It is sad when a young person dies; a once-promising future is snuffed out. When the death could have been avoided, it is much worse; people feel a vexing sensation of frustration – perhaps we could have done something. When drugs, alcohol or abduction are part of the story, then the media turn the death into a public sensation, a morality tale predicated on the cliché of “the innocence of youth.” There is only one general caveat: The young person must be affluent or white.
Kraig Crow died on August 21, 2006, after overdosing on cocaine. He was white, affluent and a star athlete at Lincoln High School, where he played football. Less than year later, The Oregonian ran an in-depth, above-the-fold feature on Crow’s death and the eventual arrests of the five people involved in selling Crow a quarter-ounce of cocaine.
The police case leading to the five arrests – and the resulting Oregonian feature – illustrates a discrepancy between how law enforcement and the media focus their energy on resolving and covering the deaths of affluent youths.
Inevitably, news organizations attempt to contextualize these stories by implying that an encroaching evil exists – either drugs, alcohol dependency or sexual predators. The freakishness of these stories, however, implies otherwise. The underlying connotation of these articles is that law enforcement and the media are compelled to act, or perceive these freak occurrences as “problems” worth fighting, only when the young person is wealthy.
That unctuous waft is the unmistakable odor of classist reportage. And it relates to any story involving children in peril. During the height of the child abduction media scare in 2005, the Scripps Howard News Service conducted a study and found that white children accounted for 76 percent of CNN’s missing-children coverage. Law enforcement is not absolved of criticism. Of Justice Department studies, only 19 percent covered missing or exploited black children.
“Middle-class white families have good social networks and are able to mobilize people better, making it a matter of community-wide attention,” said sociologist David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, quoted in the Scripps Howard article.
This succinctly explains any coverage of children in peril, including the Oregonian’s overblown story on Crow’s death.
Crow’s death warranted coverage. But the coverage of any story must be commensurate with its news value. A young football player dying of a drug overdose is sad, and it clearly necessitates some level of coverage, but turning the story into front-page material indicates that it is not only newsworthy but also the most important story of the day. If Crow had been poor and Hispanic, would The Oregonian deign the story worthy of front-page coverage? Would the Portland Police Department spend a year investigating the death, netting five-penny ante, ludicrously small-time drug dealers?
This is obviously a rhetorical question.
The hook for this story is a trite media standby: drugs are infiltrating affluent, predominantly white schools. Disregard the fact that there is no evidence of widespread cocaine use at Lincoln High School, or any Portland school. News stories like this may distress the affluent families of Portland who are na’ve enough to think that bad things could never happen to their kids, but they also give premium coverage based on child’s perceived standing in society.
It is unbelievably sad when young people die needlessly. Overblown features about the deaths or abductions of attractive, wealthy, white kids only perpetuates a number of classist stereotypes. News coverage should be reasoned, fair and responsible. It can be none of these when news organizations spend resources covering only the wealthy.