Someone stopped by my office the other day and pointed out The News & Observer’s front-page headline on the Chapel Hill double murders.
He wondered whether the story would have gotten the same attention — front page the first two days, follow-up stories most of the week — if the victims had not been an upper-income family living in the country club section of Chapel Hill.
My considered response, after talking to folks inside and outside this paper, is that it would have. But the story does raise questions about how the media in general, and The N&O in particular, cover murder stories. Do the rich and/or famous get more attention than those lower on the social scale?
Let’s look at the Chapel Hill case first: Parents James and Alison Sapikowski killed, 16-year-old son Adam confesses, police say. Parents may have been dead a couple of weeks, and police are questioning whether the son held a post-prom party at the home for his Durham Academy friends, with his parents dead in the bedroom.
Sensational stuff. There’s no other word for it, and the story has been picked up by national media. In The N&O, the story ran on page 1A Sunday and Monday, with follow-ups Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. (Thursday headline: “Family requests privacy.”)
In the same week, the paper reported on the killing of a mother of three by her estranged husband who, police say, chased her down by car on the streets of North Raleigh, ran her minivan off the road and killed her with his bare hands. A picture of the wrecked cars ran on the front page, but the story itself was on the front of the City & State section.
Why the difference in play? Because, says front-page editor Eric Frederick, the Chapel Hill story had more unusual elements. “In the case of the [Raleigh] domestic killing, what was unusual was that it happened so publicly. Unfortunately,domestic killings are not that unusual.”
I looked back over N&O issues since the beginning of March to get a sense of how the paper treats murder stories. What’s depressing is how many violent deaths there are in our community. The N&O ran 22 local murder stories in its final editions during that period. Four made the front page, seven ran on the City & State front and the rest were consigned to the inside pages.
Some of these hapless humans — the “routine” druggies and the domestic battlers — got less coverage than the story of a family chihuahua shot to death, allegedly, by the next-door neighbor.
What constituted front-page material? Not economic or social status, I was encouraged to see. Besides the Chapel Hill killings, there was the random killing of a retired teacher in South Raleigh, the murder of a teenager in a mobile home in Clayton and the slaying of a man in a trailer park in North Raleigh. Each case had unusual circumstances that made it stand out; the accused in the Clayton killing, for instance, is the teenager’s stepfather.
There were stories during that period that seemed just as tragic. One, for instance, was the killing of 23-year-old twins in Durham, one of whom was pregnant and delivered a baby after her death. A cousin was charged in the killings. That story didn’t make the front page. Mightn’t it, if the killings had happened in upscale Hope Valley?
The initial report on the South Raleigh schoolteacher killing didn’t make the front page either. A follow-up story ran on the front two days later after editors realized the prominence of the victim.
In both stories, the victims and accused were African-American, as was the minivan mom, which makes me wonder whether editors are too quick to dismiss as routine crime that occurs among the poor and minorities.
Frederick, the paper’s front-page editor, doesn’t think social status is a factor. “I’d like to say no,” he said. “We certainly don’t say: this person is poor, this person is African-American” in judging where to play a story. Status is a factor, he said, only to the extent it is related to “connectedness” — how involved, how well known the person is in the community.
Lois Boynton, a journalism ethics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, says research shows that status does make a difference in how newspapers cover crime. “I would like to believe it’s regardless of race, gender, national origin or sexual orientation,” she said. “It’s a legitimate question to ask, because there have been things to show that prominence is a news value. What gets construed as prominence is different in different communities.”
Boynton lives in Chapel Hill, where she’s following the coverage of the Sapikowski killings. “To me, I think the heinousness of the crime is really the thing people are responding to, more than the fact that this is a white, upper-income family.” Her only concern, Boynton said, is “the aspect of regurgitating ad nauseam” the story on TV and in the newspapers after the initial reports.
Here’s my own take, and it’s pretty obvious. Yes, newspapers do give more attention to high-profile people involved in crime, as victims as well as perpetrators. Look at the coverage of the Mike Peterson murder case in Durham, which I would submit fell under the “regurgitation ad nauseam” category. Newspapers do this, let’s be honest, because you as readers want to read about the prominent. The N&O sold a lot of papers during the Peterson trial.
Nothing wrong with meeting readers’ interests, as long as the coverage is appropriate to the importance of the news. And as long as the paper is giving due attention to the not-so-mighty.
