I lol’ed.
I don’t understand your question. Is it possible for pecuniary interests and liberal agendas to both inform news coverage? Or does it have to be one or the other?
4 pages and I have no idea what this thread is about. Racism? The “Liberal Media”? The definition of heiress? Lionel Ritchie’s riches? Nicole Ritchie’s racial identity? Jews? Cork Asians?
I think I’ll just go with that.
Check out the coverage of the Kobe Bryant trial. Athlete gets charged with rape. Evidence later found to be less than unimpeachable. Case is dropped. Fingers pointed early on at Kobe Bryant.
Of course, I never see people who are sympathetic to your view ever compare the Duke case to Kobe Bryant, despite the similarities. So I’m not surprised by your belief that the Duke Hoax is something special.
The pernicious and omnipresent domination of the dark god known to the ancients as “Koppel”.
Duh.
That got a lot of attention because he’s a well known person. The coverage of Paris Hilton is not racist. As I said above, Halle Berry’s arrest was covered widely.
If a well known person is accused of a serious crime, it gets coverage no matter what their race is.
There’s nothing in the behavior shown by those posts that proves he’s not genuinely delusional. I’ve known delusional people before and they were perfectly capable of polite conversation. I don’t have telepathic powers of course, so I can’t say for sure, but my bet is that he seriously believes the things he’s saying about Koppel and Murdoch.
Of course if he is delusional I’m not sure being here and being subject to mockery and derision is the best thing for him. And if he’s a troll, he should be banned for that. So it may not make much difference.
I think that as much as “If it bleeds it leads” is a factor, “If they’re rich or pretty then the crime was more shitty” is equally one. Spousal murder accounts for 6.5% of all homicides (about even as to whether husband or wife is the victim/murderer) but how many others can you name from the year when Lacy Peterson (2002) or Bonnie (Mrs. Baretta) Blake (2001) or Nicole Simpson (1994) were murdered? Why were they chosen? They were rich and or famous and or “pretty”, and it’s not just murder that “the prettier the shittier” applies to.
Matthew Shepard’s murder was senseless and horrible, but as a gay man I still believe and have maintained since it happened on these boards and elsewhere that I have trouble considering it a hate-crime. I honestly don’t think it was a case of two drunk and meth’d up trashy losers deciding to go kill 'em a fag nearly as much as it was a case of a mugging that got way out of control. I don’t even think their original intent was to murder Shepard, just to rob him, but they were drunk and drugged and did. (I’m not saying they shouldn’t be in prison- if Shepard’s family had not argued against it I’d have no problem with them dying because they killed an unarmed defenseless guy- but the purpose, at least initially, was robbery.)
IN NO WAY SAYING HE DESERVED TO DIE, but Shepard comes across like a first-rate spoiled and obnoxious little prick. Among other things, two months before he died he had made a pass at a straight bartender who slugged him; had Shepard accused him of assault he’d have been within his rights, but instead he accused him of rape! He backed down only when the hospital rape kit proved he had not been sexually assaulted. Getting into a truck with two drunk broke redneck strangers that the staff and regulars at the bar could have told him were meth-heads and had records was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard of in my life.
Compare and contrast him with Billy Jack Gaither. BJG was by all accounts a warm and wonderful human being. He left a good paying in Birmingham, AL, a city he loved and where he could be openly gay, in order to return home to his hometown of Sylacauga and take a lesser paying job so that he could live with his sick elderly parents because they needed him and most of his brothers and sisters had family or other commitments. Because he knew that it bothered his parents he was exceptionally discreet about his sexuality, though he was not closeted.
Two months after Shepard’s death Billy Jack’s throat was cut, he was thrown into the trunk of a car, and when he was still alive and fighting when the trunk was open again two men beat him to death with axe handles, then robbed him and burned his body on a pyre of tires in the woods that one of them had already arranged. The murderers were two men, who make absolutely no secret of the fact that they killed him because he was a queer. (Both were sentenced to life without parole because, as with Shepard’s family, Billy Jack’s family asked prosecutors not to seek the death penalty as they knew BJ was against it.)
