Opinion: A tragic slaying, and a rush to judgment
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Did the horrifying murder last month of Los Feliz teen Lily Burk get so much media attention because the 17-year-old victim was Jewish? At least one reader thinks so. A more puzzling question for us at the Opinion Manufacturing Division, though, is whether we should provide a forum for such ugly allegations.
If you’ve ever wondered why your comments take so long to appear, both on this blog and on the graffiti boards on latimes.com’s editorials and Op-Eds, it’s because each comment has to be screened by somebody here at the OMD. If a comment doesn’t meet The Times’ standards -- if it contains profanity, or is blatantly offensive or inflammatory -- it doesn’t get posted. Most of the time, deciding whether or not to post something is a snap, and the vast majority of reader responses make their way onto the site -- latimes.com readers are a pretty well-educated, civil bunch. But sometimes, making a call on a reader comment is harder than, say, making a call on President Obama’s health care plans. A comment in response to one of today’s editorials is a case in point.
The editorial concerned Burk’s murder, and the effect it might have on California prison policy. One reader submitted the following:
On the day Lily Burke was killed a man killed his daughter and then himself and several others were shot and killed in the LA area. Lily Burke was a jew so her death is still in the media. It is an insult that the media considerers a jewish girls death so much more important than anyone else’s. I had a friend murdered. She was a Mexican American around Lily Burke’s age and also killed by a stranger with a criminal record. Her death was not on TV. She got a little spot in a local newspaper. Is a jewish girls death really that much more important than anyone else’s?
Should The Times post this comment, or others like it? This one posed so many problems that I ran that question past my fellow editorial writers. It is, on its face, anti-Semitic, playing into a vicious stereotype that Jews control the American media. On the other hand, it raises an important point that should be of great concern to journalists and readers: Do newspapers and other media value the lives of some kinds of crime victims more than others? If this reader had criticized the media for playing up the Burk story because she was white, we would have posted it without hesitation. So why would we be reluctant to post it because the criticism is based on her Jewishness?
The response from my colleagues was mixed. Some thought the comment was clearly anti-Semitic and should be junked; Jews have been victimized for centuries based on imaginary conspiracy theories, so such statements must be treated differently than comments about a non-threatened majority such as whites. Others noted that questionable comments like this one are extremely common on non-newspaper blogs and they provide fodder for the kind of reader interaction and dialogue that is the entire purpose of our forum.
In the end, we decided not to post it, but to blog about it instead. In part, that’s because we haven’t been able to determine whether or not Burk was Jewish -- her parents are of mixed religious heritage. Does the reader who posted this comment about her know something we don’t?