Even when he’s sort-of-right, there is little evidence to suggest that the emoting and marching and sermonizing of Hartford’s designated Angry Black Man, the Rev. Cornell Lewis, has much of an impact.
His latest protestation is that the news media and Gov. M. Jodi Rell — and perhaps the general culture — is much more interested in and concerned about the recent home-invasion horror in Cheshire than about the various minority bodies littering the mean streets of Hartford.
As is often the case, the Rev. Mr. Lewis has well-calibrated public relations timing — but not much to offer.
He is not expressing anything revolutionary in this. The academic literature is littered with studies suggesting that the news media perks up its little ears and wags its tail when murder or rape victims are white, wealthy and without sin.
A few weeks before Lewis was sharing his concern in Hartford, the nation’s black funeral directors were having their national convention in Philadelphia — and one of the points of informal discussion was the lack of media and political attention to dead, black, urban crime victims. With the traditional news media chasing an older, suburban audience, crime news with a “there but for the grace of God go I” morality tale is going to get top billing.
A home invasion of a “prominent” Cheshire doctor, with subsequent rapes and murders, is going to win the news-interest contest against a minority victim without impressive resume, address or story to tell.
The public relations imperative is a bit unappetizing, but the minority population is learning how to play the game. The recent multiple-homicide executions of three young friends in Newark, N.J., received unusually widespread news coverage, in part because the community played up the fact that the kids had college and occupational successes and aspirations that merited the middle-class news treatment.
The old complaint that news outlets play up “bad news,” deserves a more careful analysis. The preference is for crime news with a melodramatic morality tale: the victims are admirable and/or pretty and/or rich and/or blameless — and the perpetrators are different enough from the victims as to be considered alien beings.
The body count associated with urban gang and drug wars offers little in the way of sympathetic, soap-opera emotion — and the news coverage is diminished as a result.
The preference of news consumers is for theater-quality scripts, with heroes to be cheered and villains to be booed. If the circumstances are more ambiguous than that, interest is lost.
Has your local newspaper or television news programs paid much attention to the Dodge City that is Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where between 2000 and 2006, there was, on average, a murder every 3 hours? No, we don’t care. It is far away — and much of the mayhem is in slum areas where it’s hard to decide whether the victims were without sin.
While it’s nothing of which to be particularly proud, when half of U.S. homicide victims are black (as they were in 2005) and most of those are young, black men, a numbness sets in among the news audience — and the purveyors of news product as well.
All of this is not so much “racism” as it is a distancing of middle-class custom and behavior and decision-making from what often appears to be odd and senseless and unpredictable behavior in neighborhoods we can so easily avoid.
There was Juan Pagan, convicted last month in Massachusetts, for murdering a 19-year-old, after a “verbal confrontation” about not much of anything at all. There was Daryl Deshon Johnson, convicted this month in Minnesota of second-degree “unintentional murder” for shooting to death a 15-year-old victim in a botched robbery involving a football jersey.
This stuff is fascinating, in an awful sort of way — but it doesn’t energize the middle-class news audience. When the lunacy slops over to the suburbs, we’re ready to absorb.
As for the Rev. Mr. Lewis, he can engage in another march or another prayer session. But at the end of the day, little of substance will change. The state is about to distribute yet another round of money for futile urban violence prevention and tutoring and other job-creating opportunities for the social-service conspiracy.
Will the programs be “successful?” Perhaps the Rev. Mr. Lewis should pray for a miracle.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
