I just finished listening to the 10th episode of the podcast “Murder in Boston,” produced by The Boston Globe and HBO, which revisits the infamous 1989 Charles Stuart case. The podcast and the Globe series had concluded, but Globe columnist Adrian Walker, who narrates the podcast, explains that the decision was made to release one more episode after Mayor Michelle Wu publicly apologized to the Black community for the city’s and the police department’s racist response. And here’s a good overview of the Globe’s reporting by Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab. Both are well worth your time.
Leave a comment | Read comments
Discover more from Media Nation
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
aronsbarron
What was not reflected in the excellent series were the changes brought about in television news. I remember several meetings at WCVB-TV Channel 5 with legitimately angry members of the African-American community. Their rage went beyond the immediate case of Charles Stuart. They complained that the only stories the tv stations typically aired in Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester were crime stories: drugs, gangs, murders, etc. Why weren’t we telling positive stories, new businesses opened, student achievement, social service “good news” stories? The station did make concrete efforts to do so,to get beyond the idea that “no news is good news, and good news is no news at all.” Can’t say how that has carried over decades later, though there still seems to be too much dependence on the police scanner.