Bad Bad Interracial Crime, Minimal Press Coverage: Media Bias In Play?

Great Debates
21

Generalized pessimism about human nature and intellectual laziness.

The paradigms or templates serve useful purposes for journalists and even their readers. They are proven story-sellers. They decrease the need to give individualized thought and attention to each unique fact pattern – how much easier to figure out who is the proxy for Simon Legree and who the proxy for Eliza, or which side in an international conflict is like the Nazis and which like the Jews, or which figure in a political scandal is like Nixon and which like Bob Woodward, and then work back from the comfortable old model. They confirm people’s pre-conceptions. And they can burnish the ego of both reporter and reader. In a world in which a consensus has emerged that whites used to treat black life with unacceptable indifference, there’s still some smug gratification to be had in deploring the fortunately-rare instances when someone does something as evil as dragging a black guy behind a car. Oh, and some journalists like to masquerade as intellectualoids, finding “larger lessons” in random acts of violence, when in many cases the only large lesson is man’s inhumanity to man, which I’ve already marked down in my notebook.

22

You’re saying what the OP said, so yes. :wink: I understand your position, but in reality I don’t know how you would find any information to back up the claim you are making. The explanation appeals to people like your friend, and like Charlie Daniels, because it fits their preconceived notions of how the world works. (As Huerta88 just said in another context, “intellectual laziness.”)

23

The article I read said the group originally just planned to take their car and that’s all- I would love to know how you go from a routine carjacking to castration, burning, dismemberment, etc.

24

I saw that, but other sources question why they then abandoned the car shortly thereafter.

25

Yes, this is a little clearer way of saying what I previously posted. There is a perception in newsrooms that when a group of whites murders a black person, it is a hate crime caused by bigotry, ignorance and hatred, but when a group of blacks murders a white person, it is a crime of frustration and revenge for centuries of oppression. It may well be a skewed perception, but it is there. Given that newsrooms are overwhelmingly staffed by white liberals and, as has already been discussed in this thread, news folk don’t want to fuel anti-black bias by pointing out the races of either victim or perpetrator, there is a tendency to err on the side of pro-black bias. Sometimes, of course, names of the principals can indicate race and photos of victims and suspects will always reveal race. Newspaper and TV editors have discovered that if they consistently show images of both victims and suspects, they are not accused of bias nearly as often as if they include racial references in the story text.

And just a clarification – my reference to a bias against “rich white athletes” is meant only to explain the media’s fascination with the Duke lacrosse debacle. The alleged victim’s race was a secondary contributor to the demonization of the “trust fund brats.” A primary motivation in flogging that story had to do with a perception that college athletes are an unfairly priveleged group. If any random group of scummy white kids had been accused of raping a black stripper at a party, it wouldn’t have gotten much play.

And should anyone bring up the Tawana Brawley story, remember that that incident got tons of early coverage because Brawley was thought to be an innocent child who was kidnapped and violated by vicious racists, and bigotry was thought to be the motivation for the crime.

26

…I remember actually that the impetus of sensationalizing the story was staving off accusations that the story was being buried because of its racial dynamics.

Furthermore, that entire story was a bit of a fluke in that it was the media’s self-awareness drove most of the controversy. First they were over eager to paint the accuser as a victim, then after being embarrassed by the creeping holes in her case, they were over eager to attack Magnum.

27

That’s a handy bromide that journalists frequently reach for, and as I said, there is a tendency to be overly-cautious when racial issues are involved. But I assure you, the fact that the suspects were athletes – and participated in a sport normally associated with the Country Club set at that – had far more to do with the constant drumming of this story than did the races of the principals.

28

I agree with the first part. I don’t even necessarily have to go as far as the second part. I suspect the response is closer to treating the incident as a one-off, as not a part of any larger pattern, as not symbolizing anything or raising serious questions about blah blah blah, which is more likely to happen when it is white-on-black. Though perhaps this lack of interest in exploring or attributing racial motives when the perp is black and the victim white can take on a whistling-past-the-graveyard aspect of the MSM ignoring even crimes that have a clear racial animus at their core.

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2000/03/06/hate/index.html

29

Although I agree with the above comments on what stories get national attention, I would think this one would be different not because of the brutality involved, but in the multiple bizarre types of brutality. IOW, stabbing someone with a knife 100 times, brutal, but not rare. How often do you get a case with everything mentioned here? Any one of the specifics here on its own also would not be unusual, but all together, yeah I’m surprsied this is the first I’ve heard of it- I honestly cannot believe Nancy Grace hasn’t featured this, the female victim is blond after all.

30

This is the opinion of your colleagues in the media, or your interpretation?

