White Crime Victims Favored In Mainstream Media Reports

In December 1995, American Journalism Review wrote about a year-old Chicago study documenting that white victims of crime received more television news time than their minority counterparts. Recent research indicates that the trend continues in mainstream media.

White victims in the United States frequently become household names. Decades after being raped and stabbed in 1964 within earshot of more than three dozen neighbors in the New York borough of Queens, Catherine “Kitty” Genovese remains one of the most memorable murder victims in the nation’s history.