From Janine Jackson's 1998 article we are offered insights into how typical MSM reporting would cover the narrative:
Already obsessed with the use of the cocaine derivative crack among the urban poor, mainstream media used ... limited, qualified findings as grounds for an astonishing spree of sloppy, alarmist reporting and racial and economic scapegoating that still echoes today
...
"Crack baby" stories typically had an anecdotal focus and a veneer of sympathy for the "tiny victims," ... More urgency was reserved, though, for the unimaginable dangers these babies were supposedly destined to wreak on the world: The Washington Post (9/17/89) warned of "A Time Bomb in Cocaine Babies," while the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (9/18/90) declared flatly, "Disaster In Making: Crack Babies Start to Grow Up."
...
The emphasis may have varied, from pity for the children ("Crack Babies Born to Life of Suffering," USA Today, 6/8/89) to disgust for the mothers ("For Pregnant Addict, Crack Comes First," Washington Post, 12/18/89) to the unfathomable amount "their" problems might wind up costing "us" ("Crack's Tiniest, Costliest Victims," New York Times, 8/7/89). But overall, commercial media found the premise - a coming onslaught of affectless genetic deviants - utterly persuasive.
Compelling stories cast within the mold of a morality tale. Jackson notes (my emphasis added)
The premise, however, was false. The inadvisability of using cocaine during pregnancy is not disputed. But subsequent research on cocaine-exposed children found that many of the dangers mentioned in initial studies are simply not borne out.
... Health-care providers working with infants exposed to cocaine in utero found them indistinguishable from other children. Much medical research pointed to other factors - such as the lack of good prenatal care, use of alcohol and tobacco, and, simply enough, poverty - as more primary factors in poor fetal development among pregnant cocaine users than cocaine itself.
Proponents of a revised view included Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose initial 1985 study launched much of the media juggernaut. By 1992, Chasnoff was saying, "poverty is the worst thing that can happen to a child," and expressing dismay at the press' misuse of medical research. "It's sexy," he suggested of the "crack baby" story (AP, 12/6/92). "It's interesting, it sells newspapers and it perpetuates the us-vs.-them idea."
Just who is the us in the "us-vs.-them idea" mentioned by Dr. Chasnoff?
From the 2009 New York Times story, we learn that
When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children.
...[S]cientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.
...
Cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus. But experts say its effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco — two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women, despite health warnings.
In the first half of NYT article, we are told that the morality of cocaine use is the issue
cocaine use in pregnancy has been treated as a moral issue rather than a health problem ... Pregnant women who use illegal drugs commonly lose custody of their children, and during the 1990s many were prosecuted and jailed
But later in the article the racial issues loom large:
Possession of crack cocaine, the form of the drug that was widely sold in inner-city, predominantly black neighborhoods, has long been punished with tougher sentences than possession of powdered cocaine, although both forms are identically metabolized by the body and have the same pharmacological effects.
... If [cocaine-exposed children] develop physical symptoms or behavioral problems, doctors or teachers are sometimes too quick to blame the drug exposure and miss the real cause, like illness or abuse.
“Society’s expectations of the children,” she said, “and reaction to the mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity, but by the social meaning” of the drug.
What exactly does the "social meaning" of the crack cocaine mean? My best guess is that it means white elites jump upon any and all opportunities to further marginalize, stigmatize, and demoralize poor blacks.
Teasing out the effects of cocaine exposure is complicated ... [because] ... almost all of the women in the studies who used cocaine while pregnant were also using other substances.
Moreover, most of the children in the studies are poor, and many have other risk factors known to affect cognitive development and behavior — inadequate health care, substandard schools, unstable family situations and exposure to high levels of lead.
Back in 1998, FAIR painted a much clearer picture of the inherent racism and how 60 minutes legitimatized
Such a sustained media assault was not without real world effects, of course. Years of accusatory coverage contributed to a shift to more punitively focused public policy, which was, in turn, welcomed by the press. In 1994, 60 Minutes aired a show (11/20/94) celebrating one such policy: a South Carolina law under which women who used cocaine while pregnant were arrested and jailed under child abuse statutes. "Cracking Down," the segment was called.
Fast forward to 1998: Despite an amicus curiae letter signed by 15 leading medical and social service organizations condemning the policy, the Supreme Court declines to hear an appeal in the convictions of two South Carolina women. Cornelia Whitner and Malissa Crawley, both mothers of healthy children, are serving prison terms for prenatally "abusing" them by using cocaine. And 60 Minutes announces plans to re-air its 1994 segment on the policy that sent them to jail.
... [O]f 23 prosecutions, 22 were of African-American women, and the one white woman was married to a black man.
In America, the perpetuation of racial divide (us-vs.-them) serves to deflect from class issues. As the lawyer who represented Whitner and Crawley notes:
"Many of the people who are actually working with the women and children were saying, 'These are poverty babies, and nobody wants to address that. So we call them crack babies.'"
In addition
[L]eading medical groups like the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the March of Dimes [join] in saying, "If you want to help children, don't arrest their mothers."
In an entirely different morality play, Chicago Tribune sports writer Bob Verdi writes some unmentionable truths:
Like lemmings, members of the broadcast and print media have piled on ...
We in the media are not here to make you think; we are here to tell you what to think.