31

This is my experience in several newsrooms over the course of nearly 20 years in newspaper newsrooms. It’s one of the dirty little secrets of newsrooms. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud to be a liberal. What I’m not proud of is that none of my colleagues (nor I) even tried to filter our liberalism out of our reporting.

Three things I will attest that critics are right about the media:

  1. Newsrooms are overwhelmingly liberal, and that bias is reflected in mainstream reporting.

  2. Headlines sell newspapers (though not the way critics think they do.)

  3. When it comes to accuracy, the media talks the talk but fails to walk the walk,

32

The explanation appeals to people like your friend, and like Charlie Daniels, because it fits their preconceived notions of how the world works. (As Huerta88 just said in another context, “intellectual laziness.”)
[/QUOTE]

You see, this attitude is what irks me! My friend, so you say, is “intellectually lazy” and has “preconceived notions of how the world works.”

He put up with continual harrassment because of his race, people telling him “Whites don’t belong here!”, defacement of his property, getting “bumped into”/almost knocked down by black guys twice his size when walking his own neighborhood, and basically just continual intimidation just because he chose “the wrong neighborhood” to move to! Even his black neighbors who were pretty decent to him could never muster the courage to say anything about the idiot racist bullies who were bothering him! They just could not bother themselves to get too upset about it!

It actually reminded me of when I attended Tennessee State University, a predominantly black college, for graduate school, from 1989 to 1991. This enormous fellow shoved me to the floor, and made sure that I knew that it was not an accident – a very hateful scowl, followed by an expletive-filled statement that my kind was not welcome in their fine institution! Needless to say, not one person in that hall (all witnesses were black!) said one thing to the bully!
Of course, white people are never, ever supposed to let such incidents influence them! To do so would be racist, after all!

33

A couple of things here.

There’s no doubt that white-on-black crime is news in a way that black-on-white crime is not.

But the argument that it’s part of the giant liberal conspiracy is bogus.

For one, conservatives have an entire arm of the national media devoted to their cause. If this is a liberal problem - or a liberal-created problem - where is FOX news? Rush Limbaugh and his 909 proteges? Matt Drudge and the 9 million other conservative webmuckers?

Yeah, journalists are liberal. So are college professors and well… pretty much smart, college-educated people generally. But that’s because being smart makes you liberal, not because of some giant conspiracy to brain-wash college students.

As far as why the black/white crime bias exists… if bias is the right word for it…

Yeah, part of it is white guilt. (But hey, it’s not like there’s nothing to feel guilty about.)

And part of it is that what’s unusual is news. Black on white crime is not unusual. It’s the man-bites-dog thing.

That journalists are liberal has almost nothing to do with it.

34
  1. Selective reporting (or non-reporting) of events is influenced by, and perpetuates, journalists’ leanings, biases, interests, and this can skew public perception.

Reporters have to use discretion in choosing what to cover and how much precisely because there’s no conversion table that says a triple homicide drug slaying in Petaluma and a rape-murder in the hometown and an attempted assassination in Kyrgyzstan must get the same number of column inches. It’s only when they systematically misuse their discretion in following and reporting on stories for which they have a template that problems come up. Back in the early ‘90s the ombudsman of the Washington Post wrote a piece in which he noted that the paper had run umpty-eleven articles about the 20th anniversary rally for Earth Day on the Mall, and approximately nil on the gathering protesting on the 20th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, even though the two events drew roughly the same large-ish crowd to the Mall in roughly the same time period. He didn’t rely on the numbers alone (100,000 gathered=six above-the-fold stories). No, he pointed out that this result had been essentially pre-ordained because plenty of people on the paper remembered (or had heard their parents’ stories of) the great gatherings in support of “progressive” causes of the '60s and '70s, and were easily, nay, giddily able to fit Earth Day into that paradigm. They didn’t have a real paradigm for telling an anti-abortion story, and even more cogently, no one in the newsroom, nor anyone they knew, had the anti-abortion cause on their radar screen (at least not as anything good or inspiring).

Same reason why the media was so willing to go with the bogus epidemic of black church burnings but you didn’t and don’t see much coverage about Kosovars burning Serbian churches in very real numbers (well, it’s also in godforsaken Kosovo too). But even during the war, that was too confusing, because the prevailing Western media template called for the Kosovar Muslims to be the innocent proxy Jews to the Serbs’ Nazi butchers, and the reality was a little blurrier than that.

35

This isn’t remotely true, but liberals sure do love to think it.

In my experience your political ideology is shaped primarily by three factors:

  1. The ideology of your parents

  2. The ideology of your friends

  3. The ideology of your teachers (throughout life.)

If you grow up in South Carolina, your parents, friends, and teachers are more likely to instill in you conservative ideals versus liberal ideals.

If you grow up in Massachusetts, it’s the reverse. Although in any one state the conservative/liberal divide is never much greater than 60/40 one way or another.

