Three decisions

Why do some important decisions get more coverage than others?

This is a story about three decisions - well, less about the decisions, and more how much those decisions were brought to our attention. On November 19, the jury in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse delivered a verdict of not guilty. On November 23, a jury found the organizers of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017 liable and awarded over $25 million in damages. On November 24, three men were found guilty of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. While none of these are particularly groundbreaking legal decisions, they are each very important social decisions.

In 2017, at a Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia over the removal of a Confederate statue, protestors, including the defendants, marched down the street chanting “Jews will not replace us” and invoking Nazi imagery. One of the defendants, drove his car into counter-protesters along the sidelines, killing Heather Heyer. Responding to the events, former President Donald Trump famously said that there were “good people on both sides”. Following the violence, a civil lawsuit was filed by nine individuals who had been injured and suffered psychological trauma against 12 of the more prominent organizers and participants in the rally. The plaintiffs sought compensatory damages for their medical expenses and other pain and suffering costs, as well as punitive damages. 

The slogan of the march, “Jews will not replace us” is a reference to an Antisemitic conspiracy theory known as “replacement theory”. The conspiracy posits that Jews are attempting to replace the White American population with non-White immigrants from foreign countries. This conspiracy has frequently been promoted by far-right and white supremacists individuals such as Tucker Carlson and David Duke. 

In February 2020, three men shot and killed Arbery in the process of making what they claimed to be a citizen’s arrest. The defendants pled they had acted in self-defence out of fear that Arbery would grab their gun from them. In the days leading up to the shooting, Arbery had been seen wandering in and around a partially built house in a neighbourhood generally concerned about property crime. Shortly before the shooting, a neighbour had called the police after seeing Arbery in the partially built house. The jury did not accept the defendants’ self-defence argument. This decision has been warmly received as a step in the right direction in the fight for the sanctity of Black life in America. 

In August 2020, at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men, killing two of them. Rittenhouse was charged on five counts, including recklessly endangering safety, reckless homicide, and intentional homicide. The teenage shooter pled self-defence. Throughout the trial, information about what took place on that night in Kenosha was revealed to be a very different narrative than was heard on mainstream media in the wake of the shootings last summer. After more than a day of deliberations, the jury acquitted Rittenhouse on all counts, accepting his self-defence argument. 

Each of these events made front-page news the day they happened, and two of them continued to garner significant coverage and discussion throughout their respective trials. The differences in coverage of these trials merit some discussion. 

In November 2021 alone, the New York Times published approximately 66 articles about the Rittenhouse case, at least nine since the verdict was delivered. Since May 2021, the New York Times has published some 85 articles about the Arbery case, 17 since the verdict. Since 2017, the New York Times has published 47 articles on the Charlottesville rally, including one article discussing the verdict, and no articles since. Furthermore, the New York Times offered live updates and coverage of both the Rittenhouse and Arbery trials. 

Why was the coverage so different for the Charlottesville trial? After all, what happened was no less deadly, and no less revelatory about racial dynamics in America. 

There is nothing wrong with the amount of coverage the Rittenhouse and Arbery trials received, it was and is absolutely warranted and necessary. The question instead, is why Charlottesville did not receive similar treatment. 

Some of this can likely be explained by the tide of public attention, Charlottesville is already what feels to many like a long time ago. But a portion is likely attributable to the kind of uncomfortable we are comfortable with. 

We have worked hard over the past year and a half, since the death of George Floyd, to shine a light on Anti-Black racism in every aspect of our society. This is important work that should have been done a very long time ago. This reckoning has forced us to get comfortable with our discomfort talking about Anti-Black racism. We are more prepared for these conversations, and we are implementing structures to deal with these issues. 

We are not this comfortable being uncomfortable talking about Antisemitism. Part of this may be because of the varied forms Antisemitism takes - conspiracy theories around control, misinformation around the legitimacy of Jewish presence in Israel, and the minimization and negation of past and present Jewish experiences. What happened in Charlottesville was overt, perhaps not as much as what happened in Pittsburgh in 2018, but close. Talking about it in the media, however, involves confronting something that we are still very uncomfortable with. 

In the wake of the Holocaust, there is an intense desire to believe that forms of Antisemitism, not pegged to Israel, are over. But they’re not, a lesson we are learning with growing rapidity in recent months and years. Coverage of what happened in Charlottesville involves recognizing this and having some really uncomfortable conversations. But it will also mean acknowledging the failure to recognize the Jewish experience in our current Anti-Racism and equity, diversity and inclusion programs. 

We didn’t want to talk about Anti-Black racism or the impacts it has on so many of our friends and community members. But we needed to, and we will need to for a very long time. It was important that so much time and discussion in the public sphere was devoted to the Rittenhouse and Arbery trials because of what they stand for in conversations about race and racism in America. 

Conversations about Antisemitism will not take away from other conversations about Anti-Black and Anti-Asian racism. We need to stop behaving as though they will. It is disappointing and not surprising to see how little time was spent on coverage of the Charlottesville trial. But its outcome was without question a victory for more than just the Jewish community. We need to start getting comfortable with having uncomfortable conversations about Antisemitism. We need to demand equal recognition by major news outlets of the growing number of attacks against the Jewish community. 

I would not be surprised if many missed the one article on the Charlottesville trial, and had no idea it was happening or that it has concluded. That’s a problem, and one I felt was necessary to call attention to today. There is still time to correct the disparity in the amount of publicity the Charlottesville trial received compared to other major trials happening at the same time. If we have learned anything about these issues through our efforts, it is that we need to get comfortable acknowledging and discussing things that make us profoundly uncomfortable. It’s time to include Antisemitism among those uncomfortable conversations.