Fascinating. I’d forgotten what the Kitty Genovese story was about, but immediately remembered as soon as I started the article.
This is the first I’ve heard that the original story was totally wrong, and therefore all the hundreds of follow-up articles were wrong, too. Has the NY Times ever apologized for this?
And these are the people who wind themselves into a tizzy over Fox News.
WHAT? You mean The Enemy Media has been manipulating us for, like, FOREVER?
Say it ain’t so! ;)
Control the News, Control the People.
Control the Food, Control the People.
Control Healthcare, Control the People.
Control the Weather, Control the People.
Control the *Insert*, Control the People.
We’re Screwed. Well, a good 51% of America is.
I, however, see it all quite clearly.
Upon reading that story, I decided to never be a “bystander” if I saw a crime being committed.
I vowed that I would do something to thwart the crime or aid the victim.
In 1983, I got my chance. I helped apprehend a young man who mugged two British tourists on Canal Street in New Orleans one Sunday night.
I am, of course, much older now. But I still feel the same way.
The fact that a lot more of us “good guys” are carrying is, IMHO, having a positive influence that cannot but help to reduce the crime rate.
It is too bad one of the people who saw/heard Kitty Genovese that fateful night was not carrying — Kitty might still be with us, and the perp would, perhaps, not have survived the incident?
What was the agenda?
The New York police arrested a person for a murder that Kitty Geneovese's killer, Winton Mosley, later confessed to. When this was mentioned to the police chief, the police chief parried this story by saying 38 people witnessed the murder and did nothing. The "New York Times then ran with the deceitful story and the rest is urban myth... history.
The Genovese saga was/is a staple of college courses, especially psychology and sociology. It is the go-to anecdote for lazy profs and TAs to demonstrate desensitization, conditioning, etc.
Naturally, none of these ‘academics’ ever cracked a book to find out if their chestnut was truthful or accurate.
Remember this from a college psych class back in the 70’s. Used as an example of distributed responsibility.
I always interpreted this as an attempt to distract from the issue of black on white crime. During the mid-1960’s there was an explosion of black on white crime as the black crime rate skyrocketed and the end of segregation brought blacks and whites in contact more. The fact that many of the criminals responsible were self-styled black power acolytes made it even more un-PC of a story to cover for the liberal media outlets like the New York Times. So what to do? They can’t just ignore it. It had gotten to be the kind of thing that was omnipresent in too many people’s lives. The America lifestyle was being radically changed as fear of crime caused flight from public places in big cities — parks, public transportation and even libraries became dangerous and were abandoned by non-underclass individuals. So what to do for the liberal intelligentsia?
The Kitty Genovese story became part of a “counter narrative” that steered the discussion, and people’s thoughts, away from taboo ideas and toward interpretations of events that support the dominant narrative. In This case, those scared neighbors became the bad guys: middle class white suburbanites were a much to blame as the killer. It’s clumsy and obvious, but it works on most people if social pressure is reinforcing it. This is what sophisticated propaganda that has been developed through application of academic psychology looks like. Cultural Marxism. Until conservatives wise up to this stuff, we are in trouble.
You better believe that Obama is as well versed the cultural Marxist cannon as he is in the classical Marxist cannon.
I went to the link and read the whole article. I see that the New York Times story was wrong, see less support for the claim that it was intentional (the Times apparently accepted the claims of the City’s Police Commissioner, not an unheard-of thing for a newspaper to do in the pre-Watergate era), and see zero support for the headline’s claim that this was “to drive an agenda.” What agenda? The article doesn’t even suggest one, and I don’t see one.
One more lie from the New York Slimes. Is anyone surprised?
I remember when this happened, and several later documentaries on how people ignored her cries for help.
Now we find it was bogus.
Reminds me of the Russian Ambassador’s words in DR STRANGLOVE...”Our source was the NEW YORK TIMES!”