Diane Revoluta

The press covers crime (especially relatively rare instances of random violence against white people) because crime sells – because the white audience loves to hear about it. Then the intensive, decontextualised and highly salable coverage of crime becomes evidence of a Crime Epidemic; the Audience gets “sick and tired” of hearing about a thing that every marketer knows it actually never gets sick or tired of hearing about, and it empowers its elected representatives to Get Tough. Thus the criminal is demonised.

—Jonathan Franzen, “Control Units”