RADAR ALERT: NPR Gives Raped Males The Unworthy Victim Treatment

[Alert on-line here]

Last week, June 23, Attorney General Eric Holder missed the deadline for issuing standards to prevent prison rape.

Men being raped in prison is so accepted by mainstream America that Saturday Night Live's writers saw nothing wrong with doing 4-1/2 minutes of ass-rape jokes in a sketch called "Scared Straight" that ended with Betty White saying emphatically, "Wizard of Ass"! Blogger Scott Starnes states the attitude explicitly. Under a graphic stating "Ass-Rape: It's Always Funny," Starnes asks: "Who honestly cares about criminals being ass-raped in prison?"

Ignorant callousness is an obvious problem for reformers trying to eliminate prison rape. But an even more insidious problem is the media's treatment of male victims as unworthy of concern, as NPR's Morning Edition recently did.. NPR chose to ignore the fact that 90% of incarcerated individuals are male, and instead focused their story solely on a female-prisoner's experience of prison-rape. This form of bias is so subtle that most listeners won't even notice it. But it is a classic example of the very media bias described by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent, in which they write:

Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.