This morning's New York Times offers a wonderful example of the way that the newspaper treats news of crime. When the victim of a crime is a young white professional woman who lives in a wealthy area of Manhattan, the Times offers extensive coverage -- the news of a woman being hit over the head with a chunk of concrete near Park Avenue South made it onto the front page of the Times a few days back. When the victim of the crime is a poor black or Hispanic person in the Bronx, the Times barely pays attention. Today's paper, for instance, includes a report on the fact that four teenagers were shot and wounded yesterday afternoon in front of a Bronx high school. The article about the Bronx shooting is given scant space and poor placement, inside the metro section. The Times didn't even bother to have one of its own reporters write about the Bronx shooting, instead relying on the Associated Press wire service for its coverage.
Imagine if four students had been shot on the sidewalk outside Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, an elite public school (you have to do well on a test to get in) with a substantial white population. Or imagine it had happened on the Upper East Side outside the Dalton School, a private school with a fine reputation that is attended by the children of many of Manhattan's masters of the universe. It would be all over the front page of the Times, and the paper would dispatch probably a dozen of its own reporters to find out what happened.
There's an argument to be made that crime in good neighborhoods is more newsworthy than crime in bad neighborhoods because it is more unusual, more "new." There's probably some truth to that. But there's also some truth in the idea that by choosing not to pay much attention to this school shooting in the Bronx, while paying lots of attention to crimes against white professionals in rich neighborhoods, the Times is subtly signaling its readers and advertisers about who its newspaper is aimed at. And for all the acres of coverage in the Times about race as part of the interminable series on "How Race Is Lived in America," you'd have to look pretty hard to find a detailed explanation or defense of the fact that, yeah, the Times does pays less attention to crimes that involve poor minorities. The view here is that the Times, as a private company and one protected by the First Amendment, should be able to choose its audience by shaping its coverage in any racial, geographic or demographic direction it desires. But watch the way the Times editorials react when, say, a pizza delivery company or bank or insurance company tries to make the same sorts of marketing decisions. In those industries, such practices are roundly condemned by the Times as "redlining."
Blowing Smoke on Tobacco: Speaking of the Times' attitudes toward private industry, the newspaper's lead editorial today basically comes out in favor of using class action lawsuits to put companies out of business, even when the Congress or state legislatures are unwilling to declare the products illegal. The Times has taken this position before on the gun issue, ignoring the dangers of allowing courts and trial lawyers to usurp the legislative powers that are properly vested by the American system in the Congress and the state legislatures. In today's case, the matter is not guns but cigarettes, which the Times labels "a product that causes more than 400,000 deaths in America a year." This logic is just as flawed on tobacco as it is on guns. The cigarettes don't cause deaths; the smokers who choose to use them are causing their own deaths. Any serious person has known for years that cigarettes are bad for you, and millions of people have quit the habit with an eye toward improving their health. It's probably even an overstatement to say that the smokers are causing their own deaths; death is one of those unavoidable things in modern life. If it weren't caused by smoking it would be caused by old age or eating too many egg yolks or an illness attributable to some other factor. But class-action lawyers haven't yet been able to figure out how to make a buck by suing God for preventing their clients from living forever, so in the meantime, with the full encouragement of the Times, they are going after the deep pockets of the tobacco companies.
Real Estate: The endless onslaught of Times stories about real estate prices continues in today's metro section with a story about the run-up in prices at Cooperative Village on the Lower East Side. As we said yesterday about the story in yesterday's metro section about the summer vacation house rental market, there's plenty of room for this sort of stuff in the Sunday Real Estate section and the weekly "House & Home" section. News coverage of these matters helps encourage real estate companies to advertise in the Times, but at a certain point the quantity of coverage and the placement of it just become silly.