Winona and the Wichita massacre

TownHall.com ^ | 11/08/02 | Michelle Malkin

[kattracks]

Here is a story of two trials and how they were covered in the news. Or not covered. You tell me what it says about the media's twisted values.

The first trial was held in Beverly Hills. The accused was Hollywood starlet Winona Ryder, charged with shoplifting at a Saks Fifth Avenue store. A Nexis search turned up more than 500 stories on the trial published over the past week alone. Television, news and radio reporters from around the world breathlessly described Ryder's daily court attire -- her hairbands, her coatdresses, her shoes, her bra straps, her lipstick.

We learned the all-important details of how she appeared "pale" one day, "chipper" the next. Crack news reporters informed us that she is "doe-eyed" and "petite." Talking heads endlessly scrutinized the trial evidence, tapes and testimony. Psychologists explained the motivations of kleptomaniacs. Entertainment insiders parsed Ryder's film career for clues.

On Wednesday, the cable shows provided "breaking news" coverage of the guilty verdicts and wall-to-wall analysis of What This Means For Winona. The New York Times and Washington Post followed up with bylined news articles.

This, you see, was news that mattered. News fit to print.

Meanwhile, in unglamorous Wichita, Kan., the eight-week trial of Jonathan and Reginald Carr came to a close. The brothers were found guilty of four counts of capital murder, along with numerous charges of rape, aggravated robbery, burglary and theft, committed during an unspeakably brutal killing spree in December 2000.

The perpetrators were black. The victims -- including friends Jason Befort, Heather Muller, Bradley Heyka and Aaron Sander -- were white. The Carrs were convicted of murdering these four young people, execution-style, on a frozen soccer field after a night of terror in Befort, Heyka and Sander's townhouse. After breaking into the residence, the Carrs forced Muller and Jason Befort's unnamed fiance to perform sexual acts on each other; the men were then forced to participate. Next, the Carrs raped the women, drove all five victims to an ATM machine, forced them to withdraw money from their accounts, and headed to the soccer field.

The five victims were forced to kneel in the snow and beg for their lives before sustaining gunshots to the head. The Carrs then ran over their victims with their truck. Befort's fiance miraculously survived. She walked more than a mile, bleeding and naked, in the snow, before finding help.

When such senseless, evil savagery takes place against politically correct victims, the mainstream media is quick to make national news of such crimes. "If this had been two white males accused of killing four black individuals, the media would be on a feeding frenzy and every satellite news organization would be in Wichita doing live reports," wrote Trent Hungate of Wichita in a letter to the Wichita Eagle after the killings two years ago. Indeed. The horrific James Byrd dragging case in Texas and the Matthew Shepard murder in Wyoming, for example, garnered front-page headlines and continuous coverage.

But with the exception of local Kansas newspapers, the Associated Press, The Washington Times, Fox News, Court TV and conservative Internet sites, the Carr trial made almost no news.

If you read The New York Times or The Washington Post or watched the evening news this week, the Wichita Massacre never happened. Not to worry, though. The latest investigative report on where Winona Ryder got that Hermes handbag is coming up next. Stay tuned.

Contact Michelle Malkin | Read her biography

©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

[gubamyster]

ping

[Cindy]

KANSAS.com - THE WICHITA EAGLE: "CARR BROTHERS FOUND GUILTY OF CAPITAL MURDER" (110402) (*Note: Complete coverage of the Carr Brothers' trial on this site.)

COURT TV.com: CASE BACKGROUND Article regarding Reginald and Jonathan Carr

[Winston Smith]

I want to Congratulate Michelle, she is a WONDERFULL thinker. The next best thing is she can write what she thinks. Included in the mix, she very attractive.

WOW

[Sabertooth]

Michelle Malkin Growl!

Post here to the thread if you'd like to be on the Michelle Malkin list.

[MissAmericanPie]

She nails it again, my dream President and VP for 2012? Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, in any order.

