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Genovese 50

Edgy MD Mar 12 2014 10:24 AM

Had enough of JFK and the Beatles? Well, it's also the 50th anniversary of the Kitty Geneovese Kase. The New Yorker provides a nice summary of how A.M. Rosenthal's coverage of the case was both brilliantly inspired and heartbreakingly inaccurate. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/b ... oks_lemann The real Kitty Genovese syndrome has to do with our susceptibility to narratives that echo our preconceptions and anxieties.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Mar 12 2014 12:41 PM Re: Genovese 50

I've gotten this waved in my face as an example of "how awful people are" or the moral abasement of city dwellers by older, ill-informed blowhards, mostly, as recently as 2 or 3 years ago. (The terrible millennials around me tend toward dubious online surveys/pithy non-sequiturs as crap-argument support in this realm.)

SteveJRogers Mar 12 2014 01:16 PM Re: Genovese 50

Alan Moore would work the Genovese case, and the Rosenthal created narrative into his Watchmen comic book. With Genovese looking at a fabric that would change its design, and choosing not to purchase it. The soon to be costumed vigilante Rorschach would adapt that fabric for his mask after hearing of her murder.

Edgy MD Mar 12 2014 02:43 PM Re: Genovese 50

I'm not sure I can diagram that second sentence in LWFS's post above, but I think I know what he's getting at. It's interesting how much it foreshadows the quasi-journalistic stories --- the don't-tell-me-about-Snopes/who-cares-if-it's-even-remotely-true-'cuz-I'm-totally-on-board-with-the-narrative --- forwarded through Facebook every hour of every day. As the New Yorker story noted, the Rosenthal coverage went viral before there was such a thing as going viral.

SteveJRogers Mar 12 2014 03:20 PM Re: Genovese 50

Edgy MD wrote: I'm not sure I can diagram that second sentence in LWFS's post above, but I think I know what he's getting at. It's interesting how much it foreshadows the quasi-journalistic stories --- the don't-tell-me-about-Snopes/who-cares-if-it's-even-remotely-true-'cuz-I'm-totally-on-board-with-the-narrative --- forwarded through Facebook every hour of every day. As the New Yorker story noted, the Rosenthal coverage went viral before there was such a thing as going viral. The first thing that I thought of when reading the story interestingly enough was the Trayvon Martin case. Even today there are memes and people who hold it as a very strong example of both racial divide and gun laws, despite evidence to suggest that it wasn't as (pun NOT intended) black and white as the original reports of the case suggested. AND if anyone did try to dig deeper, like looking into both Martin and Zimmerman's pasts, looking what combining the watermelon juice and Skittles can produce and whatnot, that was considered "muck raking" and too much "blaming the victim" even though it was more about trying to see the entire picture beyond a rather biased original report put out by Martin family legal counsel.

Edgy MD Mar 12 2014 04:11 PM Re: Genovese 50

I don't think the problem with looking deeper was that it became muckraking, but rather that people looked deeper only to find the facks that confirm the narrative that they prefer.