The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [47]
This awful but isolated incident got retold in the media repeatedly over the coming months as evidence of the unbridled spread of youthful violence into previously safe areas. The coverage culminated in a New York Times story a full year after the event. Headlined “Mistaken Killing of Three Teen-Agers Erodes a California City’s Confidence,” the piece was hard to take seriously if you knew much about what actually had transpired in Pasadena over the twelve months following the shootings. There had been no epidemic of violence by the city’s youth and no mass exodus of homeowners or merchants, many of whom depend heavily on the tourist trade. On the contrary, Pasadena’s “Old Town” section was booming with new restaurants and clothing boutiques, and violent crime in Pasadena actually dropped by 20 percent in 1994. On Halloween night that year community groups sponsored an outdoor carnival on the steps of City Hall that went off without incident.45
Stories commemorating the anniversary of violent events further add to what has become an extraordinary volume of coverage about kids and crime. When a professor of communications at the University of California at Santa Barbara monitored the media for a month in the early 1990s he discovered that stories about health and economic issues together accounted for a measly 4 percent of newspapers’ and television newscasts’ coverage of children. By contrast, 40 percent of all news reports about children in the nation’s leading newspapers concerned crime and violence. The figure for evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC was 48 percent.46
Local newscasts are worse still. In a paper published in 1997 in the American,journal of Public Health researchers from the University of California at Berkeley reported the results of an analysis they conducted of all news stories broadcast on local television stations in California over a twelve-day period. Fifty-five percent of stories about young people concerned violence committed by or against them.47
Reports about violence by youths customarily contain two elements that together guarantee the audience will sit up and shudder: vivid depictions of the young criminals and their crimes, and numbers showing dramatic increases on some dimension or other. A New York Times story typical of the genre began with a kid and a crime: “It was a wave of the hand from a 10-year-old boy with a Botticelli face and Dennis the Menace bangs that brought Elizabeth Alvarez to her death on a humid afternoon last August.” Then the story related the kid and the crime to a statistical trend: “As overall violent crimes leveled off, those committed by people under 18 rose 47 percent.”48
If instead of percentages reporters concentrated either on the actual numbers of such crimes committed by kids in these age groups or on historical comparisons, they wouldn’t have much of a story. “The number of homicides committed by children age 12 and under grew by 125%,” USA Today let its readers know, at a time when fewer than forty kids under the age of thirteen were convicted of murder each year. In the mid-1990s homicide by children under thirteen occurred less often than in 1965. A report from the Justice Department stated unambiguously, “Today’s serious and violent juvenile offenders are not significantly younger than those of 10 or 15 years ago.”49
Particularly rare are kid criminals whose behaviors, given the rest of their lives, are very surprising. You have to dig deep into the media accounts, though, to glimpse that reality. It was the angelic face of Jacob Gonzales, in a large photograph just beneath the masthead at the top of the front page of the New York Times in 1994, that most readers undoubtedly remembered for weeks to come. Headlined “2 Boys, a Debt, a Gun, a Victim: The Face of Violence,” the story tells how Jacob helped his buddy, a fourteen-year-old drug dealer,