TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012290/01221014.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 116 lines

                ┬                                                              NATION, Page 19

Turning Victims into Saints


Journalists cannot resist recasting crime into a shopworn
morality tale

By ELLIS COSE


    Reporters, like vampires, feed on human blood. Tales of
tragedy, mayhem and murder are the daily stuff of front-page
headlines and breathless TV newscasts. But journalists rarely
restrict their accounts to the sordid, unadorned facts. If the
victims of such incidents are sufficiently wealthy, virtuous
or beautiful, they are often turned into martyred saints in the
epic battle between good and bad. Thus the spectacle of a
wounded husband, with a dying pregnant wife at his side,
desperately calling for help in a reputedly dangerous Boston
neighborhood, inevitably set editors' pulses racing.

    The Boston Globe told us that the unfortunate Stuarts were
not just any couple. They had enjoyed a life "rich with
potential" and a marriage "so loving it warmed even those at
its edge." In a front-page editorial, the Boston Herald
solemnized, "Perhaps it was the very ordinariness of their
lives . . . that touched us all."

    The statement was blatantly untrue. What made the story so
compelling was not that the people were ordinary but that they
could be portrayed as extraordinary. In an age of broken
marriages and abandoned dreams, the suburbs of Boston had
yielded a perfect couple unquestionably devoted to each other.
And this couple were set upon by scum.

    The standard for journalistic hagiography was set in 1932
with the kidnaping and later killing of Charles Lindbergh's
infant son. Lindbergh was already a bona fide hero, so the
media concentrated on canonizing his family: the faithful and
pregnant wife; the child who was "a golden-haired replica of
his famous father"; Lindbergh's "visibly distraught" mother,
who, despite her suffering, persisted in teaching chemistry at
a high school in Detroit.

    Every few weeks, with a different twist, the tale is played
out again. Last April the media world exploded in indignation
at the rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park. The story
was horrible enough on its own. But it was made more poignant
by the larger-than-life goodness of the heroine. "All anyone
could remember about her," reported the New York Daily News,
was her "grace, cheer and success." She was young, white,
brilliant, a rapidly rising banker. And despite being
overwhelmed by a "wolf pack," she put up a "terrific fight."

    Other examples abound. When a doctor was brutally murdered
by a half-deranged derelict at New York City's Bellevue
Hospital last year, the press promptly pointed out that she was
not just any doctor. She was "full of life" and blessed with
a "brilliant mind." The nightmare of Hedda Nussbaum and her
murdered Lisa was the saga of not just another battered wife
but a once lovely, once successful, patiently suffering woman
who had been possessed by a diabolical man.

    The press prefers its victims to be affluent and white. But
notable exceptions arise. When blacks or Latinos are cast in
the starring role, they are generally portrayed as somehow
different from others of their race -- more gifted, harder
working, more attractive, somehow more noble. The implication
is that unlike most of their ethnic cohorts, they are
individuals worthy of our pity or concern. Tom Wolfe parodied
this syndrome in The Bonfire of the Vanities, when he
described reporter Peter Fallow pumping an English teacher for
details about a black youth struck by a car. After ascertaining
that the young man attended class regularly, Fallow proceeds
to describe him as an "honor student."

    The national media were slow to discover Tawana Brawley, a
young black woman who claimed to have been sexually assaulted
by several white men. But when the press did embrace her, it
quickly figured out how to make the facts fit the mold. Though
some reporters grew skeptical of her story early on -- and were
later vindicated -- the media initially made Brawley not only
a survivor of vicious violence but also a popular honor student
whom racism had subjected to unimaginable agony.

    As the Boston press noted on various occasions, the Stuarts
and their tragedy became symbols -- of inhumanity, of
drug-related crime, of racial animosity. They also became an
easy peg for a recurrent moral tale pitting good against evil
that is guaranteed to generate tears, confirm stereotypes and,
most important, get readers to turn the page. Such allegories
are generally passed off as a search for deeper meaning or an
attempt to humanize the injured party. Yet the images are so
shopworn and predictable that they in fact dehumanize. And the
ostensible larger meaning is patently obvious: here lies another
life that could have contributed much to society had it not
been crushed by those who deserved to die instead.

    Sometimes the image of the heroic victim holds up. Other
times, however, the paragon of virtue is revealed -- as was
Charles Stuart -- to be a very flawed human being. At which
point the press, like an avenging ex-lover, typically executes
an about-face and attacks with self-righteous fury, as if to
say, "How dare you misrepresent yourself!"

    That is not good journalism. But it is usually good reading.
And for that reason alone, the pattern is certain to be
repeated many times over.