Avenue of Broken Dreams | National Review
“Avenue of Broken Dreams”
The National Review, Richard Brookheiser
From the beginning, the article skews intentionally towards the emotional (perhaps even melodramatic). The headline is vague, not releasing any hints as to the content of the article itself
Richard Brookheiser focuses the piece on crime statistics in New York City, but instead of focusing on using facts or data to present his argument, he relies fully on storytelling, opening with a story of a murder. He dives into describing the life of the woman who was killed, as well as the reactions of those who knew her.
The article is published in the National Review, a notoriously right-leaning news source, and accordingly, Brookheiser ends the piece with a note to Mayor Adams, advising him to be tougher on crime and citing the “misguided policies” of others in the state government.
And yet, I felt as if this article is crafted to sound more neutral than many other National Review works. The headline is evocative and full of rhetoric, but does not specify an issue or take a focused stance on crime rates in New York City – it presents what seems to be common ground between two divisive perspectives on a controversial issue. Clearly, Brookheiser has strong opinions on those in the NYC government, but concedes that Adams’s “heart is in the right place,” and leaves that call for action in only the concluding note, not as a driving theme in the article.
It seems like there is also a deliberate choice to focus on minority victims – in the images chosen for the article and the victim described, all the people depicted are from minority groups. Is this Brookheiser trying to push a political agenda in categorizing people of color as needing to belong to either “aggressor” or “victim”? Or is this his way of offering common ground between people of different ethnicities? That question stuck with me when I was looking at the article and thinking of how its presentation affected its presence in common discourse.