[2nd_shift_guy]

I lived in Wichita for almost 50 years before moving to a small bedroom community just north of there. These two should have been charged with a hate crime but Kansas has no hate crime laws. The Feds did not come in and bring charges against these two neither. Hopefully after this is over we will have some form of hate crime legislation introduced into our house of Reps in Topeka. I guarantee if this had happened to one of the P.C. protected minorities there would of been national media and a out cry of why do we not have any hate crime laws.
2nd shifter

[Travis McGee]

Slow hanging is much too good for the Carr brothers, but it's about right for most newspaper editors and TV "news" producers.

[exnavy]

I hope you have the death penalty in Kansas.

[scan58]

Oh well, you know how they would probably be spinning it, anyway. "It was the fact that they were poor, down-trodden and black that caused these men to do this. They couldn't help it...it wasn't their fault." God help the victims of this horrible crime.

BTW, welcome to FreeRepublic.

[SkyPilot]

Thank the Lord we weren't the only people to see this horrific imbalance in coverage between these two trials.

How do media sluts sleep at night?

[KS Flyover]

    "Wichita Massacre" murder trial "Ping List"

Please let me know if you want on (or off) this list.

[KS Flyover]

Hey Sabertooth

Please add me to your Michelle Malkin ping list.

Thanks

[Non-Sequitur]

Oh yeah. There are six guys on death row right now. The actual executions will take place at the state correctional facility at El Dorado, just east of where they are now but the actual death row is somewhere else. The latest guy was sent there last week for luring women to La Cygne with promises of S&M sex, then killing them and stuffing their bodies into oil drums. You think the Carr brothers are sick? This guy killed a woman with an infant child, arranged to have his brother adopt the baby girl (receiving a few thousand dollars in return), and then sat through family gatherings with his niece for the next 15 years all the while knowing that he had butchered her birth mom. Of course since the victims and the murderer where white neither Ms. Malkin or anyone here would be interested.

[exnavy]

Well it's sad that we even have to consider putting anyone to death, I do not believe that Americans should maintain someone as sick as these two.

[KS Flyover]

"Of course since the victims and the murderer where white neither Ms. Malkin or anyone here would be interested."

You do have a point. Not too many people, except us locals, were interested but the case did receive a lot more national attention compared to the Carr murders.

Kansas Jury Recommends Death For Man Convicted of Killing 3 Women, Stuffing Bodies in Barrels

[Skywalk]

Why do you say that? I read the entire crimelibrary.com website and crimes of that sort are gut-wrenching. They anger me, they sadden me and if I were made of weaker stuff I would just break down that there was that kind of evil in the world.


HOWEVER, the coverage of the Carr brothers(or lack thereof) has a greater political significance than a run of the mill murder. The guy you mentioned was not even a serial killer in the Ted Bundy sense, so he loses even more points as a political story.

I wonder how preventable the Ted Bundys of the world are, but I believe it is the racial hostility inculcated into many blacks(and others, of course) that provokes these kinds of crimes. In that, they are of a different kind than a typical serial killer(only way to prevent or deter is to discover and kill the serial evildoers)

[RWG]

The deomcRATS are getting their due, the media is next. It can be done through the internet with all of its blogs.

[InvisibleChurch]

another difference: video of one, not of the other

[fporretto]

I wish this were some sort of inexplicable aberration, but it's not.

For more than twenty years, black-on-white crimes, no matter how hideous, have been carefully airbrushed out of the national picture, while the statistically far less frequent white-on-black crimes have been made into causes celebres, arguments for everything from police sensitivity retraining to reparations for slavery.

Equally inexplicable, the media consistently downplay the torrent of criminal victimization of blacks by other blacks. Nor do they give any attention to the devastating economic effects black-on-black crime has on predominantly black neighborhoods.

There's no understanding it. It's as if the media were actively engaged in deceiving the American people about the most important locus of racism in America today. Yet I don't know one single individual who isn't perfectly aware of the dominant trend in interracial crime.

Why lie, at the top of your lungs, no less, when you don't have a prayer of putting it over? Why squander your credibility, such as it is, to no gain?

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com