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Close your eyes and imagine reading a news story about two white men breaking into a black man’s house in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C., slashing his throat and killing him, and attempting to rape his girlfriend, also black. Picture a white woman waiting in the getaway car.
Now envision the media coverage. Would it be a stretch to say that newspapers, 24-hour cable TV channels, local stations, national networks, and Oprah would converge on the area and set up camp to provide blanket, non-stop coverage of the atrocity? Can’t you see it? Every race-based group, faux civil rights organization — including women’s advocacy groups — and so-called black leaders and the clownish New Black Panthers descending on Georgetown demanding an old-fashioned lynching…
Story after story, commentary after commentary would be written. It would be pandemonium, just like it was at the beginning of the Duke rape case, when the media believed the stripper-accuser’s implausible and incredible tale of gang-rape.
Now keep all of these images in your mind for a second longer. Hold it. Hold it. Now click on the link below:
Take the man-bites-dog story above, reverse the skin colors, and you’re left with a classic yet ordinarily dull dog-bites-man crime story. A British national named Alan Senitt was murdered. And how was your weekend?
Here’s another scenario:
Earlier this year, David Rosenbaum, a reporter for the New York Times, was killed in his upscale D.C. neighborhood by a couple of black thugs. Standard story, nothing new. Most coverage focused on the life and career of the man. The murderers got minimal coverage.
Had Rosenbaum been a black reporter murdered by white thugs, we’d know where the white men lived, where they grew up, what elementary school they attended, their home address, how much money their parents make, how much their house was worth, etc. The current focus in the Rosenbaum case is the gross incompetence of DC’s law enforcement in handling the case. Don’t get me wrong. The cops should be investigated, but as I said, if the murderers were white and victim black, this crime would take on epic status.
(DC isn’t called the “murder capital” for nothing. After the wise D.C. Council banned decent, hardworking residents from owning handguns in 1976, the violent crime rate shot up. Now, only the criminals and cops have guns, and the criminals know it. Thugs run wild and rampant, killing law-abiding and peaceful people over dumb #$&%, a common scenario.)
Senitt’s murderers won’t get much coverage, either. Had the Brit been a black American and his murderers white skin heads, for instance, liberals across the country would be calling for a nation-wide crackdown on “white supremacists” and trying to implement even more stringent thoughtcrime laws and speech codes.
But black criminal thugs are just plain uninteresting and too common for blanket news coverage. That’s why shows like “Law & Order” thrive. We want to see a white Park Avenue princess poisoning her faithless boyfriend or pushing her rival off the balcony of her $2 million crib, not some black thug blowing his “girlfriend’s” brains out while her children are nearby because she made him angry (I worked on such a case at the U.S. Attorney’s office) or slashing some white guy who won’t give up his wallet.
B-O-R-I-N-G!
Yes, left-leaning journalists find such stories boring, if you can believe it. But a white lacrosse player punching a man, which is against the law, of course, makes them tingle all over. And if that “gay” man was also black (which I don’t think he was)…Oh boy! Collin Finnerty would have to move to some remote, undisclosed island.
Some people like to “watch” the Washington Post for signs of bias and inaccuracies. Others enjoy fisking the New York Times. Too many sad bloggers spend their time “watching” other bloggers. I count myself among the people who watch for media bias over race-related coverage broadly, a bias which almost always tends to favor blacks.
Ideally, news coverage would be fair and objective and skin color largely irrelevant, but it’s not. I don’t make the rules; I’m simply telling you what I see and why I think it’s so.
Addendum: Like David Rosenbaum, Alan Senitt was Jewish. What if the murderers were white, ordinary, non-skin head criminals? Neo-Nazis? Blacks who hated Jews? How different would the media coverage be in those three examples?
If this little girl is black and the rapists are black, you won’t read much else about it. If the majority or all of the rapists are white and the child is black, get ready for Armageddon…
Update: This story won’t get much play…unless the killers are white. To reiterate, left-leaning media are bored with black-on-black crime, white-on-white crime (unless it involves the wealthy), and black-on-white crime.
In all fairness, how many resources can media expend on crime news v. the rest of the news? When it’s potentially profitable — man-bites-dog — then blanket coverage is justified. Just playing Devil’s Advocate…
The Independent Conservative blogs about real justice and healing in Durham. Don’t hold your breath.
Update II: I wonder if the media and civil rights activists are camped out at this trial?
