- I like Leonard Pitts columns and usually agree with him.
But today he's monumentally wrong. He is railing against whites "putting
on the victim hat" because of a horrific murder that happened in Knoxville
and the scant attention it got from the media.
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- It seems that in January, a young white couple, Channon
Christian and Christopher Newsom, were victims of a brutal crime. They
were carjacked, kidnapped and raped. Cleaning fluid was sprayed into Christian's
mouth. She was stuffed in a trash can and apparently suffocated. Newsom
was shot and set afire. His body was dumped. Five African Americans, one
a woman, have been arrested.
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- The story made headlines around Knoxville. It was unnoticed
nationally.
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- That has changed. A constellation of white supremacists
and conservative bloggers has pushed the story into the national limelight
as illustration of their argument that news media, constrained by political
correctness, refuse to report black on white crime while pulling out all
the stops when crime is white on black as in the Duke lacrosse debacle.
Me, I would see their Duke case and raise them a Central Park jogger, but
what do I know?
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- I don't know if it's Pitts snarky tone ("It seems"?
"I'm obligated -- because I'm black --") or his kill-the-messenger
approach that puts me off the most. First off, I don't see how the Duke
case and the Central Park jogger case cancel each other -both were gross
police and prosecutorial errors- unless seen as tit-for-tat in racial wars.
Two wrongs don't make a right, as Pitts well knows.
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- Second, by jointly disregarding "white supremacists"
and "conservative bloggers" he's equating the two, and that's
also wrong. A conservative may have a right bone to pick with the media
coverage without being racially suspect. For example, here's what John
Leo or Charlie Daniels had to say about the case. Now, I don't agree with
99.9% of anything Charlie Daniels has said or sang about, but I can't disagree
with his "soapbox" in this case.
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- I do think that if this had been five white animals raping,
torturing and murdering two black kids, it would had been big news. I think
the press would have labeled it a hate crime maybe even before the prosecutors
did. I'm not saying that would have been bad, coverage (not media circuses)
of hate crimes is good to the point that we are all aware they exist and
as part of the national discussion on race. This crime was gruesome, brutal
and sick, the kind that national news outlets salivate for (missing girls
in Aruba for example), and the absence of interest is baffling indeed.
Personally I don't think (or maybe I don't want to think) the press self-censored
itself because of political correctness, but I don't see the need to demonize
all of those who may think so.
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- http://stuckonthepalmetto.blogspot.com/2007/06/leonard-pitts-wrong.html
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