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Some Thoughts on the Charlotte Murder

Note from Ace: While we wait to hear about Charlie Kirk, and wait for the next MSNBC incitement to leftwingers to assassinate more Republican normies, TJM has some thoughts about the Iryna Karutska slaying.

So, I live outside of Charlotte, NC, but I simply don't consume local news. I never have, no matter where I've lived. I'm just not of the generation that reads local newspapers or watches local broadcast news. However, the story of Iryna Zarutska has fascinated me, and I think it's partially driven by a small discussion my wife, Dolley, and I had when we first moved to the area.

We moved to the city's environs because she got a major job offer from a major employer. We didn't want to pay Mecklenburg County house prices, so we ended up settling on a house in a rural/suburban area in an outlying county. Then the discussion started about how she would get to work. She eventually just settled on driving (I work remotely for a company based in another city and can work anywhere), but for a time she looked into using the light rail, the same light rail that Zarutska was murdered on.

So, it's caught my eye since news of it first broke in the final week of August.

Of course, it didn't actually blow up as a news story until this weekend when the police released the footage from the train of the murder. Not footage that's hard to parse with crowds or action in the corner of a frame. Center-frame violent murder, even with the actual second of the act cut out in the initial release (the actual murder footage has also been released, and it's...brutal), the image of Decarlos Brown's arm fully extended and swooping in with a knife to an unsuspecting girl is potent, the kind a written description will never be.

And it did blow up. It blew up on social media. News organizations ignored it as long as possible, hoping it would go away, but once Elon Musk xeeted about it a dozen times and even President Trump mentioned it more than once, and the mayor of Charlotte put out a statement on it, the media finally felt the need to report it, mostly framing it as nasty MAGAts using murder to advance a narrative.

The centerpiece of this reaction has to been Sex Machine Brian Stetler's rant about how the murder wasn't newsworthy (also that the attention to the story is racist because leftist logic).

And it got me thinking. What is newsworthy?

Well, here's what the Columbia School of Journalism defines as newsworthy by Jack Fuller:

My proposed definition of news includes several elements that are not wholly subjective (though this does not mean they are unambiguous): timeliness, interest for a given community, sig­nificance. These look beyond the journalists' personal prefer­ences outward to phenomena in the world that can be dis­cussed, if not measured.

Was the murder of Zarutska these three things? Was it timely? Well, the video was new news, kind of like the newest addition to an ongoing investigation, so I think it counts there. Was it of interest for a given community? Was it significant? These two require some digging.

Significance

Let's talk about this slightly out of order because the second point is meatier. The third point, of significance, is interesting.

According to the CDC there are an average of 18.8 murders a day in America. Roughly one-nineteenth of these from one day flooding the news more than two weeks after the event, which means that roughly 300 murders have happened since, making Zarustka's murder one of three hundred since it happened. From purely a murder point of view, that doesn't seem that significant.

Well, what other parts of the story are there?

There's the fact that Zarustka was a Ukrainian immigrant, a refugee from a war that the media has demanded our attention, treasure, and even blood to fight for about three years. That's significant. There's the fact that Decarlos Brown was released fourteen previous times from arrest based on his own behavior. That's significant.

There are these specific facts about the case that just make it different from most murders in America (most of which seem to related to gang activity). It's a different story. It has specific points of fact that make it interesting in the sea of other murders.

And yes, Iryna was a pretty girl, but that's obviously not enough. A few months before, a North Carolina girl, Logan Federico, was murdered in South Carolina in a home invasion, the perpetrator, Alexander Dickey, also a multi-time felon, shot her dead. And it was mostly forgotten the second it happened. Heck, Iryna's story has popped up twice, the first time it was mostly forgotten after half a news cycle, only given that much breath because of her status as a Ukrainian refugee, before everyone had moved on in late August.

And then the video surfaced. Images are powerful things, and that video was a powerful image.

One might even call it significant.

Interest for a Given Community

So, what community? When talking about the national news, we're talking about the community of collective Americans. Community may not be the best word for our progressively balkanized nation, but it works well enough for this question.

So, is this story, the story of a Ukrainian refugee murdered in cold blood by a man arrested fourteen times before, including in January, an arrest that his own mother admits should have kept him off the streets for a long time, at what is hopefully the tail end of progressive efforts to release misdemeanors without punishment and reclassify felonies as misdemeanors, of interest to the American community?

All I see are "narratives" that have been swirling for literally years coming to a head in a single story. The Ukraine War, anti-policing efforts, urban decay, along with other tangential stories like Trump using the National Guard to tamp down on crime in DC.

How could this not be of interest to the larger community? It has everything.

And I think that's key to understanding why the story has legs despite the larger news organizations trying to quietly ignore it. They'll trumpet George Floyd's death, trying to create a movement, but they'll ignore the anti-George Floyd death because it doesn't help their policy preferences and preferred political party.

And yet, the news story spread precisely because it was newsworthy and there are avenues for the mass media's audience to share news stories that the mass media don't want shared.

Anyway, that's why I think the story of Iryna Zarutska's murder on the Charlotte rail line by Decarlos Brown was newsworthy.