The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [67]
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.7
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.8
Of Dogs and Men
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.” 9
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.10
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.”11
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