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Ho hum, just another dead guy in Dorchester
By adamg on Wed, 08/18/2010 - 8:04am
The Globe today leads with Markoff's suicide (and offers us two videos detailing how he killed himself). The 39-year-old guy gunned down at noon on a Dorchester street? That gets a brief.
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Comments
The news loves the death of a
The news loves the death of a white girl, and when its done by a preppy white guy its the story of the century. So sad.
Race doesn't really have everything to do with it....
People hated this white guy Markoff like you could hate no other. If he killed someone of any race it would make news.
respectfully disagree, Pete.
one of the reasons people were so captivated with Markoff was because he killed a beautiful white woman. had he killed a poor black hooker, i think the world would hate him a lot less. it's just another kind of Missing White Girl Syndrome. only in this case it's a Murdered White Girl.
there are a lot of other reasons people are fascinated with this case (craigslist, call girls, rich folks, fancy hotels, etc.), but at the end of the day, the worlds obsession with this case has a lot to do with race and class.
agree
I'd have to agree. Every time an update is run on this they show both the photo of Markoff and of his alleged victim (I feel fairly confident that we can drop the "alleged" but I suppose we never will be able to, legal(istic)ly). Had the victim been a black prostitute I doubt we'd keep seeing her photo. Children(any race up to a certain age), white women and maybe puppies get continual play in the victim file.
The majority of the audience is white, so who are they going to connect with and then subsequently be drawn to reading the story about (clicking on the link or buying the paper)? It will be interesting to see if as a greater percentage of the country is Latino if we will start to see more Latino representation of Latinas in that victim file, say in 20 years.
Beautiful white woman?
This was a hooker we are talking about. I think the Lacey Peterson case would be more of a situation where the race of the victim/suspect is more of a factor. And I'm not trying to say her life is not as valuable as anyone elses, regardless of race or class, but I'm just saying race is less of a factor here than it would be in that Peterson case, or in another case where someone is murdered under a mysterious circumstance. I would agree that the media would cover a story like that less if it were a black man killing his black wife. Here though, I think this would have been just as big if the hooker was black.
No mystery
The white male crook gets the attention over a black male victim. Again. And again. And again. And again.
What you seem to forget is
What you seem to forget is that blacks (specifically those of the self celebrating thug underclass) regularly kill each other in urban areas around the country. It's a common event which has become boring to the news media. Now when some preppy rich white guy kills someone, that's a bit rarer, and a a more exciting story for the average reporter. Thus it gets thrown on the air by the media and played until our eyes and ears bleed.
Now for those of you going to pull the whole race baiting gambit and can't seem to remember that I'm black:
Notice how when a good kid, who happens to be black, gets gunned down for innocently walking across the wrong basketball court on the way to buying a Mother's Day card, that gets heavily reported for at least a week. When the shooters and victims are both reasonably identifiable as thug on thug the news simply doesn't care anymore.
Haviland is 100 percent
Haviland is 100 percent correct. There was a ton of coverage, in the media and on this site, of the 14yr old killed outside Bromley Heath. What doesn't get regular coverage is gangsters shooting gangsters, nor should it.
The other 14-year-old
Regular readers no doubt wish I would shut up about this already, but:
The media is remarkably inconsistent in caring about 14-year-olds. Yes, there were two kids shot to death this summer, and yes, both cases were extensively covered. But everybody, even the police, kept failing to mention the third 14-year-old shot to death this year.
As for yesterday's murder, we don't know the circumstances. I'd argue a 39-year-old guy getting shot repeatedly at noon outside on a quiet residential street (just scanned a year's worth of BPD crime records; didn't find anything from that street) merits more than just rewriting a barebones BPD press release, which is what the Globe and Herald basically did. I know that's what they did, because I did the same exact thing and recognize the BPD press office's work in their stories.
So am I a hypocrite for not doing more about this story? Perhaps. Unfortunately, there's only one person in the Universal Hub Mobile News Unit. But I didn't rush downtown for the press conference on Markoff's suicide, either.
As for gangsters shooting gangsters
I didn't much care about that either, until one gang member fired into a car in a funeral procession carrying some other gang members right at my daughter's bus stop (a couple hours before she was due to get off the bus, granted), killing one of them. All of a sudden, I cared a great deal. I'd be interested in hearing from anybody living on a street that does have a gang problem; I wonder if their perspective might be different.
Yesterday, Davis defended the
Well, are they? I don't have
Well, are they? I don't have the numbers, it sounds like Davis does.
