Aha. It did.
ywtf asked up-thread for other examples of big interracial crime. I could add the Howard Beach incident from the 1980s and the Wichita Massacre from the '90s. The what? Exactly.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/classics/carr_brothers/index.html
Yes, but there is a big difference between a blurb on the website and devoting a two hours segment each night for a week on something. Now, if the question is, does the media suprpess these stories to kepp from riling up whites, I don’t know, not being in the media, but I’m also not sure if this is a good or bad thing.
So the issue is how hyped the story is, not just whether it is reported in the national press at all? How much coverage should there be? What is the standard that supports the lazy liberal biased media argument?
For instance, would the tremendous cover up of the incident involving Colin Ferguson, the Long Island Railroad Shooter, count? Was that blurb coverage, or something more? Why did they report that incident, despite their fear that whites would flip out and go all Helter Skelter-RAHOWA?
And here again is why being race-blinded is a deteriment to reasoning skills.
The reason that the Duke and Brawley cases received attention is because the accused represented public institutions: a well-recognized school and police officers, respectively. If the people involved had all been a bunch of nobodies, with no-name affiliations, very few of us would know anything about any of these cases. Rape accusations are made every damn day in this country, and most of them don’t even make local news, let alone national! Furthermore, these cases would have likely received ample press even without the interracial aspect. A teenager being accused of being gang raped by cops? A bunch of college athletes being accused of raping another college student? These cases have all the ingredients necessary for sensationalism.
The church burnings are significant because there’s a historical precedence there. You might have heard of the Birmingham church bombing back in the 60’s? Yes? Maybe? I can’t imagine the media not reporting on this type of terrorism, since it immediately conjures up memories from the past.
The cases of black-on-white crime that you just mentioned are really no different than the thousands of crimes that happen every year and go without a media blitz. They just happen to involve white victims and black perps (oh noes!!!). Open and shut cases about no-name Joe Schmoes with no-name affiliations don’t usually receive attention on the national news because there’s nothing much to say about them except “that sucks”. The pundit shows on MSNBC, FoxNews, and CNN need a little bit more to work with than “that sucks” type of commentary.
It’s strange that people are complaining about Tawana Brawley when that case happened twenty years ago. I mean, come on. To use that to support the claim of bias looks really ludicrous, given that the media’s landscape has changed a lot with the advent of the internet and promulgation of 24/hour news stations. Crimes that used to make headlines 20 years ago barely get mentioned today, because we are so ridiculously unindated with information. So I have to laugh at the number of times Brawley is mentioned in this thread. That case was from another era.
You mean “on this type of terrorism, if it were terrorism, which the media did not bother to substantiate for a long time, but eventually concluded there was not much of a racial-terror motive nor a dramatic spike in black church burnings, if any.”
I don’t understand this. We have more media, so it’s natural that stories get less exposure? As you yourself said, cable television is chockablock with true crime, I’ve seen forensics stories on isolated murders from all over the country.
And why is Brawley not relevant when the Duke hoax played out very much like the original Tawana, replete with showy appearances by the race hustlers and a failure of the “civil rights leaders” to apologize afterward? Is Emmet Till relevant to James Byrd? I wouldn’t condemn you for mentioning them in the same breath, when both were killed for getting involved with the wrong rednecks at the wrong time.
I have never seen a good debate based on the premise: “If X and Y were different/switched, people would react differently!”
It’s impossible to debate that. There is no way to create a baseline.
Violent crimes are in the news every damned day, at all levels of news. There are millions of stories. Of course you can cherry-pick ones that support your interpretation. What’s startling is that there seem to be so few examples available that you have to go back 20 years for one.
We have more media, more exposure to nonstop information, therefore the mundane is even more mundane than it was 20 years ago. Stuff that used to take up a lot of airtime back when there was only a handful of stations doesn’t garner a lot of attention in this competitive market. We have shorter attention spans for one thing. Another thing is that we are more desensitized to stories about crime. For example, the next school shooting that takes place will probably not spawn half the attention that the last one did. Serial killers used to make headlines, now we barely keep up with them. The same trend is seen with natural disasters, terrorism, and children getting trapped in wells. You have to up the ante with each new incident to garner the same amount of press.
Brawley happened back in 1987. I would think if the media is covering all these white-on-black crimes to the exclusion of b-o-w, a case more recent than that would be offered as evidence to wow the court with. Again, because it apparently can’t be said enough, these type* of crimes happen all the time and they fail to attract national attention.
