{"id":24302,"date":"2014-02-16T11:20:29","date_gmt":"2014-02-16T16:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24302"},"modified":"2014-02-16T11:20:29","modified_gmt":"2014-02-16T16:20:29","slug":"the-crime-that-launched-a-thousand-bad-editorials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/02\/16\/the-crime-that-launched-a-thousand-bad-editorials\/","title":{"rendered":"The crime that launched a thousand (bad) editorials"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the New York Post<\/em>, Larry Getlen<\/a> retells the tale of Kitty Genovese’s murder and the myths that grew up around it:<\/p>\n

The murder of Kitty Genovese shifted from crime to legend a few weeks later, when The New York Times<\/em> erroneously reported that 38 of her neighbors had seen the attack and watched it unfold without calling for help.<\/p>\n

The Times<\/em> piece was followed by a story in Life<\/em> magazine, and the narrative spread throughout the world, running in newspapers from Russia and Japan to the Middle East.<\/p>\n

New York became internationally infamous as a city filled with thoughtless people who didn\u2019t care about one another; where people could watch their neighbors get stabbed on the street without lifting a finger to help, leaving them to die \u00adinstead in a pool of their own blood.<\/p>\n

The people of Kew Gardens \u2014 before that, a relatively crime-free neighborhood where few bothered locking their doors \u2014 were referred to in the press as monsters.<\/p>\n

But as journalist Kevin Cook details in his new book, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America<\/em> (W.W. Nor\u00adton), some of the real thoughtlessness came from a police commissioner who lazily passed a falsehood to a journalist, and a media that fell so deeply in love with a story that it couldn\u2019t be bothered to determine whether it was true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the New York Post, Larry Getlen retells the tale of Kitty Genovese’s murder and the myths that grew up around it: The murder of Kitty Genovese shifted from crime to legend a few weeks later, when The New York Times erroneously reported that 38 of her neighbors had seen the attack and watched it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,13],"tags":[343,347,213,321],"class_list":["post-24302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-usa","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-debunking","tag-newspapers","tag-nyc"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6jY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24303,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24302\/revisions\/24303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}