likely to be murdered than is a white woman. All told, the murder rate for black men is double that of American soldiers in World War II. And for black men between the ages of fifteen and thirty, violence is the single leading cause of death.
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David Krajicek, a journalism instructor at Columbia University, recalls a term that he and his editor used when he worked as a crime reporter for the
New York Daily News
in the 1980s. The term was
unblees—
unidentified black males. “Unblees,” Krajicek notes, “rarely rated a story unless three or four turned up at the same location. We paid little attention to these routine murders because the police paid little attention.”
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Police inattention is one of several factors that journalists accurately cite to account for why white crime victims receive more media attention than black victims. Journalists also cite complaints from African-American leaders about the press paying too much attention to problems and pathologies in black communities. But are crime victims the best candidates to overlook in the service of more positive coverage? A host of studies indicate that by downplaying the suffering of victims and their families the media do a disservice to minority neighborhoods where those victims live. Criminologists have documented that the amount of coverage a crime victim receives affects how much attention police devote to the case and the willingness of prosecutors to accept plea bargains. As a rule, the more coverage, the more likely that an assailant will be kept behind bars, unable to do further harm to the victim or community. In addition, when a neighborhood’s crime victims are portrayed
as
victims—sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics—people living in other parts of the city are more inclined to support improved social services for the area, which in turn can reduce the crime rate.
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Underreporting of black victims also has the effect of making white victims appear more ubiquitous than they are, thereby fueling whites’ fears of black criminals, something that benefits neither race. Helen Benedict, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, has documented that rapes of white women by black men—which constitute a tiny proportion of all rapes—receive considerable media attention. In a separate study of women’s concerns about crime Esther Madriz, a sociology professor at Hunter College, discovered that stories in the news media “reinforce a vision of society in which black men are foremost among women’s fears.”
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Another explanation journalists and editors give for their relative neglect of black victims might be called the Journalism 101 defense. Those of us who took an introductory journalism course in college remember the teacher pounding into our cerebrums the famous dictate attributed to John Bogart, city editor of the
New York Sun
in the 1880s: “When a dog bites a man that is not news, when a man bites a dog, that is news.” Everyone
expects
black crime victims, the argument goes, so their plight isn’t newsworthy. Here is how a writer for the
Los Angeles Times,
Scott Harris, characterized the thoughts that go through reporters’ and editors’ minds as they ponder how much attention, if any, to accord to a city’s latest homicide: “Another 15-year-old shot to death? Ho hum. Was he an innocent bystander? What part of town? Any white people involved?”
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As heartless and bigoted as this reasoning may sound, actually there would be nothing objectionable about it if news organizations applied the man-bites-dog principle universally. Obviously they do not; otherwise, there would never be stories about crimes committed by black men, since no one considers black perpetrators novel or unexpected.
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My friend David Shaw, media critic at the
Los Angeles Times,
offers a simpler explanation for the scant attention to black victims. To stay in business newspapers must cater to the interests of their subscribers, few of whom live in inner-city minority neighborhoods. The same market forces result in paltry coverage of foreign news in most American newspapers, Shaw suggests.
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Now
there’s
a study someone should do: compare the amount of attention and empathy accorded by the U.S. press during the 1990s to
black men shot down in American cities to, say, Bosnians killed in that country’s civil war. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bosnians fared better. The tendency to slight black victims extends even to coverage of undeniably newsworthy crimes such as shootings of police by fellow officers. In 1996, after a white New York City police officer, Peter Del-Debbio, was convicted of shooting Desmond Robinson, a black plainclothes transit officer in the back, wounding his kidneys, liver, lungs, and heart, reporters and columnists evidenced great sympathy for Del-Debbio. They characterized him as having made an innocent mistake and suffering overwhelming remorse. The agony of Robinson and his family, by contrast, received more modest attention. Few reporters seriously questioned—and some overtly endorsed—the official spin from the district attorney, mayor, and defense attorneys that the shooting had nothing to do with race and was largely the victim’s fault—even though in testimony Del-Debbio recalled having reacted not to seeing just any man with a gun but “a male black with a gun.”
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While some writers made note of the fact that black officers say their white colleagues are quick to fire at African Americans working undercover because they view them as suspects, no reporter, the best I can determine, investigated the issue. When Richard Goldstein, a media critic for the
Village Voice,
reviewed the coverage of the shooting he found that only the
Daily News—
not the
Times
or
Post—
made note of the fact that, since 1941, twenty black police officers in New York had been shot by white colleagues. During that time not a single white officer had been shot by a black cop. “Imagine,” wrote Goldstein, “the shock-horror if 20 female officers had been shot by male cops. But when it comes to race, the more obvious the pattern the more obscure it seems.”
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The reverse is true as well. When it comes to race, obscure patterns become accepted as obvious and are put to use in perpetuating racial fears. Consider a scare about black men that has been directed at people like me. As a Jew, I am susceptible to fear mongering about anti-Semitism.
I am not as paranoid as the Woody Allen character in
Annie Hall
who hears the
wordJew
when someone says “did you”; but neither am I among those Jews who, never having experienced anti-Semitism personally, imagine that it vanished from the globe when Germany surrendered in 1945.

In my own life anti-Semitism has been an almost constant presence. Growing up in a small town in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, I was attacked—verbally on numerous occasions, physically a few times—and members of my family were barred from joining particular clubs and living in certain neighborhoods on account of our religion. Throughout my career as a professor as well I have endured anti-Semitic remarks from students, staff, and fellow faculty, and Jewish students have come to me for advice about how to handle bigoted teachers and classmates. My writing also brings me into contact with anti-Semites. Because I have a Jewish-sounding name, when I publish controversial articles in newspapers and magazines I can count on receiving letters that go beyond criticizing my views and accuse me of being part of an international Jewish conspiracy.
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So far as I can determine, on none of these occasions was the anti-Semite black. To judge by stories in the news media and reports from advocacy groups, apparently I have a phenomenally skewed sample. Blacks, we have been led to believe, are America’s preeminent anti-Semites. When I conducted a search of databases for major U.S. newspapers, magazines, and network news programs for the eight-year period beginning in 1990 the vast majority of stories about anti-Semitism were on two topics: attacks on Jews in Eastern Europe following the demise of communism and anti-Semitism by African Americans. The sorts of anti-Semites I and my students most often encounter—bitter white people—received relatively little attention.

Even their most fanatical cousins went largely unnoticed. In 1993 white supremacists terrorized Jews, blacks, and other minorities in Billings, Montana, for months on end. A swastika appeared on the door of a synagogue, bottles and bricks were tossed at homes of Jewish families, racist and anti-Semitic literature appeared on windshields and in mailboxes. Yet according to a study by the sociologists Joe Feagin and
Hernán Vera of the University of Florida, only four stories on the violence appeared in the nation’s news media. “In contrast,” Feagin and Vera report, “during the same period more than one hundred national media stories focused on anti-Semitic remarks made by Khalid Muhammad, until then a little-known minister of the small religious group, the Nation of Islam.”
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