On July 16, after the Zimmerman trial had concluded with a “not guilty” verdict and a small army of experts and selected citizens were wrangling over the implications on television, you could have found these two statements in the media: “We’ve Had Our Conversation on Race. Now We Need One on Guns,” Alec Macgillis proclaimed in the New Republic. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Ekon N. Yankah, a professor of law at the Cordoza School of Law in New York, complained that “we are tired of hearing that race is a conversation for another day.”

I have to agree with the professor. From what I saw and read, the conversation has not yet taken place. What the media, with the usual exceptions, did offer was its traditional soapbox derby of opinions and half-baked notions, of platitudes and pieties, of misinformation and prejudice, of political correctness and worn outrage.

Even the good professor, as he suggested that “race and law cannot be clearly separated” and that “race is always a factor,” could not propose how that factor could be accounted for in our legal system. By insisting on all-black juries for black defendants? By creating racial proportionality in conviction rates? I doubt it.

The “experts,” suddenly sporting an unusually high proportion of black talking heads, mostly dragged out their old soapboxes: the anti-gun soapbox, the racial justice soapbox, the hate-crime soapbox. There are merits in each of their positions, but even collectively they did not amount to a “conversation on race.”

When television’s hosts, guests and panels of citizens convene, almost always after a “tragedy,” catastrophe or sensational trial – remember O.J. Simpson? – they reveal their (by now) learned inability to confront the issue they are meant to confront. The experts repeat the stance on the issue we have come to expect. Isn’t that why liberals watch Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and conservatives listen to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News?

And those panels of ordinary citizens? They are on their best behavior when on television, as they usually are when talking to pollsters. They mimic the solemn faces and goody-two-shoes tone of their hosts and generally say what they think they are supposed to say. They nod; they agree to agree or to disagree.

If Americans want to have a conversation on race – or on class, or finance capitalism – they’d have to be honest and say what they think and feel. If you want to find out what that is, read the comments in your local paper when a story appears with the mugshot of the young person arrested for murder in the robbery of a convenience store. Listen to people in airport lounges or at the supermarket or in the stands of a youth softball game. Their talk rarely resembles the staged “conversation” in TV studios.

And if the hosts and experts want to get at some pieces of the truth about race or class, they’d have to do what a consultant did while working with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Why do the Indians drink?” he was asked. “Because they are unhappy,” he responded. “And why are they unhappy?” He said: “Because we took their land.” Next question: “What would make them happy?” He answered: “Give them back their land.”

And he never consulted for the Bureau of Indian Affairs again. I’d bet that most of the folks in our media aren’t going to follow his example.

“We still don’t know the first thing about terrorists.” That was the title of last week’s column in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper now available in English and Hebrew on the Internet, by American-born (Los Angeles) and educated (UC Berkeley) Bradley Burston. I have not read or heard an American journalist or TV host make a similar comment, but I wish I had.

What’s remarkable is that Burston, who lives in Israel, has “seen terrorism up close, what it does to people.” He writes that he has “talked with terrorists and their victims,” and that he has had dreams “haunted by the sight of strips of human flesh hanging from a charred bus ceiling.” And yet because of his experiences in the fields of terror, he concluded: “We still don’t know what makes terrorists cross the lines that separate mad from madness, and madness from evildoing. We don’t know the first thing about what really goes on inside their heads. But that does not stop us from pretending that we do.”

Coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing by our media was full of such pretending, by commentary exuding bloated certainty or by guesswork masquerading as insight. Burston offers a pithy summary of all that: “If some on the right were quick to reject any association between Islamist terrorism and U.S. – and for that matter, Israeli – military operations, some on the left seemed to see little else.”

Burston refused to fire off comments from the hip: “I know only this about terrorism: It is evil. We can spin it as we like, bend it to our own prejudices, but it remains evil authentic, in all its forms, justifications, and euphemisms.” Bless those reporters, standing there on the streets of Boston, who asked questions similar to the ones Burston asked, but got more spin than light for answers.

Academicians who have researched and written about contemporary terrorism do better than the sound bite experts from Washington, D.C., think tanks. Expertise, after all, is not knowledge. One professor observed after 9/11 that cynical political

and religious “leaders attract youth who feel humiliated, culturally and personally,” to carry out terrorist activities against enemies of the state or faith.

