However, based on what I know of the US, nearly any murder or other serious incident caught in the news where the races of the victim and the accused were different would practically always provoke a hysterical reaction wracked with all the usual American neuroses. There's nothing exceptionally bad about this case's handling that hasn't been true for a very long while IMO.

Well, I am giving it as an example of standard and long-standing attitudes of the sort that Orwell described as "transferred nationalism," not some novel phenomenon.