If you go to a liberal arts school, you’re very likely to be surrounded by liberal students and liberal professors. Even without the much derided “indoctrination” the fact that you’re around liberal ideas all the time will almost certainly influence how you think.

On the other hand, if you’ve ever had much experience at pretty much any university or college business school, you know the students and the professors are overwhelmingly conservative. I have a friend who teaches a few information systems classes at one of the leading institutions in Virginia, he’s fairly liberal and frequently complains about the oppressively conservative ideology of everyone who runs the business college and its students.

When talking about college making people smart thus making people liberal, liberals tend to forget that not every one who goes to college is an art, history, or sociology major. They also forget, I think, that college doesn’t make you smart any more than anything else does, if you aren’t smart in the first place you’ll either not go to college, or go to college and do poorly and take nothing away from it other than a piece of paper which will help you get a job.

I also hate to break it to you, but here was the educational break down of voters in 2004’s Presidential election:

No High School (4%): 49% Bush 50% Kerry
H.S. Graduate (22%): 52% Bush 47% Kerry
Some College (32%): 54% Bush 46% Kerry
College Graduate (26%): 52% Bush 46% Kerry
Postgrad Study (16%): 44% Bush 55% Kerry

While it’s certainly true that people who decide to spend a large portion of their lives in college seem to trend more Democrat than Republican, and thus ostensibly more liberal than conservative, I think it’s obvious from the outset that most conservatives are more interested in actually going out and making money versus spending 10 years in grad school.

To support that theme you can look at 2004’s vote by income:

$15,000 (8%) 36% Bush 63% Kerry
$15-30,000 (15%) 42% Bush 57% Kerry
$30-50,000 (22%) 49% Bush 50% Kerry
$50-75,000 (23%) 56% Bush 43% Kerry
$75-100,000 (14%) 55% Bush 45% Kerry
$100-150,000 (11%) 57% Bush 42% Kerry
$150-200,000 (4%) 58% Bush 42% Kerry
$200,000 or More (3%) 63% Bush 35% Kerry

36

What’s your point? That your friend has really good reasons for having preconceived notions about how the world works? It makes no difference.

You said your friend is a “white-nationalist lite” type, so I think you know what that means. Why the excuses? If you have some bad experiences with black people and decide they’re pretty much all alike, “intellectually lazy” is one of the milder things people can call you.

37

I’m still at a loss to understand the point of the OP and this thread. We are presented with an anecdote and are told that there is a trend. We are presented with “facts” such as “reporters are liberal” and that they are unable to report crimes in which the perpetrator is black and the victim is white.

Of course, multiple counter-examples leap to mind, but the OP and others of similar orientation soldier on.

So what is the real intent of this thread?

38

(1) Since when does the “intent” of a thread have anything to do with its content?
(2) The “intent” is as I stated, although I might have put it the other way round: if this particular black on white crime does not merit national coverage (and perhaps it does not – I’ve said multiple times that I lack a mathermatical standard for calculating appropritate outrage), then maybe localized allegations of white on black crimes (Duke, James Byrd) do not, either, merit saturation coverage. One may agree or disagree (another word is “debate”) with this contention, or my contention that a lazy media reports on paradigms that flatter or match with their ideological biases and not on ones that don’t.

What does your questioning of my “intent” accomplish other than burnishing your credentials as not being of “similar orientation” to me, which apparently is a source of sufficient pride to you that you had to make a pointless post registering your feigned loss of understanding of the OP? So noted, and who cares?

39

Gosh, I thought we had a pretty thought-provoking thread going here, but it’s obviously not up to **Hentor’s ** standards – I feel so inadequate for wasting his time!

40

I’m not feigning anything. I understand that your opinion is probably that there is insufficient attention given to crimes committed by other races against Whites. I understand that your opinion is that this is due to members of a lazy liberal media. I understand that you have an anecdote that you are waving about with fervor.

I don’t understand how I am to debate your opinion. You have no factual basis. I don’t have any data to reply with. My opinion is that there is a tendency to overreport about scary black men in the media, and that tends to fit with preconcieved racially-based pre-judgments. Susan Smith’s “carjacking” was national news when it was still a case of a black guy taking her van and kids at gunpoint. I heard a story a few years ago about a black guy in Michigan murdering a white family in their sleep. What does this prove?

When come back, bring data.

Sunrazor, don’t cry. I’m sure you’re still a wonderful person. I’m just not sure what is particularly thought provoking about this. Maybe it’s just that I’ve heard this tale before, about the oppression of whites by PC liberals. If you haven’t, I guess I could see how it would be thought provoking, but I tend to doubt that you haven’t. Do you have anything other than your opinion to share with us?