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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Mindless and Deadly By Phyllis Vine Buried deep in a New York Times story (1/30/01) about the brutal murder of Dartmouth professors Susanne and Half Zantop, resides a common prejudice linking violence with mental illness. Speculating on the reason for the attack, the paper noted that Half Zantop "had once tried to help a mentally ill young man." When two local youth were arrested--neither suffering from overt psychosis--the knee-jerk response seemed groundless. Yet the initial impression associating the crime with mental illness had already been molded. When a Manhattan woman was assaulted with a brick by an unknown assailant, the New York Daily News (11/19/99) ran two-inch block letters across the front-page, demanding: "GET THE VIOLENT CRAZIES OFF OUR STREETS." The New York Times (11/20/99) flayed the Daily News for its "throat-grabbing covers," but not for its erroneous assumptions. Daily News editor Brian Kates summarized the situation when he told a Times reporter that people assumed "the guy who did it was probably deranged. Obviously that remains to be seen." When the eventual suspect turned out to be neither schizophrenic nor bipolar, the pundits were hardly apologetic: "Drake turns out not to have been the insane box-dweller many thought an eventual brick-attack suspect would be," New York Post columnist Rod Dreher said (12/2/99). And some just kept hammering on the mentally ill; "Whatever Drake's mental condition might be, those loons on the loose who pose threats to the citizenry are still out there because of mental-illness policies that need to be revised," opined Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch (12/2/99). Questionable causality To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1064 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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