Katie Couric, STFU

Can someone tell me what the damn hell Katie Couric meant by this? The tragedy was magnified by her background??

Bias in Today Show's Central Park Jogger Interview?

....the racial aspect of the jogger case was barely mentioned in the hourlong report. The tale of an upper-middle-class white woman attacked by a roving band of black kids played into the modern urban narrative of fear. The guilt of the defendants was taken as fact by the newspapers (sample headline: "Teenage Wolfpack Beats and Rapes Wall Street Exec").

It is, sadly, always a story when poor black men attack a rich white woman - - and not so much a story when rich white men attack a poor black woman. It's even less of a story when a husband attacks a wife, even though some of those batterings result in injuries as severe as those suffered by Trisha Meili.

Indeed, the NBC piece went out of its way to confirm that worldview. White people were shown in contemporary interviews, flatteringly lit, sitting in comfortable chairs. Black people were shown in black-and-white news footage, jostling or yelling or, in one egregious example, confessing to a crime that, it turns out, the confessor did not commit.

Even worse: Katie Couric said the tragedy of the Central Park Jogger was "magnified by her background." Shot of the facade of an Ivy League college, shot of the pricey apartment building where Meili lived.

So successful white woman Katie Couric said that the plight of successful white woman Trisha Meili was "magnified" by her circumstances. Had she been poorer, had she attended a state college in the Midwest or gotten her GED in an adult school, the crime would not have been as great. Had she been black, presumably Couric would have said the crime was "minimized by her background."

Enough rant. You get the point. Shudder.