So like Shepard Billy Jack was gay, unlike Shepard he was by all accounts a great guy. Like Shepard his murder involved two men killing and robbing a gay man in a rural area, but unlike Shepard his murder was premeditated and absolutely had everything to do with the fact he was gay. So why is it that Matthew Shepard is damned near a saint whose name alone can cure goiters but Billy Jack doesn’t even have a fucking wikipedia entry*?
Because Matthew Shepard was a pouty lipped delicate featured waif whose father was a rich corporate and government official and who had been to boarding school and spoke French. Billy Jack was a lower middle class not particularly good looking guy from a redneck family in “never heard of it-ville” Alabama**. Plus one other reason that you can hear media execs tossing around: “Oh fuck, we’ve already affected caring and moral outrage and lamented over gaybashings just two months ago- we’ll sit this one out so we can cover Vanna White’s pet kangaroo or the missing white girl who’ll go missing next week-one always goes missing, just find one”. Billy Jack wasn’t good for ratings.
*I think I’ll start one. That was an irritating omission to discover.
**Billy Jack was from Sylacauga, a city of 12,000 that’s the hometown of Jim Nabors (who still has a lakehome near there but made no comment during the trial). Just to be self-referential, the tiny and depressed and depressing county seat where the trial was held is a town of 400 and the closest to where I grew up (about 12 miles). In one of those “small world, idn’t it?” things Billy Jack is a distant (about 5th) cousin of mine through his mother, though I didn’t know him and had never heard of him until his murder.
And I agree with Larry that Guy’s less a troll than a guy with some really serious issues. The pity is he seems bright at times and has to on some level know what bullshit this is, but since it’s got just enough corn kernels of truth on the surface he ignores the fact that the other 90% is pure shit.
Duke university is a well-known school. Don’t you think that had a lot to do with the press given to this case?
A little but not a lot. Do you think that every time a student at a well-known school is accused of a serious crime it gets wide coverage?
When it is 95% of an entire sports team? Yep.
The more appropriate question is do you think we’d know anything about this case if it involved a bunch of poor, generic-looking kids from a generic town with generic ties to no-name places, people, and things. Because I assure you, crimes like this happen all the time (right as I type, as I matter of fact) and you never hear about them.
Take Duke University out of the equation and the lacrosse case would not have been on anyone’s radar.
You really need to have a talk with your roommates.
No, the more appropriate question is whether the coverage would have been as wide and as credulous had the races been reversed.
I don’t think it’s the big name university, as much as it is the athletes themselves. The general consensus is these are spoiled (in the college sense) overpaid (in the pro sense) prima donnas. The media seems to jump on every single transgression. Every DUI, every fight outside a bar, every time a well know third baseman is seem with a woman not his wife… up to and including the worst of crimes. Joe Schmo gets a DUI and it’s a listing in the crime log of a local paper. Tony LaRussa gets one and it’s national news.
When black celebs – even college-athlete celebs – commit crimes, major or minor, it does not escape the media’s notice.
I can’t see how anyone can possibly believe that if it had been a team of black atheletes at a major university that were charged with gang raping a white woman, the incident would have been ignored by the pressed. Where’s the evidence to bolster such an opinion? I just cited Kobe Bryant, but that wasn’t good enough for you. And yet you’ve offered nothing.
I can’t imagine who in the hell is pretending there is no disparity in the number of liberals and conservatives in newsrooms. That would indeed be absurd, but I’ve no clue who is pretending that.
I just can’t believe that the “overwhelming” number of liberals in the media are purposely burying black-on-white crime stories. Do you think that they are?
Let’s be clear what I’m saying:
I’m saying that if a members of a team of black athletes had been falsely accused of gang rape by a white woman at a major university, it would not have gotten coverage that was as widespread or as credulous as that in the Duke Lacrosse hoax.
Do you agree with this? Or do you want evidence?