[FAIR-L] ACTION ALERT: NBC Exploits Central Park Victims

[bon moun <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

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>Subject:      [FAIR-L] ACTION ALERT: NBC Exploits Central Park Victims
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>                                 FAIR-L
>                    Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
>               Media analysis, critiques and news reports
>
>
>
>
>ACTION ALERT:
>Dateline NBC Exploits Central Park Victims
>
>June 23, 2000
>
>When dozens of women were sexually assaulted in and around Central Park on
>June 11, the story became front page news locally and nationally.
>
>While many outlets focused on allegations that police officers did little to
>prevent the attacks or help the victims, a disturbing trend emerged in
>coverage of the story. In a media climate accustomed to sensationalized
>images of mass crime scenes, news outlets seemed to use the Central Park
>"wilding" story as an excuse to feature lurid amateur video footage of the
>assaults.
>
>Outlets from the Fox News Channel to the New York Post repeatedly featured
>images of nearly naked women crying, screaming or trying desperately to
>cover themselves as they were forcibly stripped and molested.
>
>Adding serious insult to injury, many of these outlets disregarded newsroom
>policies preventing the identification of victims of sexual crimes (policies
>established because assault victims are less likely to come forward if they
>believe their attacks will be hyped by the media as a spectator sport).
>
>Some outlets partially obscured the faces or bodies of the victims; others
>showed close-ups of victims' faces and even slow-motion visuals of a woman
>attempting to hide. While outlets such as the New York Times and NPR (both
>6/19/00) correctly questioned the ethics of outlets running clearly
>identifiable images of victims' faces, they missed the larger point-- that
>repeated airing of these lurid images were exploitative regardless of
>whether the victims' faces could be seen.
>
>Sexual assault on this scale-- and the police force's failure to respond to
>it-- is certainly news.  But media did not have to run tape of in-progress
>sexual assaults to tell the story. Victims caught on tape attempting to
>cover themselves didn't want bystanders in the park to see them naked; by
>running this footage over and over, news outlets made sure that the victims
>were exposed to anyone tuning into the TV news for weeks to come. In doing
>so, news outlets have further humiliated the victims, exposing them on a
>grander scale than did the original attackers.
>
>One of the worst examples of coverage was a Dateline NBC (6/20/00) broadcast
>reported by Bob McKeown. The broadcast opened with McKeown describing "young
>people wearing very little at all" at the parade; his first interviewee,
>parade attendant Andre Holmes, sets the tone for the broadcast: "Everything
>was hot.  The women are hot.  The food is hot."   Interspersed between
>interviews with victims, men who had videotaped the assaults and police
>spokespeople 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 assaults
>on them: "What responsibility, if any, did the women have for what happened
>that day in the park?" McKeown asked.
>
>To answer that question Dateline turned to Amy Holmes, identified as a USA
>Today columnist but not as a member of the anti-feminist Independent Women's
>Forum. 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 was
>triggered by "almost consensual... play" is, to say the least, a dubious and
>regressive one. Even if the assaults were preceded by mutual "roughhousing,"
>to suggest that this somehow implicates the victims of the subsequent
>assaults is like saying that a woman consensually kissing on a date somehow
>mitigates date rape-- or, to use a more accurate analogy, the rape of women
>other than the one that went on the date.
>
>Dateline completed its analysis of this "delicate question" by consulting a
>man present at the assaults, who insisted that though he was "not blaming
>anyone," there were "two sides to this coin." He described the assailants as
>"a crowd of guys, just oversexed and overheated, provoked to a point to
>where it allowed them to do what they wanted to do.  They saw open flesh and
>they just got hungry for more."
>
>It is disturbing that Dateline would uncritically present the discredited
>and sexist argument that men who sexually assault women do so because they
>are provoked to the point of losing control.
>
>In one revealing segment, McKeown described the motivation of one the men
>who videotaped the assaults: "He had gone there, he admits, to record
>videotape of pretty girls, many of them scantily clad.... It turns out
>several men we met were doing the very same thing that day."  McKeown
>explained that this was "one reason there would be so many pictures of the
>mob mayhem that followed."
>
>Dateline's implication is that the existence of home video "pictures of mob
>mayhem" was due to a libidinous, voyeuristic urge on the part of male
>onlookers in and around Central Park. To what, then, can we attribute
>Dateline's repeated airing of these explicit, humiliating pictures of
>sexually assaulted women?
>
>ACTION: Please ask Dateline why it felt it was appropriate to repeatedly run
>exploitative images of women being stripped and groped against their will,
>and why the show framed its investigation with the question of "what
>responsibility" victims bear for such assaults.
>
>As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if
>you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@xxxxxxxx with your
>correspondence.
>
>CONTACT:
>Dateline NBC
>mailto:dateline@xxxxxxx
>
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