Covering (or not) the oldest profession

After her daughter went missing in late 1996, Patricia Barone, 67, tried to get news media outlets in Poughkeepsie to cover the story. Most declined. The body of her daughter, Gina Barone, 29, was discovered nearly two years later,…in a ramshackle house a block from Vassar College…. “If one Vassar College girl was missing, we would have had cops all over the place,” Patricia Barone said. “Every one of these women is somebody’s child, and people don’t kind of get that. Your children are your children no matter what they do out there.”

— The New York Times, April 7, 2011

By Joel Thurtell

Hundreds of murdered women are found, but news media won’t write about them.

Why?

Because the victims were prostitutes. But why would that make a difference?

Back when I was a newspaper reporter, I encountered this prejudicial attitude in editors when it came to covering people whose lives didn’t measure to the orthodoxy demanded by those arbiters of what’s fit to print.

I tried if not to explain at least to describe such prejudicial mindsets in my novel, CROSS PURPOSES, OR, IF NEWSPAPERS HAD COVERED THE CRUCIFIXION.

Here is an excerpt from CROSS PURPOSES. The scenes are fiction, but they pretty well describe what passes for mental processes in newsrooms about topics editors think are not “respectable.”

Rob Wolfman is night cops reporter at the Detroit Filibuster, a daily newspaper. He was sentenced to this purgatory by City Editor Chutney Vipes because Wolfman, once the Filibuster religion writer,  was too vocal in expressing his independent views. Don Strodum is an assistant to Vipes.

This CROSS PURPOSES excerpt is from Chapter XIII, “Maudlin is Okay,” pp 72-73 and p. 78-79:

Just now, the telephone had rung and Rob Wolfman, temporarily back at police headquarters, had announced that the bodies of two women, partially clothed, had been found by some kids beside, but not in, a factory Dumpster.

“Why weren’t they in the Dumpster?” Strodum demanded.

Whatever reply Wolfman gave apparently was inadequate.  “Find out why they weren’t in that Dumpster and then get back to me.”

There was a pause as Strodum listened impatiently to Wolfman, speaking in a whisper from the police office the Filibuster shared with the Detroit News and Free Press. The NFP reporter was sitting not five feet away from Wolfman, who knew his rival was out of the loop on the Dumpster story because he’d been having a long lunch with a police officer from the Public Information Office whom he was dating. If Wolfman spoke softly, the Filibuster might keep its exclusive.

“Hey, listen, Rob,” Strodum cut in, “First of all, find out what those ladies were doing.  Were they on their way to temple?  If so, it’s a big story.  But if they were out buying crack cocaine, or something equally illegitimate such as selling pussy, we don’t have space for them.”

Bodies in–or beside–a Dumpster.  That was a run-of-the-mill news story, not the sort of thing the city editor should be involved in.  Vipes didn’t want to know whatever it was that Rob Wolfman was finding out about.  He’d had enough of Wolfman for one day–for one lifetime!

……

For the first time in days, Vipes felt like the old Chutney Vipes was back.  He was elated–all the more so when he returned to the city desk and heard Don Strodum again on the telephone with Rob Wolfman.

“What’d you find out about those ladies’ bodies, Wolfie?”

Pause.

“Prostitutes?” Strodum bellowed.  He turned to Vipes.  “Those two bodies beside the Dumpster were ladies of the night, Chut.”

Vipes shook his head.

Into the telephone, Strodum said, “Don’t waste your time on whores, Rob–they got what they deserved!”