- If five whites carjacked a black couple, tortured them
for hours, then dumped the bodies, the national news media would descend
upon the benighted city in which the dastardly crime occurred and, having
reported the unspeakable deeds, subject the rest of us to rants on racism
and harangues on hate. It happened with James Byrd, the black man dragged
to death behind a car in Jasper, Texas, and it happens even when the crimes
are fictive, as with huckstress Tawana Brawley and, more recently, the
lacrosse team at Duke University. In such cases, the media tell us that
whether or not the crimes actually occurred does not matter: We learn a
lesson simply in contemplating them.
-
- The truth is, we are never permitted to contemplate the
truth about race and crime. Almost all interracial crime involves
blacks harming whites, and federal statistics show that blacks commit more
hate crimes than whites. The news media's stiff-necked refusal to report
these facts is escalating and indisputable, as several recent cases show,
and invites us to question why so many news professionals-so dedicated
to disclosing so many unwelcome facts about so many subjects-are so unwilling
to examine this one. "Liberal media bias" isn't the only answer.
Something else is at work.
-
- First, a few examples. The murders of Christopher Newsom
and Channon Christian in Knoxville, Tennessee, merited almost no attention
from the national news media and none from the New York Times. According
to police, on January 7, a band of black criminals carjacked the pair,
then treated them to a nightmare of sexual torture. They gang-raped Newsom,
shot him, burned him with gasoline, wrapped him in bedding, then set him
ablaze. Afterward, they dumped his body on nearby railroad tracks. They
forced Christian to watch this and repeatedly (and savagely) raped her,
then sprayed liquid cleaner in her mouth to erase their residual DNA. After
killing her, the thugs placed her in trash bags and stuffed her in a garbage
can. Five suspects await trial.
-
- On Halloween, three white girls approached a haunted
maze in the backyard of a home in Long Beach, California. A group of a
dozen black boys, according to newspaper accounts, began taunting them.
The boys grabbed their crotches, asking, "Are you down with it?"
The girls ran through the maze, but when they returned to the front
yard, the boys were waiting to taunt them again. Then they heard another
male voice declare, "I hate white people." "White bitches,"
others shouted.
-
- The girls started to leave, but a mob of about 30 blacks,
including young girls, gathered and pelted them with pumpkins and lemons.
"We hate white people," they hollered, "fking white
people." When the defenseless girls tried to flee, the mob attacked
in full force, beating and stomping the first victim to the ground. When
she tried to fight back, a black man smashed her head with a skateboard,
then hit her again when she was on the ground, unconscious. The mob kicked
her while she was down. When one friend tried to rescue her, the mob swarmed,
punched her until she dropped, then stomped, and kicked her while she was
on the ground. She received 12 facial fractures and severe damage to one
of her eyes. The third girl also tried to help, but the mob beat her to
a pulp-again, kicking and stomping her when they got her on the ground.
Three of the girls remain tragically disfigured until this day.
-
- The judge tossed out DNA evidence from a victim's blood
on one attacker's clothes because, one news report said, "it would
complicate the case." Ultimately, he sentenced those found guilty
to house arrest and probation. Again, the New York Times and
other national news media mostly ignored it. No wondering how it could
happen. No soul-searching. No lectures on racism from the university professoriate,
Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton.
-
- In April 2005, a mob of 30 blacks attacked four white
girls at Marine Park in Brooklyn, New York, shouting "black power,"
according to the small weekly that covered it, and invoking the name of
Martin Luther King, Jr. Two of the victims landed in the hospital, one
with a broken nose. Immediately, police denied this was a hate crime. The
national news media ignored it. And again, the Rainbow Coalition took a
powder.
-
- On December 14, 2000, two black brothers, Jonathan and
Reginald Carr, invaded the Wichita home of Jason Befort and his two friends,
Bradley Heyka and Aaron Sandler, who were entertaining Befort's girlfriend,
Heather Muller, and Sandler's former girlfriend ("H.G." Name
with held because she was an eyewitness to the murders.). (Sandler was
then studying for the priesthood.) As with the carjacking in Knoxville,
the black men, ending a week-long feral rampage in which they killed two
other white people, subjected their five white victims to an orgy of sexual
torture nearly beyond description. After beating the men senseless, they
forced the women to have sex, attempted to force the men to have sex with
the women, then raped and sodomized the women. They robbed them and drove
the naked victims to a field and executed four of them. H.G., having
been shot in the head and run over repeatedly with a truck, managed to
survive. Despite H.G.'s testimony, which indicated that the brothers made
numerous racial slurs while torturing and attempting to kill her, prosecutors
hotly denied that this was a hate crime. Again, the national news media
ignored the story.
