Essay 4065

From The Chicago Tribune…

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‘What is a hate crime?’ Issue deserved deeper examination

By Timothy J. McNulty

A front-page article on hate crimes in last Sunday’s Tribune (see Essay 4028) provided a fascinating insight about racial division in the country and provoked angry responses about the mainstream media’s reporting on hate crimes.

Unfortunately, the way the newspaper called attention to the story with provocative headlines and photos promised more than it delivered and was more stereotypical than informative.

The story raised an important topic worthy of the front page, but it was undercut by its presentation and omissions that include asking but never fully answering the question raised by the large main headline: “What is a hate crime?” Even more, the secondary headline, “Some are asking why no media outcry over murders in which victims were white and defendants are black,” simply played into allegations of a media double standard. It needed to say more.

The brutal killing of a young white man and woman in Tennessee last January is central to the story, but not until the 18th paragraph are authorities quoted saying that there is no evidence of racial motivation in the case. Three black men and a woman are charged with the kidnapping, rape and murder.

That killing motivated first extremists and later more generally conservative commentators and bloggers to condemn the “liberal” media for not making this a major story of black-on-white crime, even though police and prosecutors say the contention that this was a “hate crime” is baseless.

That desire to seek more publicity for the crime is fueled, the story points out, by several high-profile cases in which whites were charged with crimes involving other races, most recently when white Duke University lacrosse players received national attention on charges, later dropped, of raping a black woman.

Lots of emotion is evident in reaction to the crime and to the reporting of the issues that it raises. But it cries out for some clear, unemotional discussion of what is meant by the term, especially after the grieving mother of one of the victims is quoted: “If this wasn’t a hate crime, then I don’t know how you would define a hate crime.”

There is a distinction between “hateful” crimes, which could apply to many violent crimes, and a “hate crime,” which is a legal term with definition, even if it is controversial and depends on subjective judgments about motivation and thought.

A prosecutor and ultimately a jury decide whether race, religion, ethnicity or other factors qualify a crime as a hate crime, but the article did not go into such specifics. Nor did it mention the consequences of increased penalties.

The story by Tribune national correspondent Howard Witt provided details of national crime statistics by race and comments by others on how the media cover crimes by racial identification. He quoted country music star Charlie Daniels on his Web site taking Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to task for not rushing to the site of black-on-white crimes. I would have liked to have heard from either of those men on the topic.

Witt, a skillful reporter who has been writing complex stories about racial controversies, wrote in an e-mail Thursday that the story has been reviled and praised. Some of the hundreds of e-mails and Web postings he has seen show people reading into the article whatever fits their preconceived ideas and prejudices.

But other readers sent messages expressing concern that the paper’s coverage of this and the Duke case was “pandering to bigots.” They wrote that the topic of race and crime is too easily manipulated.

The story, labeled a “Tribune Special Report,” demanded careful treatment for such a volatile subject. The juxtaposition of the photo of a smiling young white couple and then passport-size photos of three sullen black men and a black woman said more than it meant to.

The packaging of the article, the task of editors, not reporters, is a sharp reminder of how critically important the position on the page plus the headlines, labels and photo captions are to readers’ perceptions, even before they read the story.

The crime was covered locally in Knoxville and still receives much regional attention, because of continuing demonstrations by members of neo-Nazi groups and other white supremacists.

Extremist groups have used it as a recruiting tool on the Internet and spread rumors and false details of the murders along with allegations of a media double standard. Five months after the crime, the Knoxville News-Sentinel ran a front-page story separating fact from fiction in the case.

A few days before the hate-crime story, the Tribune published a Commentary page article on the same topic by syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts. The “white supremacists and conservatives” who are pushing the Tennessee story, Pitts wrote, are “so abysmally, stupidly, self-servingly wrong” that he could not help but respond.

So did many readers, including one who wrote, “the media has never shied away from covering black crime—whether the victims are white or black.” She also noted that the issue is not just about the perpetrators of crime, contending that stories about white female victims are more likely to make headlines than stories about black female victims.

The story should have probed deeper and given more context to the issues. While the connection between race and crime is a complex subject for any writer, readers expect a special report in the newspaper to be special and its presentation precise.