The Murder of Iryna Zarutska

On 22 August, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee named Iryna Zarutska was stabbed to death by a black male on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, as she returned from work. The incident was captured on CCTV and produced outrage from many conservative commentators when it circulated online, but an oddly muted response from much of the media. Eleven days after the murder, CNN’s Abby Phillip made the following observation during a panel discussion about the crime: “People are murdered every single day in every city in America,” she remarked, “and every single one of those murders is terrible and a tragedy. But this particular one, I’m trying to understand why this has become such a flashpoint on the Right.”

The implied questions are worth addressing, since they suggest bad faith or an ulterior motive on the part of those outraged by this savage and senseless attack. Why did this particular killing cut through the daily background noise of American violence? And why did it elicit such a powerful reaction from the political Right? The answers lie in three interrelated concerns: (1) the inconsistency with which victims and offenders of different races are treated by mainstream media, (2) the problem of urban disorder and impunity, and (3) the characteristics of the victim herself.

Identitarian Media Bias

People are murdered every day in America, but not every murder is treated as newsworthy. Some are amplified into morality plays about “systemic racism” while others are dismissed as isolated tragedies, and this discrepancy generally follows an identitarian script dictated by a perverse view of social justice. When George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer in 2020, his face appeared on murals from Berlin to Nairobi. Breonna Taylor and Michael Brown also became household names following their deaths at the hands of American law enforcement. But Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver—both of whom were white victims of lethal police force—remain largely unknown in the public imagination. The difference is not the brutality of the incidents, but the racial frame within which they are reported.

These impressions are borne out by data. In a 2023 report for the Manhattan Institute, Zach Goldberg found that “The median unarmed black victim of a fatal police shooting receives nearly 21 times more news articles than the median white victim, an imbalance that likely distorts public perceptions of police violence.” A 2022 analysis by the Washington Free Beacon also found that “Before May of 2020, papers were roughly twice as likely to mention the race of a white (13 percent of stories) versus a black perpetrator (7 percent). After May of 2020, the numbers were 28 percent and 4 percent, a ratio of seven to one.”