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StumbleUponDateline NBC Exploits Central Park Victims
6/23/00
When dozens of women were sexually assaulted in and around Central Park onJune 11, the story became front page news locally and nationally.
While many outlets focused on allegations that police officers did little toprevent the attacks or help the victims, a disturbing trend emerged incoverage of the story. In a media climate accustomed to sensationalizedimages of mass crime scenes, news outlets seemed to use the Central Park"wilding" story as an excuse to feature lurid amateur video footage of theassaults.
Outlets from the Fox News Channel to the New York Post repeatedly featuredimages of nearly naked women crying, screaming or trying desperately tocover themselves as they were forcibly stripped and molested.
Adding serious insult to injury, many of these outlets disregarded newsroompolicies preventing the identification of victims of sexual crimes (policiesestablished because assault victims are less likely to come forward if theybelieve their attacks will be hyped by the media as a spectator sport).
Some outlets partially obscured the faces or bodies of the victims; othersshowed close-ups of victims' faces and even slow-motion visuals of a womanattempting to hide. While outlets such as the New York Times and NPR (both6/19/00) correctly questioned the ethics of outlets running clearlyidentifiable images of victims' faces, they missed the larger point-- thatrepeated airing of these lurid images were exploitative regardless ofwhether the victims' faces could be seen.
Sexual assault on this scale-- and the police force's failure to respond toit-- is certainly news. But media did not have to run tape of in-progresssexual assaults to tell the story. Victims caught on tape attempting tocover themselves didn't want bystanders in the park to see them naked; byrunning this footage over and over, news outlets made sure that the victimswere exposed to anyone tuning into the TV news for weeks to come. In doingso, news outlets have further humiliated the victims, exposing them on agrander scale than did the original attackers.
One of the worst examples of coverage was a Dateline NBC (6/20/00) broadcastreported by Bob McKeown. The broadcast opened with McKeown describing "youngpeople wearing very little at all" at the parade; his first interviewee,parade attendant Andre Holmes, sets the tone for the broadcast: "Everythingwas hot. The women are hot. The food is hot." Interspersed betweeninterviews with victims, men who had videotaped the assaults and policespokespeople were constant visuals of women being sexually assaulted.
As if this prurient display wasn't bad enough, Dateline went on to raise the"delicate question" of whether the victims should be blamed for the assaultson them: "What responsibility, if any, did the women have for what happenedthat day in the park?" McKeown asked.
To answer that question Dateline turned to Amy Holmes, identified as a USAToday columnist but not as a member of the anti-feminist Independent Women'sForum. Holmes cited the videos in claiming that the assaults started out as"almost consensual sexual play and roughhousing and exhibitionism."
The theory that the sexual assault of passersby by an aggressive mob wastriggered by "almost consensual... play" is, to say the least, a dubious andregressive one. Even if the assaults were preceded by mutual "roughhousing,"to suggest that this somehow implicates the victims of the subsequentassaults is like saying that a woman consensually kissing on a date somehowmitigates date rape-- or, to use a more accurate analogy, the rape of womenother than the one that went on the date.
Dateline completed its analysis of this "delicate question" by consulting aman present at the assaults, who insisted that though he was "not blaminganyone," there were "two sides to this coin." He described the assailants as"a crowd of guys, just oversexed and overheated, provoked to a point towhere it allowed them to do what they wanted to do. They saw open flesh andthey just got hungry for more."
It is disturbing that Dateline would uncritically present the discreditedand sexist argument that men who sexually assault women do so because theyare provoked to the point of losing control.
In one revealing segment, McKeown described the motivation of one the menwho videotaped the assaults: "He had gone there, he admits, to recordvideotape of pretty girls, many of them scantily clad.... It turns outseveral men we met were doing the very same thing that day." McKeownexplained that this was "one reason there would be so many pictures of themob mayhem that followed."
See FAIR's Archives for more
on:
GE/NBC
Sexism
Sensationalism
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