*And as amazing as it is, that includes w-o-b rapes, too! Shocking, isn’t it?
I am in the media, and I know the race of the suspect/victim does matter, but that doesn’t count in this thread because I don’t have a web-based study to back it up. So, it’s just an “opinion”.
You apparently don’t have any type of study or data whatsoever, web-based, scientific, survey or otherwise.
What is so difficult to comprehend about “opinion”? How long do you intend to bemoan your lack of understanding of the concept of “opinion”? How do you have 30 years in any field, particularly one involving a heavy use of words and reporting on opinions without knowing what opinion means?
Is it? I wouldn’t put it in the top million, myself. The popular phrase “I’m gonna get medeival on your ass” should quite clearly drive home the point that this kind of utter sadism is nothing new to humanity.
Indicidentally, I seem to recall a black-on-white killing a few years back that got extensive, if not excessive coverage. What was that guy’s name… P.J.?
Wow. This is the first I’ve heard of this, and I gotta say, in its combination of details (assuming they’re all proven true), it’s among the most horrible, depraved crimes I’ve heard of in a long time. Just…wow. I don’t support the dealth penalty, but I admit that reading this made me waver for a moment.
Okay. That said, a couple thoughts. First, I don’t think anyone can deny that white victims are usually given much more attention in the media. Partly it’s racism, partly it’s that audiences are more likely to be interested in and sympathetic to victims they can identify with, which would usually be middle class whites like themselves (you may consider this to be racism too; it seems a slightly different thing to me).
Second: Black criminals do get plenty of air time on the evening news as well. But even though that’s true, I think what the people forwarding this e-mail around are getting at is that very few black-on-white crimes seem to generate media-driven discussions of black criminality in the way that white-on-black crimes generate discussion of white racism (along with all the other coverage of white racism in the media). Let’s look at you with the face’s examples:
Five of those six were heavily discussed in the media in terms of white racism (the first three definitely; the Susan Smith case was very carefully not, as I remember, discussed in racial terms [even if that’s how people privately thought of it] until it came out that she’d made the whole thing up, at which point the fact that she’d blamed it on a black male opened the flood gates to a discussion of racism; the OJ trial generated tons of different discussions, though arguably the primary one was about white racism – in the LAPD, in the jury, etc.; the Kobe Bryant trial didn’t generate much racial discussion at all, as far as I’m aware). None of them, as far as I saw, generated in the mainstream media significant discussion of the fact of disproportionate black criminality. Another example: when it turned out that the Washington snipers were black, that fact received virtually no attention in the media, though, in contrast, there was much discussion of “loner white males” when the Unabomber, Tim McVeigh, and school shootings happened, as well as analysis about the Virginia Tech shooter’s ethnicity and the role it might have played in his crimes. (I was watching the news with a friend when the snipers were caught, and his first reaction was not relief that they had been caught, but worry that there would be a racist backlash!)
The impression is given that black-on-white crime cannot be analyzed and discussed as such. Even black-on-black crimes are, though often reported, seldom analyzed or willing to be seen as signs of larger problems in the community, in the way that white crimes sometimes all-too-readily are.
For some interesting stats on race and crime, check out this report from the Department of Justice (WARNING: PDF!!). Table 42 on page 55 of that document sheds some interesting light on the Duke rape case: in 2005, an astonishing 0.0 percent of rapes of black women were by white men. So clearly when it does happen, or is alleged to happen, it’s news, though maybe not in the way the media made it out to be. (Some needed caveats: that’s a statistical 0.0 percent, meaning that the sample included ten or fewer reports. Also, that table is for “single offender victimizations” – not sure where the stats are for group rapes.)
Uh oh! Don’t bring that little nugget up (the 0.0% data point) - it’s a sore spot of some sparkling idiocy around here.
I absolutely know what opinion means – it’s a point of view based on, in this case, decades of observations of the same phenomenon happening over and over and over again. As I have already pointed out, there are no “studies” that prove bias in the media because all such studies are done by the media and are done with the specific purpose of proving that no bias exists. Now, I can go back through decades of personal diaries and list case after case when colleagues of mine demonstrated or, in some cases, came right out and admitted that their biases influenced their reporting, but you would dismiss that as anecdotal.
There are studies, by so-called media watchdog groups, that show a public perception of bias, but for every liberal-bias study, there is a conservative-bias study. But there is no documentation whatsoever from within the industries involved that shows, “Folks, we have a problem with bias here,” even though I know there is one, and so does everyone in the business.