Another suggested that the “fringe motivations” of young terrorists, as the two Boston bombers, “are difficult to understand.” A comment you could hear also from a non-tenured patron of most neighborhood bars. As is this one: “Now it seems to me that there will always be some subset of humanity, which, for whatever motives, takes destructive power into their hands and uses it against society at large. That, in the largest sense, is the problem.” But Burston, reporters and viewers alike, were asking why (and how) two trees in the forest “went bad,” not how the whole forest is doing.

You can’t blame the media for not coming up with even pieces of answers. Western reporters aren’t going to become embedded in the training camps of Al Qaeda or Hezbollah, nor will they be permitted to sit down for chats with hate-preaching clerics. They can’t even learn the truth about how those fighting terror make their decisions on where to strike back and how to do it. And if they find out, it’s often only long after the action. But when it comes to terror and terrorists, the public wants to know who the perpetrators of the last attack were, who the ones of next attack might be, and what drove (and will drive) the individuals involved in each to their evildoing.

We are likely to receive tiny and superficial slivers of answers. Perhaps years from now, when a gifted novelist peers into terrorism’s heart of darkness, our understanding might grow from his or her vision of that bloody part of the human condition.

CHICAGO – Back in the early ’70s, as a cub working off the overnight city desk at the Chicago Tribune, you learned fast that all murders were not equal.

Sure, all were listed methodically on the deputy superintendent’s logbook at the old police headquarters at 11th and State streets. But while killings on the city’s predominantly white North Side were almost always pursued by our small band of nocturnal newsmen, the more numerous homicides in the black neighborhoods of the South and West Sides most often were ignored.

There was even a winking code word for the latter category. They were “blue.” Blue, as in “cheap domestic,” where a drunken live-in boyfriend kills his common-law mate. Blue, as in someone shot in the face after a street-corner dice game gone awry.

Judging by how the other four daily newspapers (yes, four!) covered and displayed their homicides, it’s safe to assume the same double standard applied.

This practice was, of course, racially and morally indefensible. And by the end of that decade – a decade of enormous change in newsroom cultures across the country—a more race-neutral standard applied. Oh, sure, a juicy society murder on the city’s Gold Coast still got top billing. But space was made for everyone in those ubiquitous Monday roundups of weekend mayhem, especially if the victim was a sympathetic innocent.

The reasoning behind this sea change was, and still is, altogether sound. All lives have value, and only by recording the circumstances of each tragedy do we begin to understand the patterns of neglect that underlay the violence … and potential ways the killing might be stopped.

Fast forward to 2013 and, I would argue, a very different set of ethical questions now confronting editors.

Last year there were 506 homicides in Chicago, more than the number of U.S. servicemembers killed in Afghanistan. This past January’s toll of 43 does not bode well for 2013.

Most of the murdered were under age 24, shot with handguns, nearly within a handful of black or Hispanic neighborhoods. Fully a third of the victims were determined by police to be not the intended target of the shooter. They were simply in the wrong place – a car, a front porch, a gathering of friends – at the wrong time and unluckily close to the intended target.

A pattern has developed in which Chicago media focus on these innocent victims, on their grief-stricken families, on friends building curbside memorials, on their wakes and on their funerals. In January the full front-page, top-of-the-newscast treatment was given, day-after-day, to the slaying of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, an innocent who the week before was a majorette in President Barack Obama’s inaugural parade. In March it was baby Jonylah Watkins, a 6-month-old shot in the front seat of a parked minivan while in the lap of her father, an alleged gang-banger with a lengthy police rap sheet.

News columnists and editorial writers daily pile on their outrage, and almost daily stories with headlines such as “Bloodbath in Chicago” circle the globe via the Huffington Post, New York Times, BBC and others.

All of which begs – or should beg – the question of whether this approach to covering lethal urban violence is doing any good … or even doing more harm than good.

