The Media go "Wilding"

Will there be no end to it? A loner AK-47-ing moppets in a Stockton school yard. Serial killers by the baker’s dozen. Drug dealers in Matamoros protecting themselves with a cordon of ritual murders. If Fox Broadcasting were to de-escalate one ratchet lower in its programming, it could easily transcribe a Horror of the Week docudrama straight off the tube.
 
And just when you thought our horror index had been trivialized, the Central Park Jogger incident has played “Can you top this?” with our emotions. Never has there been such media obsession with an event that seems to turn James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time into a mild run-through for Apocalypse Now. It makes Tom Wolfe’s scary Bonfire of the Vanities encounter on a Bronx off-ramp resemble a daylight saunter through Central Park. And having prepped at the Tawana Brawley School of impostature, the Al Sharptons of the black over-class flex their talons for a new media flight.
 
Indeed, the more one replays the interpretations of the moral disaster, the more implicated the media seem to be in the malaise. New York magazine’s media critic Edwin Diamond notes (May 15) that there were 3,400 rapes and 1,900 murders reported in New York last year. What is it, he asks, about the six minority teeners going berserk on a night of the full moon that so mesmerizes us?
 
The obvious answer is still the most valid one: a Wellesley / Yale / Phi Beta Kappa investment banker in the first flower of womanhood laid low by six scumbags without a future. Could anything be more unfair?
 
Yes. Try this computer read-out from a City University of New York Graduate Center sociologist: North of 110th is the highest indices of underclasslessness anywhere in America. South of 110th is the highest per capita wealth in the city.
 
Unfair? The widest economic fissure in the country which is the precipitate of three centuries of racism and redlining of one kind or another is of course No News. The Kerner Report, with its grim prediction of two Americas, is No News either. But it's the most salient truth about our country—a gritty reality that has been exacerbated by the last two Disney Decades of Reagan imploring his countrymen to stand tall in the saddle once more.
 
The hysteria, media-hyped, over the Central Park Jogger is middle-class anxiety that “There for my own lack of gutlessness to jog in the moonlight lie I.” Not that the fear isn’t real enough. But walk in the recent moccasins of two Brooklyn women.
 
One was walking back to her Crown Point apartment from getting a pack of cigarettes. Two black youths stopped her for a light and ended up dragging her to the roof of a tenement, raping her and throwing her off the roof to the concrete yard below.
 
Residents heard her screams but didn’t do anything. They gave two possible reasons. That kind of screaming is going on all the time. And “I didn’t want to get involved.”
 
The woman survived from the fluke that the courtyard clothesline broke her fall. Her recumbent moans brought the aid that her airborne screams had failed to muster. Unfair.
 
Imagine having to live day in, night out in such a Hades. It’s not the occasional unfairness of the discretionary nighttime jogger. It’s unremitting, unmitigated diurnal hell. I’m amazed there isn’t more cross-110th Street marauding.
 
One more Crown Point detail. TV pictures of the two rooftop rapists gave another of their victims courage to charge them for an earlier crime where she barely missed being tossed herself.
 
Preservationists have made an industry of saving buildings which survived from our kinder, gentler past. What their middlebrow sentimentality obscures 99% of the time is that our past is a most ambitious burden, an idealistic heritage corrupted by the repression of our darker side in our official centennializing hoopla. It’s more genteel tourism than mature historiography.
 
Parallel to media obsessiveness over the Central Park Jogger was mass coverage of the bicentennial of Washington’s inauguration as president. We needed to praise George less and flatter him more by following his hardheaded examples.
 
The foolishness that media hype has induced on this one incident staggers belief. The other night Larry King set himself up as an authority on the Constitution by berating every caller who neglected to use euphemisms like “alleged” when alluding to teen marauders.
 
One incensed caller played a variation on Bernard Shaw’s contemptibly rhetorical question to Michael Dukakis about how he’d respond to his wife’s rape by asking King what he’d do if someone raped his daughter. Quick as a flash, the erstwhile Constitutional tutor retorted, “I’d track him down and kill him.” (This from a man who spends half his air time lobbying against the death penalty.)
 
There’s more. When another caller asked King for a rationale, he blurted, “Do unto others . . .” Thus does talk radio decline into doubletalk. In general, my sampling of talk radio on this issue the last two weeks suggests that King may actually be talking at a higher level of discourse than his mikemates.
 
Which brings me to my conclusion. Hyping such tragedies has become part of our media’s metabolism. It helps ratings and circulation. No doubt about that. But I think it has been unwittingly eroding the conditions for a civil polity in our society.
 
Fast America is fast becoming a Foolish America. Two cyanide grapes, and Chile staggers. Traces of pesticide, and the Yakima Valley apple crop is endangered.
 
Come on. Let’s cool it, media. Acid Rain, ozone layers, nuclear waste and what we aren’t doing to deal with them is the long-term story. One Central Park tragedy is not the American Tragedy, but it is an emblem of what will engulf us if we don’t start liquidating our losses.
 
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, May 31, 1989