-
- Stories about all these crimes appeared in local newspapers
and on local television news. Somehow, however, these stories never
rocketed to the editorial stratosphere of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the Washington
Post, or the New York Times. Some national-news websites published
a smattering of AP stories about these crimes. Had they involved whites
attacking blacks, all of these news organizations would have dispatched
staff writers, photographers, producers, and cameramen to get the story.
-
- That is exactly what happened when three white lacrosse
players at Duke University were accused of raping a black stripper at an
off-campus party; the national news media descended in full force. The
charges smeared the team, and the Duke lacrosse season was canceled. Hundreds
of stories appeared about this fictive crime-a case in which the prosecutor
was forced to quit and may be disbarred for egregious ethical violations.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major television
networks unlimbered a blunderbuss and sprayed us with stories. It was time
to search our souls for racism. For intolerance. For bigotry. For a crime
that never happened.
-
- Of course, Durham was recently the site of a rape at
an off-campus party at which men from Duke were present. The national news
media ignored it, and the Raleigh News and Observer eliminated
race in its description of both the party and the suspect. A black fraternity
hosted the party. The suspect is black; the victim is white.
-
- The leftists who run the national news media know what
they are doing, and they won't confront the truth about race and crime;
that would require reforming their thoughts about the world and undermine
their declared agenda. The news media are obsessed with "diversity,"
as Bill McGowen demonstrated in Coloring the News, his book on how
the media spins stories because of race. Some topics, including affirmative
action, are taboo in newsrooms. For example, when the New York Times exposed
rank incompetence and rampant criminality among rookies in the NYPD, it
failed to disclose how or why such incompetence and criminality crept into
the ranks: Hiring standards had been lowered to promote minorities in the
name of "diversity."
-
- In journalism, the last few years have been one long
chin-wag about diversity. The potentates of journalism discuss it with
religious fervor. Editors receive dogmatic flyers and evangelical videotapes
importuning them to hire minority applicants and interns and to attend
minority job fairs. They receive surveys designed to measure the racial
and sex complexion of newsrooms. The American Society of Newspaper Editors
proclaims, "We count the number of journalists, their gender [sic]
and race" in order to "help newsrooms think about diversity."
The society sponsors a silly project called "Time Out for Accuracy
and Diversity." Of course, accuracy never trumps diversity. The publisher
of the New York Times has said that diversity is the most important
issue facing his newspaper; this is how Jayson Blair, a black serial liar
with a long rap sheet of plagiarism and mendacity, slipped through the
cracks.
-
- This leftist obsession with diversity and race in the
newsroom informs the media's coverage of crime, particularly interracial
crime. In a letter posted on the forum at Romenesko, on the website of
the Poynter Institute, David Mills, a former writer for the Washington
Times, hammered the Los Angeles Times for ignoring the mob melee
at Long Beach. "You don't have to be a card-carrying Klansman,"
Mills wrote, to point out that the LA Times surely would
be treating this story differently if three black women had been attacked
by 30 white teenagers hurling words like "F- black people." Columnists
and editorial writers would be rending their garments, agonizing over the
meaning of such a brutal crime. . . .
-
- The Halloween mob assault appears to be the worst instance
of black-on-white violence in Southern California since Reginald Denny
took a cinder block to the head. Why is the LA Times covering
it so grudgingly? The only reference to the beatings on the op-ed page
came last Sunday, when Michael McGough, a senior editorial writer, wrote
of this case: "I wouldn't dare to prejudge [it] even if the facts
weren't so murky." He then fretted that an "unintended consequence"
of hate-crime laws is that "such laws could end up punishing blacks
who commit violence against whites-which is a far cry from the historical
experience that inspired hate-crime statutes."
-
- Say what? I didn't realize that hate-crime laws were
supposed to punish only white people. Presented with a shocking instance
of black-on-white violence, the Times thinks the only larger
issue worth discussing is whether hate-crime legislation is wrongheaded?
-
- McGough's point was that blacks are incapable of racism
and hate crimes; they are perpetual victims. No wonder the national news
media refuses to report horrific black-on-white crimes. Just as "diversity"
trumps competence in the newsroom, white-on-black crime always trumps its
converse.
-
- The media's morality play about unbridled white racism
is a perilous fairy tale that justifies the media's racial agenda not just
for newsrooms but for society at large. Moreover, whites are increasingly
angry about the media's treatment of blacks and crime, which undermines
what little credibility the media have and energizes unfair and unjust
remarks and rage about blacks in general. This, in turn, breeds the very
racial animosity the dim bulbs in the news media claim they want to erase.
Yet admitting the truth would undermine the media's hectoring, obnoxious
propaganda, which insists that whites are oppressors and blacks are victims,
and would deprive the race hustlers and cultural leftists of the crowning
symbol that permits them to rig the courts and spin the news: the racist
white bogeyman.
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- http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=39
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