The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [68]
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.13
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.14
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.”15
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.”16
The Nation’s Foremost Anti-Semites
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