A Tale of Two Murders
Why are some people so angry at the media’s reaction to Iryna Zarutska’s murder? This New York Times story, which is a good stand-in for other legacy media stories, helps explain why. The Times story on Zarutska’s murder deviates in major ways from the Times’s framing of the last murder that similarly gripped the public and political consciousness: George Floyd’s. Here’s how:
The Zarutska coverage centers on political jockeying, whereas the Floyd coverage centered on morality.
The Zarutska coverage shies away from discussing the race of the alleged perpetrator and the victim, whereas the Floyd coverage focused on it at every turn.
The Times contextualized Zuratska’s murder with statistics showing violent crime is down, but the Times provided no such context in its Floyd coverage.
At bottom, people are angry at what they perceive to be political allegiances, not objectivity, governing the media response to murders. And it’s hard to argue with them.
The Zarutska coverage centers on political jockeying, whereas the Floyd coverage centered on morality.
The Times introduced political jockeying near the very top of its Zarutska story:
“The police arrested Decarlos Brown Jr. soon after and charged him with first-degree murder. But the brutal killing did not capture widespread attention until the security footage was released on Friday, at which point it became an accelerant for conservative arguments about crime, race and the perceived failings of big-city justice systems and mainstream news outlets in the Trump era.
“The outrage over the Charlotte killing is a part of a pattern in which President Trump and his allies highlight horrific crimes to bolster their case that the country is plagued by ‘American carnage,’ as Mr. Trump put it in his first inaugural address. . .”
The Times continued:
“Last year, conservatives successfully used the killing of a nursing student in Georgia, Laken Riley, by a Venezuelan immigrant who had entered the country illegally to stoke fears about immigrant crime.”
By contrast, the Times’s first Floyd story quoted plaintiffs’ attorneys and the ACLU. The only political discussion involved quotes from Democratic politicians condemning excessive use of police force:
“Benjamin L. Crump, a Tallahassee, Fla., lawyer who has risen to prominence by taking on similar cases, said he had been retained to represent Floyd’s family. ‘This abusive, excessive and inhumane use of force cost the life of a man who was being detained by the police for questioning about a nonviolent charge,’ Mr. Crump said in a statement.
“In a separate statement, John Gordon, executive director of the ACLU of Minnesota, called the video ‘horrifying’ and said it underscored the immediate need for a thorough, fair and transparent investigation into the case. He added that ‘the officers involved — not just the perpetrator, but also those who stood by and did nothing — must be held accountable.’”
The net result is this: The reader comes away from the Floyd coverage with an understanding that something terrible happened, it was inhumane, and it’s probably part of a larger problem involving police interactions with black men. The average reader comes away from the Zarutska coverage with an understanding that conservatives are weaponizing a woman’s death for political purposes.
Both frames can be accurate when applied equally to both incidents. The Floyd murder was undeniably used as an accelerant for liberal arguments about crime, race, and policing in big cities. But the Times did not frame it as such. It framed it instead as a question of basic morality.
The Times needs to be consistent with its framing of politically charged murders. Either discuss them objectively as terrible incidents that spark conversations about violence, or discuss them as “accelerants” for one political tribe’s policy agenda.
To apply one standard to one crime, and a different standard to another crime, is to invite claims of a double standard.
The Zarutska coverage shies away from discussing the race of the alleged perpetrator and the victim, whereas the Floyd coverage focused on it at every turn.
Here are the first two paragraphs of Times’s Zarutska story:
“The video, captured by a security camera in Charlotte, N.C., shows a 23-year-old woman named Iryna Zarutska sitting on a light-rail train one night in late August, dressed in the uniform of the pizza parlor where she worked.
“She is looking at her phone when suddenly, a man sitting behind her stands up, gripping a knife in his raised right hand. Moments later, the police say, he stabbed and killed Ms. Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in what appeared to be a random and unprovoked attack.”
There is no mention of race in these paragraphs at all. The first mention of race in the whole story (!) comes near the end, and here’s how it’s discussed:
“After the video’s release, a number of influential conservatives also accused major news outlets, including The New York Times, of ignoring the story because the crime was committed by a Black man against a white woman. . . The idea that mainstream news outlets downplay crimes committed by Black people has become more of a talking point in some conservative circles in recent years.”
The Floyd coverage, by contrast, put Floyd’s race in the very first sentence:
“The F.B.I. and Minnesota law enforcement authorities are investigating the arrest of a black man who died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by an officer’s knee, in an episode that was recorded on video by a bystander and that sparked large protests in Minneapolis on Tuesday.”
This wildly different treatment is as inexcusable as it is obvious. It is Exhibit A of the conservative case against legacy media outlets. The thinking is “mainstream” outlets sensationalize the deaths of black people by white people and all but ignore, or at least severely downplay, the deaths of white people by black people.
People do not like it when purportedly objective news outlets determine their coverage of a murder based on what political narrative the outlet prefers.
The Times contextualized Zuratska’s murder with statistics showing violent crime is down, but the Times provided no such context in its Floyd coverage.
The Zarutska story prominently highlighted crime statistics near the top of the story:
“. . .despite statistics that show crime is dropping. In Charlotte, overall crime was down by 8 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the police, while violent crime was down by 25 percent.”
This context is worth including in stories. But the Times withheld similar context about police-involved deaths from its Floyd story. It’s simply nowhere to be found. Here is the data that was available to the Times in 2020, but that the Times did not include:
Manhattan Institute: “As of the June 22 [2020] update, the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings showed 14 unarmed Black victims and 25 unarmed white victims in 2019. The database does not include those killed by other means, like George Floyd.
“The number of unarmed Black shooting victims is down 63% from 2015, when the database began. There are about 7,300 Black homicide victims a year. The 14 unarmed victims in fatal police shootings would comprise only 0.2% of that total.”
Harvard University study: “. . .we find, after controlling for suspect demographics, officer demographics, encounter characteristics, suspect weapon and year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics. This coefficient is measured with considerable error and not statistically significant. This result is remarkably robust across alternative empirical specifications and subsets of the data. Partitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings. Investigating the intensive margin – the timing of shootings or how many bullets were discharged in the endeavor – there are no detectable racial differences.”
The Times (and other outlets) should be consistent in how they frame these matters: either include data or don’t. But selectively deciding which murders warrant data context and which don’t invites accusations of stacking the deck for a certain narrative – because that’s exactly the net effect.
So, for anyone wondering why conservatives feel in some ways under siege by legacy media outlets, this is one (of many) reasonable explanations as to why. It is undeniable, based on the above contrast and other similar episodes that we can draw from, that “mainstream” outlets treat stories differently based on the political landscape.
That behavior creates distrust. It erodes credibility. It builds resentment. It is deeply, deeply unhealthy.
