Turning Victims into Saints

By ELLIS COSE

Reporters, like vampires, feed on human blood. Tales of tragedy, mayhem and murder are the daily stuff of front-page headlines and breathless TV newscasts. But journalists rarely restrict their accounts to the sordid, unadorned facts. If the victims of such incidents are sufficiently wealthy, virtuous or beautiful, they are often turned into martyred saints in the epic battle between good and bad. Thus the spectacle of a wounded husband, with a dying pregnant wife at his side, desperately calling for help in a reputedly dangerous Boston neighborhood, inevitably set editors' pulses racing.

The Boston Globe told us that the unfortunate Stuarts were not just any couple. They had enjoyed a life "rich with potential" and a marriage "so loving it warmed even those at its edge." In a front-page editorial, the Boston Herald solemnized, "Perhaps it was the very ordinariness of their lives . . . that touched us all."

The statement was blatantly untrue. What made the story so compelling was not that the people were ordinary but that they could be portrayed as extraordinary. In an age of broken marriages and abandoned dreams, the suburbs of Boston had yielded a perfect couple unquestionably devoted to each other. And this couple were set upon by scum.

The standard for journalistic hagiography was set in 1932 with the kidnaping and later killing of Charles Lindbergh's infant son. Lindbergh was already a bona fide hero, so the media concentrated on canonizing his family: the faithful and pregnant wife; the child who was "a golden-haired replica of his famous father"; Lindbergh's "visibly distraught" mother, who, despite her suffering, persisted in teaching chemistry at a high school in Detroit.

Every few weeks, with a different twist, the tale is played out again. Last April the media world exploded in indignation at the rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park. The story was horrible enough on its own. But it was made more poignant by the larger-than-life goodness of the heroine. "All anyone could remember about her," reported the New York Daily News, was her "grace, cheer and success." She was young, white, brilliant, a rapidly rising banker. And despite being overwhelmed by a "wolf pack," she put up a "terrific fight."

Other examples abound. When a doctor was brutally murdered by a half- deranged derelict at New York City's Bellevue Hospital last year, the press promptly pointed out that she was not just any doctor. She was "full of life" and blessed with a "brilliant mind." The nightmare of Hedda Nussbaum and her murdered Lisa was the saga of not just another battered wife but a once lovely, once successful, patiently suffering woman who had been possessed by a diabolical man.

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.