Two contrasting tales of human tragedy last week raised the question of whether The News & Observer gives more attention to some humans than others.
One was a horrendous car-truck collision in Harnett County that killed five people, all with Hispanic surnames. The N&O ran that report at the bottom of Page 1B last Sunday.
The other was the arrest of Cary resident Bradley Cooper in the killing of his wife Nancy in July. The story ran atop Page 1A on Tuesday, with a four-column picture of Cooper being booked at the courthouse.
Did the socioeconomic status of the players in these dramas make any difference in the decision-making about how to treat them in the paper? One reader thought that was so in the Cooper case.
“Can you please tell me why the arrest of Brad Cooper for a murder that the police state clearly was domestic violence, with no real impact on the well-being of the broader community (other than voyeurism because they are white, rich and from Cary) merits an entire page of your now-skimpy newspaper?” asked Debbi Schwartz. “At the same time, you give a paragraph or two to drive-by shootings, gang-related crime and other incidents that could seriously affect innocent citizens of the Triangle.”
One simplistic answer is: That’s what the readers are interested in. The Cooper story was one of the best-read stories on The N&O’s Web site last week.
And, reporter Mandy Locke points out, the Cooper story has unusual elements that make it newsworthy. It took three months for Cary police to bring charges against Cooper, creating a long-running mystery story. Meanwhile, he was involved in a custody battle with his wife’s family over their two young children — a steamy tale of marital infidelity and mental cruelty that played out in the courtroom.
“You just don’t get that kind of stuff coming up in a typical domestic dispute,” Locke said.
But it’s true also that the Coopers were, if not rich, an attractive young family from a comfortable corner of suburbia that doesn’t see many domestic killings. That’s unusual — a definition of news — and it attracts media attention. The Cooper story has a national following — internationally, actually, since the Coopers were from Canada — and Locke said correspondents from all the cable networks flock to the court proceedings.
CONTRAST THE COOPERS TO THE VICTIMS IN THE HARNETT COUNTY CRASH: Three men, two women, ranging in age from 15 to 25, all Hispanic. The men were landscaping workers. The two sisters had left high school, and one was eight months pregnant. They lived in a trailer park in Angier.
N&O photojournalist Ted Richardson, when he read last Sunday’s article, sensed there might be more to the story. “I thought we hadn’t given much attention to the tragedy in the paper, and I thought it was important for the community to know who was lost, and why,” he said.
So at the direction of Wake County Editor Jim Nesbitt, Richardson and reporter Josh Shaffer spent Monday and Tuesday in the Angier area, talking to the victims’ family and neighbors and visiting the funeral home as mourners paid their respects. Richardson, fluent in Spanish, served as translator as well as photographer.
The result was a nicely crafted narrative on the front page Wednesday that gave readers a fuller appreciation of the five lost lives. It included a sad photograph by Richardson of Ashley Martinez’s fiance at her casket, touching her hand in farewell.
I didn’t see much sympathy for the crash victims in the comments posted on the stories on The N&O’s Web site. “These are not exactly the kind of people anyone should look up to,” wrote one reader. “Sadly, their irresponsible behavior cost them their lives.”
The five victims may not have been model citizens, but their story merits our attention. I think The N&O’s investment of two journalists for two days in a story of people living on society’s margins is an apt response to criticism that the paper is absorbed with soap-opera sensations like the Nancy Cooper killing. “It’s not why we made that call” to put the Harnett story on the front page, Nesbitt said, “but I think that particular story is an answer to that.”
For his part, Richardson, the photographer, said his motivation was not to make a social statement but to show people the human dimensions of a tragedy. “It’s information, but it’s also connecting people,” he said. “I’m trying to connect people with other people in the community suffering something tragic — no matter who the victims were.”
