What the Kitty Genovese story really means, by Nicholas Lemann

[Blue_Tires]

Last edited Fri Mar 28, 2014, 01:16 PM - Edit history (1)

Plucking a few events out of the vastness of the world and declaring them to be the news of the day is a mysterious and complicated project. Sometimes what’s news is inarguable—the outbreak of war, a head-of-state transition, natural calamity—but very often it falls into the category of the resonant incident. It isn’t a turn in the course of history, but it strikes editors as illustrative of something important. Take crime. If crimes don’t involve anyone powerful or well known, they generally aren’t considered news. But a few such crimes do become news, big news, and hold the public’s imagination in a tight, enduring grip.

An excellent example is the murder of Kitty Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, by Winston Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old computer punch-card operator, just after three in the morning on Friday, March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens. The fact that this crime, one of six hundred and thirty-six murders in New York City that year, became an American obsession—condemned by mayors and Presidents, puzzled over by academics and theologians, studied in freshman psychology courses, re-created in dozens of research experiments, even used four decades later to justify the Iraq war—can be attributed to the influence of one man, A. M. Rosenthal, of the New York Times.

In 1964, Rosenthal was forty-one years old and relatively new on the job as the newspaper’s metropolitan editor, an important step in his ascent to a seventeen-year reign over the Times’ newsroom. Ten days after Genovese was killed, he went downtown to have lunch with New York City’s police commissioner, Michael Murphy. Murphy spent most of the lunch talking about how worried he was that the civil-rights movement, which was at its peak, would set off racial violence in New York, but toward the end Rosenthal asked him about a curious case, then being covered in the tabloids, in which two men had confessed to the same murder. He learned that one of the competing confessors, Winston Moseley, had definitely murdered a woman in Kew Gardens, Kitty Genovese. That killing had been reported at the time, including in a four-paragraph squib buried deep within the Times, but Murphy said that what had struck him about it was not the crime itself but the behavior of thirty-eight eyewitnesses. Over a grisly half hour of stabbing and screaming, Murphy said, none of them had called the police. Rosenthal assigned a reporter named Martin Gansberg to pursue the story from that angle. On March 27th, the Times ran a front-page story under a four-column headline:


37 WHO SAW MURDER DIDN’T CALL THE POLICE
Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector


The following day, the Times ran a reaction story in which a procession of experts offered explanations of what had happened, or said that it was inexplicable. From then on, the story—as they wouldn’t have said in 1964—went viral.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/03/10/140310crbo_books_lemann?currentPage=all

Excellent, excellent piece on how everything isn't always what it seems...

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Fascinating article

And well worth the time to head over to the New Yorker to read. Moreover, very very relevant in these times.

[Jefferson23]

2. Amazing what eventually came to light. Thank you for posting it. n/t

[yardwork]

3. Interesting. Thanks for posting.

[starroute]

4. Excellent piece -- except for the ending

The author's conclusion that "the manufacturing of the thirty-eight-witnesses myth had generally benign social effects" struck me as entirely lame and even irresponsible in the light of everything that's happened since.

To argue this point at length would take a lot more than one DU post -- but the short version is that the Genovese myth contributed to a narrative about middle class apathy and the unwillingness of good people to get involved that the Republican Party has been exploiting for all it's worth ever since. The current GOP bases its entire platform on a belief that indifference to the suffering of others is intrinsic to human nature. We as liberals may not believe that about ourselves, but we've largely bought into the idea that it's true of others. It undercuts our idealism, it weakens our self-confidence, and it narrows the range of issues that our candidates are willing to embrace.

Phil Ochs' "Small Circle of Friends," from a few years later (1967, I think), shows this demoralizing process at work. Ochs was angry, and had every reason to be, about the indifference of supposed liberals. But much of that "nobody else cares so why should I?" attitude had been manufactured by the media, with the Genovese case as Exhibit A.