I pit double standards in race crimes

Sorry if this has been done before but I did a search and didn’t find anything.

In Long Beach on Halloween 2006 there was a case where a large group of black teens including about nine girls and one boy set upon and severely beat up three young white women merely because they were white, and apparently in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I won’t get into my feeling about them, but what really pisses me off is the way that the L.A Times and apparently other large media organizations decided to not really focus on the story and bury it in their back pages. Apparently I’m not the only one that feels this way because David Mills, a black, former Washington Post writer stated that “You don’t have to be a card-carrying Klansman to point out that the L.A. 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.’”

This just gets to me on a slightly personal level because I find it very hard to believe that anybody could think that only white people are capable of committing hate crimes, as some people are positing in this case. Growing up as the only white kid on my block in DC I did occasionally have to endure crap from ignorant people, although nothing near what these young ladies went through. Is this the prevailing sentiment amongst everybody here? That only whites can commit hate crimes??

You do realize this is the Straight Dope Message Board, and not the LA Times message board, right?

I’d hazard a guess that most folks here would agree that racism is not exclusive to white folks, and that anyone, regardless of race, can be racist. (Malcom X, before he converted to Orthodox Islam and repudiated racism, said in an interview, “Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to Black people. Even Eastland knows it. Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant.” This is racism through and through.)

There are some definitions of racism that, to paraphrase, describe it as “The systematic dominance of one race over another in a social system.” In this construction, racism expressed by a member of an oppressed race against a member of an oppressor race doesn’t exist.

My opinion? Anyone can be racist against anyone else. In American society, however, the “traditional” direction of racism (“white” against “nonwhite”) is probably more prevalent than the reverse.

That doesn’t even rise to the level of racism. It doesn’t even rise to the level of stupidity. It’s somewhere down in the bottom level of the brain stem. I wouldn’t tell this one to a biologist lest they have a heart attack from laughter.

Bigotry does not discriminate.

Good one.

Considering the OP, and the fact that Malcolm X is still celebrated by many historians, I’d say that while bigotry may not discriminate, reportors of it do.

Well, Malcolm X did a lot to redeem himself, though he was still a bit of a jerk.

Actually, Malcolm X didn’t get a lot of good press when he was alive. He was the bad cop to Dr King’s good cop.

Maybe we have different definitions of focus. First, it is local news, so it gets put into the “local news” section, which is typically not on the front page. Secondly, it’s not as if they put out one article and forgot about it. And as for David Mills, “former Washington Post writer”, while that sounds distinctive, and would tend to lend some weight to his opinion in some people’s minds, he was a movie/book reviewer for them. I’m not sure why his expertise on a paper’s coverage of a topic is to be given any credence beyond that which would be given to anyone else, although with his former position, I guess he does know about being buried in the back pages.

As for the issue itself, it sure sounds like a hate crime to me, based on what has been made public so far, but I’m not privy to the trial transcripts. If it’s shown that the attacks were motivated by the color of the victim’s skin, then I have no issue whatsoever with them being charged under hate crime legislation.

Wrong.

I just did a Lexis/Nexis search, focusing on the Los Angeles Times for the period in question.

Here’s a list of the stories i found on the first attempt:

That’s just what i found with a very basic first search. Refining search terms may or may not produce more results.

By my count, that’s 36 stories, totaling over 25,000 words, in the space of three months.

Of those 36 stories, three articles totaling over 4,000 words appeared on the very front page of the paper.

Virtually all of the other stories appeared in Section B, which, as noted by DMC is pretty much where you expect to find local crimes. Of those, seven stories appeared on page 1 of Section B.

The only story that didn’t appear in either Section A or Section B was an editorial, appearing in Section M, in which the Times’s Senior Editorial Writer uses the Long Beach incident as a springboard for arguing against hate-crime laws in general.

Of course, mere volume doesn’t really tell us how the paper reported the story, and i don’t have time now to read 25,000 words and write an analysis. I’m sure there is room for debate about whether the story was covered the same as it would have been if the perpetrators had been white and the victims black.

But to assert, as you did in the OP, that the Times buried the story in the back pages, seems to me a mischaracterization at best, and at worst a completely transparent attempt at deception. Either that, or you just don’t bother checking your facts before repeating some crap you read on the internet.

Why would you assume that’s “the prevailing sentiment” here?

And, if you don’t assume that, then why poison the well by asking the question in this way?

When Latino gangbangers start killing white people for walking down the street, and the newspapers neglect to report it, then we’ll have a double standard. If this was happening to white folks, it would be front page news every day, and they’d call in the National Guard.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=723
http://alternet.org/story/46855/?comments

Excellent response. Thank you.

