Beginning with the folk music revival in the 1940s, a genre of traditional songs from England and Scotland known as "murder ballads" began insinuating themselves into the national consciousness. Sometimes drawn from national news stories and other times from local lore, these ballads, with their straight-ahead depictions of strange and gruesome crimes, have the propensity to jar the listener from his complacency. Though the stories they tell might have been headlines 100 ago, the best of these songs have an unsentimental clarity that transcends the zeitgeist and speak directly to the listener's conscience.
I got to thinking about folk music in the wake of an incident that is archaic enough, as well: the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Listening to the media coverage of this tragedy, I was struck by just how desensitizing the modern press can be. Quite the opposite of the hardened folk singer, who reveals his subject at its very core, the media has a tendency to bury this type of story beneath layers of self-referential nonsense. In doing so, the coverage completely loses both the pathos of the murder and, most importantly, the instructive element inherent in any tragedy.
In general, the press has two ways of dealing with murder. For certain types of crimes, it shines its brightest lights, aiming to illuminate every gory detail in high definition, as it did recently in the case of Casey Anthony. The more harrowing the event, the more the media encourage this kind of attention, with tabloids tripping over each other in the race to produce the most shocking rendition. While the utility of such practices may be questionable, their economics are not. Fed by the public's desire, this kind of sensationalist reporting moves newspapers. But it also promotes the cheap, distant thrills of a public spectacle at the expense the close, personal empathy for the bereaved.
In other occasions, the media treats a tragedy like Medusa, viewing the event only through its reflections on society rather than fixating on sordid particulars. This happens when, as with Trayvon Martin, the incident is perceived not as some chillingly arbitrary act but as somehow either the emblem or the product of larger social forces. In these cases, it is customary for reporters not to trump up the macabre circumstances of the ordeal but rather to draw bold political conclusions about what it all means. When pundits ask who is at fault in the shooting of a 17-year-old unarmed kid, they are not just referring to Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman. Rather, these discussions often carry political undertones.
With incidents like the Trayvon Martin shooting, the media shine light not on the case itself but off it, onto politically charged conclusions. Focusing on the trivialities the hoodie that Trayvon was wearing or the dime bag discovered one time in his backpack media outlets predictably interpret murder and its aftermath as proof of longstanding convictions. Under the homogenizing force of the 24-hour news cycle, analysis quickly devolves to meta-analysis, until the story is no longer the incident but how various sources reacted to it. This response exposes the human tragedy to the indignity of modern political discourse, cheapening it like a party slogan.
Either way, the purely tragic dimension of a murder that prompts introspection in an individual, as well as in a society is lost in the media. The real pathos in these cases lies neither in their exaggeratedly gruesome specifics nor in their grand implications but rather in their unadorned particulars the bag of skittles in Trayvon's pocket that he didn't get to eat or his girlfriend's voice tense on the phone. These particulars indicate the only absolute truths of the situation, which are missed in the media coverage that these were real people, not political mascots or case studies, and that the sheer loss of life itself is itself gruesome. These are the details that would have made it into a murder ballad about George Zimmerman, because the simplest versions of the facts, without embellishment or analysis, speak for themselves and offer their own conclusions. Everything else is just noise.
