Media coverage of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese famously implicated dozens of the victim’s neighbors in Kew Gardens, Queens – none of whom, according to a front-page NYT story, phoned the police despite witnessing the brutal attacks over the course of half an hour. Nicholas Lemann investigates how the now-debunked “apathy narrative” took hold, tracing its influence to NYT editor A. M. Rosenthal:
Stories like that of the silent witnesses to Kitty Genovese’s murder represent the real danger zone in journalism, because they blend the power of instinct—which is about whether something feels true, not about whether it is true—with the respectable sheen of social science. In his book [on the murder, Thirty-eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case], Rosenthal groused, “I did not feel, nor do I now, that the sociologists and psychiatrists who commented contributed anything substantial to anybody’s understanding of what happened that night on Austin Street.” But, if he hadn’t assigned a second-day story consisting of quotes from such people, his version of the Genovese murder would not have taken the shape that it did. The experts transformed a crime into a crisis.
The manufacturing of the thirty-eight-witnesses myth had generally benign social effects. Yet there are many examples in which tendentious public renderings of violence have set off more, and worse, violence. (Many of the lynchings in the South during the Jim Crow era were undertaken to avenge a crime that the mob, confirmed in its rage by the local press, felt certain had taken place.) The real Kitty Genovese syndrome has to do with our susceptibility to narratives that echo our preconceptions and anxieties. So the lesson of the story isn’t that journalists should trust their gut, the way Abe Rosenthal did. Better to use your head.
The Dish 