Elite or prurient, the press sure is fascinated with Yale murder
Jack Shafer, the often-irreverent media critic for Slate.com, offers some theories for why murders at Ivy League schools get so much press coverage. His column’s headline: “Murder Draped in Ivy. Why the press can’t get enough of Harvard or Yale murders.”
Shafer writes:
If you plan to be murdered and expect decent press coverage, please have the good sense to be a Harvard or Yale student or professor. America’s top dailies and the cable networks will rush to the scene of the crime and sniff the vicinity for clues to your demise. They’ll scrape your personal history and publish enough information to serve as a foundation for a made-for-TV movie about you.
Likewise, if you kill somebody and want the press to go all Nancy Grace on your ass, make sure your victim attends or works at Harvard or Yale. Journalists almost everywhere observe this rough rule of thumb: Three murders at a Midwestern college equal one murder at Harvard or Yale.
Shafer’s article concludes:
The elite press and the tabloid press (in which I include cable populists such as Greta Van Susteren) approach Ivy murder from different angles. Members of the elite press identify with Harvard and Yale — even if they didn’t go there. They may work for someone who went, or wish they’d gone, or hope their children go. The same applies to many Times readers, pre-selling the story on both the supply and demand sides. The murder-happy tabloid press, on the other hand, has always taken special joy in showcasing the pain of the high-and-mighty.
The gap between elite and tabloid narrows every time bad things happen to privileged people. The difference is that tabloids never stop to justify or explain their prurient interest. If this how-the-mighty-fall stuff is your sort of story — and I’m thinking it is, since you’ve read to the end of this piece — don’t bother with the Times. The emotional ride you seek is hawking tickets right now at the Daily News and Post.
Whichever category the St. Louis Post-Dispatch falls into, we’ve certainly gone along for the ride.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch devoted 30 inches of space — between a story and photograph — on Page A7 Thursday to report the arrest of Raymond Clark III in the slaying of Yale graduate student Annie Le.
The Post-Dispatch used 33 inches of space — again for one story and photo — Monday to report when her body was found inside a wall at a Yale lab.
All told, the Post-Dispatch has had three stories and two digest items on the murder this week.
Steve Parker is the deputy managing editor for news, and oversees the Post-Dispatch's front page. STLtoday's online news editors are on his newsroom team. Parker has been at the paper since September 1980. 
Steve, I believe the word you’re looking for is “Prurient” not “Purient” (Note the first R”. Now, my grammar police duties done, I can comment…
The reason things that happen at Harvard or Yale (less so even at the other Ivies…can anyone even name the rest of the Ivy League without looking it up?) are front page news is that they seem to have the cachet of being “the” leading universities in the country, and that what happens there determines what will happen everywhere else. It’s kind of like the fascination with what Brad and Angelina are up to. As in, they are so special, how can they possibly be like me?
When society conspires to kill some 435,000 Americans with tobacco a year little is said of the individual victims yet they are victims of a conspiracy all the same. The same can be said of 100,00 deaths caused by alcohol, the 18,000 deaths caused by refusing to treat sick, and injured Americans. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths attributed to cancer. We know how cancer is caused yet business refuses to change its methods. We know how alcohol and tobacco addiction is caused yet authorities refuse to regulate these industries. When people conspire, and act for the purpose of causing bodily harm it is considered against the law in most cases. Yet millions of murderers get off without even being charged every year. Society also murders thousands of poor Americans yearly with social exclusion. Worldwide something like 25,000 children die daily from starvation while the United States brews grain alcohol. The millions being spent on this one case could be better spent saving lives. These deaths are caused because violence begets violence and the United States government supports organized violence through sports, gun laws, and laws supporting retribution, as well as failing to control substances like alcohol and tobacco. We can only count on American government making things worse as long a good men do nothing.