I came in to say the same thing. I read the LA Times every weekday and there was a shitload of coverage about this story. I believe it was on the front page a couple times. I know for sure it was on the front page of the California section a few times as well.

Now that I’ve read your list of stories from the Times website, this story was on the front page no less than 3 times and on the front page of the California section 7. There have been 82 days since this happened and even if the 36 times the story has been talked about in the LA Times are all of them that is an average of an article every 2.27 days.

We seem to have very different definitions of burying a story.

I’ve ranted about this before (recently, even), but it continues to fuck me off how easy it is for people to perceive bias in media organs.

When I worked at the BBC, many days I could guarantee a particular type of complaint just by scanning the front page of our news site. Should a particular murder be reported (the killing of Jody Dobrowski, a gay barman, for example), I could be assured that a litany of complaints would arrive in my inbox, concerned that the BBC was demonstrating lamentable heterophobia by daring to report the murder of a gay man. Should we happen to mention that a black child, such as Anthony Walker, had been viciously murdered with an axe, endless would be the lamentations that had this been a white child, we wouldn’t have dared report the news.

Fuck these people. Fuck them in their stupid asses. I hated them with every fibre of my being then, and I hate them still. For they view the world through their own private filter, seeing only what they wish to see, adding more besides, and ignoring all that is inconvenient to their world view. These people don’t see the reporting of Tom ap Rhys Price’s murder, in which two black men stabbed to death an innocent white man. They ignore the reporting of the terrorism trials. They see only that a national news outlet dared to mention that a black man or a gay man had been wronged, and find this repulsive.

I say again: fuck them. I wholeheartedly await the day that I don’t have to worry that the mere reporting of facts becomes a biased choice. I wholeheartedly await the day that we can look at a story and worry merely about the crime of the wrongdoer, rather than the worthiness of the victim.

OPs like this make me worry that that day is a fucking long way away.

It’s easy to perceive a media bias for mass media. I can see someone thinking that the BBC or CNN has a media bias, ESPECIALLY the American media.

What gets to me is that I get accused of media bias on a daily basis - and I work for a small town newspaper. Our newsroom consists of four editors, five reporters, and me, the newsroom clerk. There’s not enough of a conspiracy to have a media bias - we’re struggling just to do our jobs. There’s enough of a division in opinion here that we can’t call ourselves a libreral or a conservative paper, because our staff is roughly half and half.

I have no idea how a large paper like the LA times runs things, but it strikes me that calling even an individual newspaper biased is stupid. The only thing that’s biased in news is the advertising budget. Everything else, you just get individual people slanting things in their direction - individuals, not a mass conspiracy.

~Tasha

But not if all of the individuals working for a paper are liberal. Then you don’t need some mass conspiracy to have bias. You just have it occuring as a result of the bias of all those individuals.

It’s fair to say that the SDMB is biased to the left. That’s only natural since mostly liberals are posting here these days. It’s not some massive conspiracy. It’s just the natural result of having one viewpoint over represented.

The LA Times may be reporting it, but I personally have not seen mention of it on any of the nightly news programmes.

Undoubtedly, but my point is that some people view even the mere reporting of a certain fact as indicating bias. If someone can see reporting of the axe-murder of a completely innocent teenager as being indication of some shocking anti-white bias, then there is no limit to the bias that can be perceived. In my time at the BBC I was accused of being biased in favour of gays, against gays; in favour of blacks, against blacks; in favour of Barnsley Football Club … you get the idea. My point is that perceived coverage of a particular story is possibly the most malleable of personal perceptions. As handily demonstrated by mhendo, the story referred to in the OP has been massively covered in the LA Times, and yet the OP seems convinced that it is somehow being effaced.

It’s so easy to claim bias, when what one is really observing is a failure to reflect one’s personal foibles. When this misperception is applied to a debate as important as this, it makes me spit nails.

Yes, I think my OP came across the wrong way. I was focused more on how it wasn’t national news because the first that I heard of it was when there was an article about it in yesterdays Washington Post. Regardless of where it was placed in the L.A Times I get the distinct feeling that had the races been reversed then it would have been all over the national airwaves. I focused on the wrong part of the story and for that I apologize.

My other main contention was simply that there were some people who felt that it isn’t possible to charge black people with hate crimes, or that it wasn’t right, and that’s where I had an issue. I wasn’t insinuating that this was the prevailing sentiment here on the SDMB, as I know this online community is by far the most intelligent I’ve ever come across.