Family Motto" "I see nothing!"
Posted on 05/16/2007 5:33:02 PM PDT by Sybeck1
(CNSNews.com) - The national news media demonstrates a double standard in covering "hate crimes," as evidenced by the lack of attention given to the murder of a white couple in Tennessee last January, a conservative columnist charged on Monday.
However, a media analyst responded that a crime is not necessarily a hate crime simply because the victims are white and those accused of perpetrating it are black.
Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, were out on a dinner date in Knoxville, Tenn. on Jan. 6, when they were carjacked, kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered.
According to published news reports, the two were tortured at length in each other's presence, strangled and shot. Newsom's mutilated and burned remains were found along a railroad track the following day. Two days later, Christian's battered and burned body was found in a trash bin.
Five men and a woman, all African-American, have been arrested and face up to 46 charges, including carjacking, kidnapping, rape, premeditated murder, theft and robbery.
The case sparked considerable debate on Internet blogs, but mainstream media coverage has been modest.
AP wire reports of the killings were carried by Knoxville news outlets, CBS News and Fox News, but other major media outlets including CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post apparently have yet to mention the story. This so angered Mark Alexander, executive editor and publisher of the online Patriot Post, that in a column entitled "Murder in Black and White," he said the attack was "more than a case study in sociopathic evil. It is also a case study in journalistic malpractice.
"True, there are some 17,000 murders committed in the U.S. each year, but this double murder was clearly far more barbaric, far more monstrous than most," he wrote. "Yet, this story has failed to attract the attention of the national media.
"Could it be because the two victims were white and the five defendants are black?" Alexander asked.
He pointed to the case in 1998 when "three white men in Jasper, Texas, beat James Byrd -- a black man -- then chained him to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him three miles to his death. Not surprisingly, Byrd's murder received national media attention -- as it should have."
When Democratic politicians seized on Byrd's murder to call for hate crimes laws, "then-Governor of Texas George Bush said there was little need for such legislation -- after all, two of the defendants were sentenced to death and the third received a life sentence," Alexander stated.
"Clearly, hate was a motivating factor in Jasper, but it was also a motivating factor in Knoxville, which leads us to ask: Why do white-on-black hate crimes invariably result in a media feeding frenzy, while black-on-white hate crimes receive nary a mention?" he asked.
Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute -- a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. -- told Cybercast News Service on Monday that just because a crime involves black perpetrators and white victims "doesn't mean it's a hate crime. You have to have specific evidence, such as some sort of racial epithet," which was the case in the Byrd murder.
The Knoxville double homicide "sounds like a horrible, heinous crime, but horrible, heinous crimes are not the standard for what become national stories," she said.
One reason the networks haven't run this story "is because they can't fit it into a narrative of anything other than shock and horror, and you can find that in any crime story anywhere."
In addition, "the suspects are not still at large, so it won't fit into a 'this could happen to your child' kind of story," McBride said. And most importantly, she added, the crime was not perpetrated on a lone white female. The fact that she was accompanied by a man at the time of the attack was a factor.
"The crimes that make national news tend to be Elizabeth Smart [the 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2002], Natalee Holloway [the Alabama teenager who disappeared during her senior class trip to Aruba in 2005] -- that kind of story," she said.
In the Knoxville case, the fact that the alleged perpetrators are black and the victims are white would be an argument in favor of the crime getting press, McBride said. "The national media tend to play into black-predator-white-victim-type stories much more than they're comfortable with."
The Patriot Post's Alexander told Cybercast News Service that he strongly disagreed with McBride's arguments.
"Although blacks represent just 12 percent of the U.S. population, black perpetrators are convicted by their peers in more than half of all murder and manslaughter cases," he stated "Per-capita black-on-white crime is far more prevalent than the inverse."
While "these cases happen with some regularity, they never get picked up by the national press -- and that's my point," Alexander said. "I would suggest to anybody that you can't take the hate out of this kind of crime. Who knows whether the attackers said racial things to these victims? They're dead and can't report it.
When the suspects in the Christian-Newsom case next appear in court on May 17, he said, "it's safe to say that they will do so without a satellite news-link truck anywhere in sight."
Certainly true for rape/sexual assault:
http://www.roadtothemiddleclass.com/opeds.php?road=234
-begin excerpt-
If you go to the website reporting the annual National Crime Victimization Survey, as many people do, you can look up the rape statistics in "Table 42: Personal Crimes of Violence 2005: Percent distribution of single offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender."
Under "Rape/Sexual assaults" the survey reports 111,490 rape/assaults in 2005 in which a white was the victim. The "perceived race" of the offender was reported as white in 44.5 percent of cases, black in 33.6 percent of cases, "other" in 19.6 percent of cases.
Where the victim of rape was black, in 36,620 cases, things were rather different. The "perceived race" of the offender was reported as black in 100.0 percent of cases. White offenders? "0.0*" percent.
The asterisk means that the sample included ten or fewer reports.
The federal crime statistics show that white-on-black rape was almost non-existent in the United States of America in 2005.
-end excerpt-
The silence from Nancy Grace is deafening.
Bill's lookin out for Bill.
