'Three murders at a Midwestern college equal one murder at Harvard or Yale'
By adamg - 9/18/09 - 2:38 pm
Jack Shafer examines the way media from all over loves them some good Ivy murder sagas - the Globe has already run six stories on that recent Yale murder case:
... Had the Le murder happened at, say, Oklahoma State University, you'd have to bribe the night editor of the New York Times with a case of scotch and Hasty Pudding tickets to get him to run a one-inch wire story. Hell, a Stanford murder wouldn't warrant this sort of coverage! ...
Comments
Well, the Yale student was
Well, the Yale student was originally reported as a missing person. It changes things. Now that it's in the public eye, the murder case will be covered, b/c people are interested in it.
Wrong stereotype. Any murder
Wrong stereotype. Any murder involving a photogenic young woman and an accused employee, with a body hidden in such a ghoulish manner, would receive big national coverage no matter what college it was. Yale may give it an added boost, but it would hardly be invisible. And the egalitarian concept that all murders are equally newsworthy is as meritless as claiming all obits belong on Page One.
The story was heavily
The story was heavily covered before they found the body. The question is, what does "photogenic" mean? Would a missing black girl with a nice smile from Tallahassee be covered in the same way? The fact is, the media - all across the country - doesn't think that black people are "photogenic."
So true. When will Barack,
So true. When will Barack, Tiger or Kanye get their turn in the media?
Also, I think that Yale and Harvard and Princeton stories play stronger in the NY Times because they are essentially New York schools in that a significant amount of their students, faculty and alumni are from New York. Not so much schools elsewhere in the country... If this story happened at Stanford or Berkeley I think it still gets less play than Yale.
If she went to Yale? Sure it would
I don't think the ethnicity of the murdered girl has anything to do with the publicity. It's all about the facts of the crime and where it happened.
I'm not troubled by the
I'm not troubled by the amount of media coverage for this one case, but I want to know why the hell a Northeastern student's murder - an apparent random act of violence - wasn't plastered all over the national news, with the FBI called in, and a suspect under arrest within days.
http://www.huntington-news.com/2.6300/nu-student-shot-to-death-on-hill-1.681827
Over a year and nothing. That disgusts me. Is a crime more important to the FBI if it's on an Ivy League campus or something?
Non controversial point
I regarded Shafer's point as pretty non-controversial. As terrible as this crime was, unfortunately its basic elements -- whether characterized as a campus killing, an instance of workplace violence, or some combination -- are sadly not unheard of. And as others have noted, similar stories not involving Ivy League institutions have not been so extensively reported by the media.
As someone who studies workplace violence issues, I hope the resulting coverage at least will shed some light on this concern. It's certainly worthy of attention.
As for the Globe and Ivies, well, that hasn't changed. After all, if someone passes gas at Harvard, they cover it like a Category 3 Hurricane.