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wrote:

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 13:32:05 -0400, "George" george@least wrote:

Who would have cared if it had been a white guy fighting the LAPD on tape
rather than the (everyone remember the phrase?) "black motorist Rodney
King?" It would have been just another drunk fleeing and eluding.

Ya gotta sell that soap, and folks won't read your paper or watch your
broadcast unless you give 'em what they want.

I don't want to get into a discussion of the more subtle (I won't say
'finer') points of news coverage, but I will point out that the Rodney
King story had two things going for it -- one of them legitimate IMHO
and one of them illegitimate.

The legitimate point is that a lot of minorities in Los Angeles
believed that the police tended to brutalize them as a method of
keeping them in line. What happened to Rodney King played into that.

The ******* was that it was a very graphic piece of tape. As far as
the news gerbils in television were concerned, that made it not only
newsworthy but worth running and re-running and re-running. (That
running it constantly might be inflammatory apparent occurred to those
twits not at all.)

Of course it did. Riots are news too.

The hard fact is that there is a large measure of simple prejudice and
not a little stereotyping that goes into deciding what it
'newsworthy.' Which is why a 'pit bull attack' is so much more likely
to get big play than a dog bite.

--RC

wrote in message
. ..

"J. Clarke" wrote in message

Nice theory, but if you actually apply it to my example, a Golden
Retriever
mauling a child would certainly be a LOT more newsworthy a story.

Wrong. For three or four different reasons. And I say that as a former
newspaper reporter and editor for wire services and daily newspapers.
Among the problems are misidentification of the dog's breed, lack of
identification of the dog's breed (remember, in by far the largest
percentage of fatal dog attacks the dog's breed is unknown), and the
scare factor of the name 'pit bull'. Not to mention the relative
unimportance to the media of getting the breed right.

Let me give you an example from another area that may help clarify how
the process works. Three or four years ago a drunk in the upscale
community of Scottsdale, AZ, was driving home after an evening's
drinking when he hit and killed a boy of 10 or so. The drunk had the
misfortune to be driving a Rolls Royce. As a result the story got at
least ten times as much play as a typical drunken driving fatality of
a child and every stinking one of those stories mentioned the guy had
been driving a Rolls Royce.

Now as with most communities, the make of vehicle involved in a fatal
accident almost never makes the news at all, unless police are trying
to find the car. What made this car 'newsworthy' was the connotation
of wealth, luxury and privilege carried by "Rolls Royce." Just as
'pit bull' in a news story about a dog mauling is more 'newsworthy'
than, say, a golden retriever.

If I weren't interested in gardening and Ireland,
I'd automatically killfile any messages mentioning
'bush' or 'Kerry'

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)