Why the Disparity in the Media’s Coverage of Trayvon Martin and Kenneth Chamberlain?

On November 19 last year, White Plains police officers forced their way into the home of 68-year-old Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr.  Inside, the officers shot and killed Mr. Chamberlain.  The events that led to the killing of Mr. Chamberlain are described in this interview that was aired on Democracy Now! last week.  If you have not already seen this interview with Chamberlain’s son and the two attorneys representing the family, I highly recommend it.  The events they describe—from video and audio recordings of the killing—is chilling and sad.  Based on what they say, it is hard to understand the police officers’ actions as anything but malicious abuse of power and murder.

We are writing about the death of Mr. Chamberlain for two reasons:  (1) It deserves more attention than it has received, so we are spreading the word.  Here is a petition you can sign that will be delivered to the District Attorney Janet DiFiore of White Plains, New York.  (2) There is an enormous disparity in media coverage of the Trayvon Martin killing versus the killing of Mr. Chamberlain, and we believe that this disparity aims to entrench inequality and injustice in our society.

To demonstrate the disparity in the media’s coverage, I searched some major news sites for Kenneth Chamberlain, and compared the results to those for Trayvon Martin.  Yesterday, a search for “Kenneth Chamberlain” on the New York Times web site returned 3 results from the last 12 months, compared to thousands for “Trayvon Martin” over the last 7 days.  A Washington Post search returned 1 result, compared to hundreds for Martin.  A search of ABC News produced no results for Chamberlain but hundreds for Martin.

It is a given that both the deaths of Martin and Chamberlain were tragic; and they also both occurred under dubious circumstances.  In fact, it may only be for that reason that the Chamberlain killing has received any coverage recently.  Given their resemblance, why has one tragedy, Martin’s, generated so much more uproar than the other?

Perhaps the media has given little attention to Mr. Chamberlain because it is not so unusual for police officers to shoot unarmed men.  I did a Google News search for “police shoot unarmed,” and it returned news items of at least six separate instances on the first page.  All of the victims were African-American males (Chamberlain was not among them).  However, I doubt that the disparate treatment results from the “norm” of police shooting unarmed African-American males.  And I would hope that if such killings in a single instance would produce a strong reaction in the media because we as a society abhor them, then their repeated occurrence would amplify the response, not dampen it.

The salient difference between the killing of Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr. and Trayvon Martin is that police officers killed the former, while a citizen killed the latter.  From this distinction we can impute a motive for excluding Chamberlain’s story while elevating Martin’s:  to bolster the social order by advancing the notion that our society is fair and just.

In the Martin case, Zimmerman clearly appears to have some degree of culpability in Martin’s death.  This predictably has lead to the prevailing caricature of Zimmerman as a racist, vigilante-type to whom dark skin equated to “dangerous criminal.”  To promote this image of Zimmerman, NBC’s Today Show even went so far as to substantially edit his 911 call to misrepresent his statement to the dispatcher.

The problem with this simplistic conception of Zimmerman is that it may serve to obscure the realities in the United States that give rise to race-based stereotypes.  The first reality is the one we have already mentioned, namely that state agents kill unarmed people—most often African-American males—with some regularity.  These killings are related to the policy of the United States to incarcerate and put under supervision a disproportionate number of African-American males, as well as to promote economic inequality that has disproportionately hurt African-Americans.  If Zimmerman is naïve, he may believe that American society works pretty well and treats all people pretty fairly, in which case it would make sense for him to assume that the United States has a reason for treating as dangerous criminals many African-American males.  However, the point is not to defend Zimmerman, obviously, or justify his actions – far from it.  Rather, the point is that that the racial inequality in our society and the unjust policies of our government inexorably produce people who act like Zimmerman.  If we detest Zimmerman’s actions, we should fight to change our society.  That the media does not care about cops killing citizens leads to the inference that they do not want people to question the state of our society, the power of our government and its agents, or the ways in which they exercise that power.

In no society should one expect to eliminate all violent and prejudiced behavior.  But in any democracy—even one as flawed as our own—a fundamental demand should be that the state does not unjustly kill its citizens.  The media should raise hell over Chamberlain’s death.  It has not, so we do not.  Ultimately, I worry that it shows how little we care about preventing the killings of people like Trayvon Martin and Kenneth Chamberlain in the future, our own rights as citizens of a failed democracy, and justice in our society.

UPDATE:  Ravi Katari on Op-Ed News came to the same conclusion regarding the media’s coverage of Zimmerman and Ramarley Graham, an African-American killed by police in the Bronx.  He wrote:

“The juxtaposition of these two tragedies demonstrates how effectively the media can selectively channel righteous indignation in a way that serves elite interest.  The murders of Graham and Martin are equally monstrous, but there’s no question that a state-sponsored homicide is far uglier and more deeply unsettling than one committed by some local fanatic.”

Well put.