Turning Victims into Saints

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The press prefers its victims to be affluent and white. But notable exceptions arise. When blacks or Latinos are cast in the starring role, they are generally portrayed as somehow different from others of their race -- more gifted, harder working, more attractive, somehow more noble. The implication is that unlike most of their ethnic cohorts, they are individuals worthy of our pity or concern. Tom Wolfe parodied this syndrome in The Bonfire of the Vanities, when he described reporter Peter Fallow pumping an English teacher for details about a black youth struck by a car. After ascertaining that the young man attended class regularly, Fallow proceeds to describe him as an "honor student."

The national media were slow to discover Tawana Brawley, a young black woman who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by several white men. But when the press did embrace her, it quickly figured out how to make the facts fit the mold. Though some reporters grew skeptical of her story early on -- and were later vindicated -- the media initially made Brawley not only a survivor of vicious violence but also a popular honor student whom racism had subjected to unimaginable agony.

As the Boston press noted on various occasions, the Stuarts and their tragedy became symbols -- of inhumanity, of drug-related crime, of racial animosity. They also became an easy peg for a recurrent moral tale pitting good against evil that is guaranteed to generate tears, confirm stereotypes and, most important, get readers to turn the page. Such allegories are generally passed off as a search for deeper meaning or an attempt to humanize the injured party. Yet the images are so shopworn and predictable that they in fact dehumanize. And the ostensible larger meaning is patently obvious: here lies another life that could have contributed much to society had it not been crushed by those who deserved to die instead.

Sometimes the image of the heroic victim holds up. Other times, however, the paragon of virtue is revealed -- as was Charles Stuart -- to be a very flawed human being. At which point the press, like an avenging ex-lover, typically executes an about-face and attacks with self-righteous fury, as if to say, "How dare you misrepresent yourself!"

That is not good journalism. But it is usually good reading. And for that reason alone, the pattern is certain to be repeated many times over.