As you've probably noticed, the murder of Yale grad student Annie Le has been getting plenty of attention in the media.
One of my favorite bloggers, Colin McEnroe of the Hartford Courant, has been doing some good work in examining exactly why the media has become so obsessed with Le's murder. (For example, the New York Times assigned eight reporters to cover the story on Friday.)
I'd encourage you to take a look at Colin's posts here and especially here and try to relate this to Cornell a little bit.
Unfortunately, we aren't exactly strangers to death here on the Ithaca campus. But we don't face the same amount of media attention as Yale is facing. Many Cornell-related deaths are suicides, which are generally treated respectfully by the media. The recent death of Warren Schor from H1N1 complications was similarly written about respectfully by both the local and national media. Teams of reporters did not descend on Ithaca, and Schor's life was not scrutinized by reporters.
Even the apparent June murder of a Cornell grad student by her husband didn't receive nearly as much attention as that given to Le's story. For one thing, the event happened over the summer, and I'm willing to bet a lot of Cornell students missed the story completely. The murder happened off-campus, which removes a lot of the drama. Also, both the victim and the accused have families living outside the country, so the American press didn't feel a strong need to play out their stories.
(A Google news search for Blazej Kot turns up three articles from the last month, none of which have been written by the American press.)
Annie Le's case is different, and the media's fixation on her case is something we should not wish upon any academic institution.
The victim wasn't international. She was from Scranton.
ReplyDeleteYep, you're right. I remembered that a lot of her family was from abroad but didn't remember where she was from herself.
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