The police won't eliminate ALL crime. They can't. But if they're doing their job and reducing it, there will still be stories about murders. That doesn't mean the strategies aren't working.
the number gunshot victims continue to grow
since he made that statement. If he's going to make that argument, he could back up by publishing the data he used to draw the conclusion.
The Globe isn't racist - they
The Globe isn't racist - they don't hate black people, they just love white people.
I'll admit that I way more
I'll admit that I'm way more interested to read updates on the Markoff story than I am to read about some nameless and/or faceless murder in a neighborhood I neither live in nor frequent.
I may click on that Dot murder story, I may not. I sure as hell will read the Markoff story, not because he's white, or because his victims were, but because its crazy interesting. Because he's the "Craigslist Killer". Because he was a seemingly typical member of society. Because he used his medical knowledge to more efficiently kill himself. Because he wrote his fiancee's name and a cryptic message in his own blood. Are you kidding me? Who gives a shit if this guy is white or what, people are reading this because it is fascinatingly dramatic.
Just because the world as you see it breaks down into black or white doesn't mean it does for everybody else.
Oh, it's a great story
But there's no reason a paper can't cover both, even in these days of shrunken newsrooms.
How it plays in other cities.
In Baltimore a middle class 20s white fellow was killed in a robbery in a middle class neighborhood in the city. The neighborhood is low on crime relative to other areas. It was big news; got lots of ink. A black man nearby was killed in his neighborhood within a few days of the first incident. The neighborhood is high on crime relative to other areas. Small news, little ink.
What accounted for the quantifiable differences in press and ink? Probably several factors including that the former was considered exceptional while the latter is considered to typical The former was a young middle class man while the latter was a middle age lower class man. More readers probably identify with the first victim's neighborhood than the second victim's area.
If there was any one thing that stood out, though I don't think it's just one factor, it is that the first murder was the exception while the second was considered - to be blunt, a typical, even expected murder.
The demographic makeup of the news consumer obviously plays into how much press is devoted. In both cases the demographic is usually middle class. Lower class folks won't get as much attention because they are not the prospective customers of most of the advertisers.
Where that leads me is to view the differences of press and reaction as based on class, not race. That makes sense in a commercial sense of who pays the piper gets to choose the tune.
But what is troubling is that there is a lot of crime and the majority come out of what developed into an American lower class. Not the 19th century Marx and Engles sense of industrialist and aristocratic class but an American definition of class that continues to support environments and cultures of violence and rage which pours out as gang wars and children dying on playgrounds.
interesting comments
I do believe that race and class are indeed a part of the mix. You cannot single either of them out as the deciding factor, but to deny it is certainly misguided. As a matter of fact, (I actually will have to take some time to research but) I do believe a black hooker was in fact killed in the past few years with not so much as a footnote.
I do agree that people are more drawn to those stories where they can identify with something embedded in the plot. I frankly am rarely interested in news such as the Markoff incident. And I am only interested in those "typical" urban violence stories where I know someone who's affected by it. It's the unfortunate consequence of the "if it's not affecting my world, then it's not really a part of my world" view. But there again is part of the typical problem, there is general concern/empathy but not general support to combat it. Shootings may be down, but a lot of it is predictable. The BPD are public servants but it also a job. Money; overtime. Smart policing mean less crime which means less employees needed. The recent example should clearly highlight it. A shooting on Thursday. 3 days later another shooting on the same block. It does not take a rocket science to identify a gap there. And that has been the case in numerous shootings in this city, where the city know the impact players and hot spots yet a lax patrols or visible presence at those location in general and a tepid improvement in the aftermath of something happening.
I did not mean that it didn't matter at all.
I just wanted to point out that in this instance, race had less to do with the sensationalism of the story than people think. Several factors made this such an wierd story. First was the issue of Markoff on camera walking through the hotel lobby. People had a picture of a murderer that needed to be identified. That kind of got the whole ball rolling. Then you got the details of the murder and the attacks before. That made this a special case. The fact that he was white play some part in peoples interest, but this was the murderer, not the victim. People wanted to see this guy in prison.
Smart policing mean less crime which means less employees needed
This statement isn't exactly true Pops. The North Koreas and Stalinist Russias have had some of the lowest crime rates in the world because of their policing policies and practices. Studies have also shown that increases proactive marked patrols have zero effect on crime rates in urban areas. I would say 75% of the current murder problem in Boston is more of a socio-economic problem than it is a policing problem.