No responsible journalist seeks a return to the days of spiking “blue” murders from the wrong side of town. But consider the following:

• Blanket coverage of lethal violence in minority neighborhoods is not balanced by an equal number of prominently played stories of good things achieved in those neighborhoods by the many good people who live there.
• Negative perceptions about violence and personal safety are a major driver of the “white flight,” racial resegregation and neighborhood decay that have plagued U.S. metropolitan areas over the past half-century. Chicago has fared better than most but still has lost a quarter of its population since 1960 as middle-class families of all races continue to move out, albeit for many reasons.
• Despite all the ink and airtime devoted to the killings, next to nothing has been accomplished – nationally or locally – in the way of more effective gun control, police tactics or provision of social services capable of solving the problem.
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Then again, veteran Chicago editors and journalists who have struggled with these issues argue it’s not the amount of coverage that’s the problem … but the type.

Jack Fuller, a former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune who has written extensively on newsroom ethics, complains too much coverage focuses on weeping and wailing and not enough on root causes and criminal logistics.

Instead of bombarding the public with “isn’t that awful” stories, Fuller argues, “we need to go deeper into what’s behind it – the social pathologies, the illegal purchase of guns. Maybe it means our war on drugs has got to end. Take profit out of the system.”

Frank Main, a Pulitzer-winning police reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, agrees there ought to be less hand-wringing and more exposure of what’s behind the shooting.

“The problem is that those stories can be boring,” Main admits. “Anytime the words ‘program’ or ‘social services’ or ‘community involvement’ are anywhere near the top of the story, many readers flip to the sports section.

“The challenge is to ratchet down the coverage of murder victims’ memorials and funerals, and spend more time in neighborhoods, police stations, courts and universities to give context to all this tragedy.”

Laura Washington, a veteran observer of Chicago’s racial dynamic and an op-ed contributor to the Sun-Times, also complains about maudlin stories focusing on grieving relatives and open caskets.

“We should spend more time, space and bytes talking to experts, community leaders and residents about why these murders are occurring, and what can be done to stop them,” she says. “Our reporting is too often one-dimensional and simplistic. The problems are multilayered and complex.”

That sentiment is echoed by William Recktenwald, a journalism instructor at Southern Illinois University and former top investigative reporter at the Tribune. In 1993, he and a team of reporters chronicled in detail every shooting death of a Chicago-area child below the age of 15 in a yearlong series called “Killing Our Children.”

People forget, Recktenwald says, that 20 years ago, when crack cocaine and automatic pistols first appeared on the streets, there were even more killings – a record 932 just during 1992. So is this progress? His police sources tell Recktenwald the numbers would be just as bad now but for advances in trauma medicine.

But the fact that several gunshot victims survive for every one killed points to another reason people ought to care, no matter where they live. Gunshot wounds and deaths cost Americans at least $12 billion a year in court proceedings, insurance costs and hospitalizations paid for by government health programs, according to one recent study. Then there’s the cost of incarcerating a single young murderer – well over $50,000 a year, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections.

“That’s the kind of thing people need to understand.” Recktenwald says. “Reporting about all the memorial candles and teddy bears, that doesn’t change anything.”

As for damage to Chicago’s civic reputation, thoughtful journalists such as Recktenwald, Main, Washington and Fuller seem less concerned.

“I’m still a believer in basic newspapering,” Fuller says. “When something happens, you report it. You cover the hell out of it … that’s how we begin to change the reality.”

Maybe so. But with so little progress achieved and so little in sight, one wonders if the old “publish and be damned” spirit still serves our troubled cities and the people who live in them.

Good riddance to “blue” homicides. But our journalism still needs a better approach.

Cleveland is used to bad press. First there was the water: The Cuyahoga River caught on fire in the 1960s and Lake Erie was pronounced “dead.” Then there’s sports: LeBron James flees the city, the Browns fail to win a single Super Bowl and the Indians are the second-worst baseball team on the planet.

Then along comes Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight. Theirs should be a happy-ending story to end all happy-ending stories. Held captive in a Cleveland house for some 10 years, they finally escape. Alas, it’s not that simple.

As BBC News Magazine reports, this is yet another instance of the “Missing White Woman Syndrome” where Berry (white) received about twice the coverage of DeJesus (Hispanic). CNN piled on by saying that while missing-children websites regularly feature photos of disappeared African-American and Latino children, “news outlets rarely feature their stories.”

Then Britain’s Guardian blasts Cleveland police, asking how the women’s whereabouts had “remained undetected for so long.” Too, cheap zithromax