Honor student, 16, beaten to death by teens in Chicago

[BuddhaRhubarb]

On the other hand, I don't think it is terribly unusual for newspapers to mention, when a high schooler is killed, if s/he was an honour student or otherwise high achieving.

yeah this was my thought. rather than just say one kid was killed by others, they need something to give the story more heft and went for the obvious and implicitly racist, in a smarmy way. This is often the modern Journo way.

[C.C.R.]

On the other hand, I don't think it is terribly unusual for newspapers to mention, when a high schooler is killed, if s/he was an honour student or otherwise high achieving.

yeah this was my thought. rather than just say one kid was killed by others, they need something to give the story more heft and went for the obvious and implicitly racist, in a smarmy way. This is often the modern Journo way.

It's a classic "Attention Getter."  There are an awful lot of people killing other people in the United States every day, so if the media want to effectively sell a given story half the battle is getting the attention (duh) of the reader/viewer.  Unfortunately, urban violence is so commonplace that the media is reduced to cherrypicking stories that they can spin to be out of the ordinary in order to sell papers/attract viewers/attract mouse clicks.

I don't think that the practice is overtly racist unto itself on the media's part (although I would agree that racist elements most definitely exist in some of the Target Audience that would be affected by the specific example being discussed in this thread) so much as it is a sad commentary about the prevalence of violence in American culture...