Herbert, "What Color Is That Baby?"

Bob Herbert writes an op-ed in today's NYT about the race of murder victims and the resulting media coverage. In it he asks why young white female victims receive more attention than children who die in the inner-city:

It’s a searing double-standard that tells us volumes about the ways in which we view one another, and whose lives are considered to have value in this society and whose are not.
Another disturbing aspect of the coverage is the extreme prurient interest that drives it. The press goes wild over stories about murderous attacks on women who are young, attractive and white.

A closer look at how and why the news media covers some of these stories is overdue. I’d like to see more coverage, not less, of murderous violence in the U.S. But I’d like that coverage to be much broader, more meaningful and less sensationalized.

"Less sensationalized" is the key part of this, I think. Herbert is definitely correct that white victims attract more press coverage, in part because white readers think of violence happening to young white women as being outside the norm, while violence directed against blacks or Latinos in Chicago is "expected," especially when the perpetrators are also non-white.

Stories like Johanna Justin-Jinich's allow an eager white middle-class audience to examine a murderer who "lurks within" the accepted in-group, while coverage of gang violence or even the shooting of innocent children in neighborhoods overrun by gangs will never excite the same feeling of horror/dread in these readers. The best horror movies know that you have to make your audience believe the threat they are witnessing destroying other lives could also exist within their own homes and neighborhoods.

In short, Herbert is correct about the media bias, but the problem goes beyond simply which kind of violence gets covered or which lives are seen to have value. Until our society comes to truly believe that violence is unacceptable and NOT NORMAL no matter where it occurs, the media will continue to make more money covering the Craigslist Killer and others like him than the countless dead children Herbert mentions. Racial and ethnic boundaries are still so strong in America that it will take a lot of change for well-off white audiences to start thinking of "their" problems as "our" problems, and until they do, the situation will almost certainly stay as it is.