There is data about rapes on-campus. For instance, in the years 2003, 2004 and 2005, there were 46 cases of rape reported at the University of Colorado, 20 at the University of Northern Colorado and 14 at Colorado State University (the state’s three largest universities). But if you search online archives of the Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News and KUSA-TV for stories about rape at Colorado universities during those years all you find is the infamous football recruiting scandal and Katie Hnida’s dubious claim that she was raped by teammates. Does that prove that there is an anti-athlete bias in newsrooms? Not by itself, no. You have to observe journalists first-hand, talk to them, measure their attitudes on a daily basis to discover that they do not particularly care for college athletes and that it goes back to their own college educations.
I’m fairly certain that an afternoon’s research in the FBI’s crime stats records (online) and any major metropolitan media outlet’s archive would turn up a similar disparity between white-on-black rape cases and black-on-white rape cases. But does that prove bias? Of course not, there could be dozens of reasons for the disparity (maybe law enforcement is withholding information, hmm?) So the hard data proves nothing except that a disparity exists. To find out WHY it exists requires investigation. You won’t find that in databases anywhere.
Really? Honestly didn’t know it had been mentioned before – apologies if it seemed I was trying to rile anyone up.
Bolding mine
Cite this from a credible source
Seems to me there’s an unspoken assumption of unlimited resources in here. A national news outlet only has so many minutes or so many pages to fill, so they select what they think is the most attention-grabbing. A viewer/reader only has so many minutes during the day and so many brain cells to dedicate to short-term information that they must select what to observe and what to absorb. We’re supposed to get upset that somebody’s filter of a filter is allegedly unbalanced? Screw that.
The alternative for people who think the media is unbalanced is to open their own media outlet and apply a counter-filter to even things out. Can’t do it, too lazy, too busy? My filter then absorbs that you’re fulla crap and adjusts itself accordingly.
You’re so right. Nobody should criticize the media unless they’re willing to found their own newspaper or cable news channel. Otherwise they’re full of crap. For that matter, how dare anyone criticize a university unless they’re willing to found their own? Or a government for that matter? Problem solved.
(bolding mine)
White racism in the jury? Are you kidding me? Pundits all over the place were attributing the non-guilty verdict to a race-blinded, predominately black jury. I disagree that white racism was put in the forefront of the media coverage. If anything, with all the shots of black people celebrating as the verdict was being read in conjuction with all the polls that were sliced down and polarized by race, the analysis was largely about black people. Just because white racism was an element in the trial, doesn’t mean that the trial’s media coverage was unfairly skewed in that direction. It could just as easily be argued that it skewed in the other direction.
And why in the hell would they? There would be no reason to use those cases as a springboard to discuss “black criminality”, and frankly, I’d have to question to agenda of anyone who would expect that. Did Kenneth Lay’s case lead to a discussion of “white criminality”? Did Jeffery Dahmer and Timothy McVeigh? Interesting also that it’s only in the case of interracial crime that discussions of “black criminality” are thought to be relevant.
Do you understand why he would have this reaction? When minorities commit crimes, people are quick to attribute it to whatever makes them different from the mainstream (e.g. “black criminality”). They automatically see it as a racial thing. Whites don’t have to live with that as much.
Cites for any of these assertions? The sociological implications of black-on-black crime have been talked about for a long time. I never hear “white crimes” being treated the same way. When white kids shoot up a school, it’s society’s problem. Video games and bullying are blamed. When black kids kill each other, it’s portrayed as their problem. Degenerate black culture is assumed to be culprit.
It’s kind of amusing (no it’s not) to see this table still making rounds. If you don’t want to be perceived as having a racist agenda, it might be a good idea to refrain from using this as support. There are other data sources that woud give you a much more accurate reading on racial crime stats for North Carolina, without the limitations of small sample size. You know this right?
Given the extreme nature of the murders I can’t explain why it wasn’t front-page news for an extended period of time. Had the racial roles been reversed it would have made the alleged rape of a stripper pale in comparison.
We had an incident where a drunk walked in front of a police car late at night that was responding to a call. It would have been ignored beyond the Darwinian nature of his demise except that he was black. Jessie Jackson had planned a rally over it but decided against it at the last moment. Apparently there are windmills that even the good Reverend wont chase after.
Isn’t that the same argument restated? How are you differentiating the term “black culture” from “society”. It looks to me like you’re saying we are a product of our environments.