No, we just saw yesterday (in the case of a teacher) that even if the perps use racial epithets that someone will say that is just part of their culture and is not evidence of "hate."
I guess a mute white guy can't commit a hate crime.
I guess a gang of white guys can do anything they want to black people, but as long as they don't use racial terms, it can't be a hate crime. I doubt that.
I don't like the concept of 'hate' crime, but as long as it is around, apply it equally. So far, not a chance of that happening.
Related link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1831205/posts
This story is so horrific it’s almost hard to read or listen to the reports.
It’s that awful.
Bump!
It's more then obvious why the media isn't big on reporting such stories as these
It doesn't fit their political agenda
There was a murder that garnered narry a mention in the media. There were actually two murders there. One involved a family of blacks. A group of whites came by and killed that family. It garnered a LOT of national news coverage. A movie was made based on this incident. Around my parts, it’s still mentioned from time to time.
The other murder was just as ghastly as the first one mentioned. Only difference is the family was white and the group of murderers was black. This family had just returned from Sunday services and walked straight into their demise. Unlike the other incident, NO movies were made for this case and no one ever hears about it.
Yes, there IS a double standard when reporting this kind of crime happens. A crime is a crime and if you want to call it a hate crime for one, it has to be called for the other. And yes, these two crimes were hate crimes. However, they happened before the term “hate crime” became vogue. I’m still waiting for the movie based on the second crime I mentioned. It promises to be a loooooooong wait.
This case boggles the mind. The lack of humanity of some in society is simply staggering.
Journalistic malpractice - that’s got a nice sound to it. The MSM has been cherry picking and issue making for far too long. Could it be that people are waking up?
They had a similar case in South Carolina a few years back with a white female victim and a group of black males that raped, tortured and murdered her. (After scrubing her with bleach and wire brushes to try and hide any evidence) Outside of Charleston you never would have known it happened.
According to the liberal media agenda,, blacks are not perpetrators of anything, they are victims. To publish this story would reduce sympathy for the black victim stereotype and their promoters, Sharpton, Jackson, et al. Cash flow would take a hit, as would their power.
“...just because a crime involves black perpetrators and white victims “doesn’t mean it’s a hate crime.”
Yeah, yeah, but it damn sure is a hate crime if it is a white perpetrator and a black/brown/red/yellow victim......always and everytime!! Thank you MSM and the victim creating looney left!
We just don’t learn, do we?
Militant
While it is great to expose the media bias, the big question is whether Alito and Roberts are the type of people who clearly understand how the media hypes murders of their favorites (women and minorities) in order to get laws passed and upheld in the courts.
There are more than a dozen unconstitutional laws out there that are currently going unchallenged...which were passed through Congress because of anecdotal evidence that “white American males are abusers and killers”.
The left’s modus operandi, often with the help of the less intelligent RINOs or the entire Republican caucus, is to highlight just one murder, somewhere, that could have happened 10 years ago...and, voila, a new law that gives divorced women the house, the kids and half the GDP of the nation.
The National Organization of Women is laughing at us because of the ease with which anecdotal evidence (a murder of an ex-wife here or there) gets their agenda through the courts.
There is probably a good reason why Newsweak hasn’t released the 1000 names of that DC Madame’s customers. Newsweek probably now has a dozen Republican politicians on its leash now. In the future they will look at Newsweak’s anecdotal evidence involving a murder somewhere and then they will say “something has to be done to stop the abusive American white male” and then vote the way Newsweak wants them to.
Check out http://www.mediaradar.org. They are about Accuracy in Reporting about Domestic Abuse. There are 17,000 murders in the USA every year but, if you listen to the news, it is all about white males killing their innocent brides...who need more and more laws to protect them from the evil white man.
Getting back to Alito and Roberts...
Are these new Supreme Court appointees atuned to the above?
Have they ever ruled based on anecdotal evidence or, more importantly, have they ever thrown a law out because they recognized a fraudulent set of “facts” (anecdotes are fraudulent when used out of context with statistics) that were used to pass the law?
What I like about FR is that there are people out there who can give hard information in answer to such questions.
Greetings,
For the last few days, I have been sending this letter out to all major news corporations and online newspapers. Sometimes it was deleted from post, and at other times, it was ignored. Hopefully with the article that you wrote, you will be able to send this out so that this case can get some recognition.
Thank you for your time.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Hello,
The reason why I am writing this letter is to discuss an unjust in the media world.
Here is the story:
This past Monday, Eliott from “Eliott In The Morning,” based out of Washington, DC. spoke about a story out of Knoxville, TN. When he read the story, I was so shocked and appalled at the severity of the crime. The link to the story is posted below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channon_Christian_and_Christopher_Newsom_murder
(side note, there was massive mutilations involving the 2 victims, which is not stated in the wikipedia article)
After reading this, you can see my concern. After doing some research and finding out as much info as I could, I was horrified that something like this could have happened and yet it has only been covered locally.
Now, I am mixed black male and I am by no way racist nor biased, because the public should know what happens in the public. But the problem is, why is it that whenever a Caucasian person commits a crime against a particular race, especially black, that it takes no more than a few hours to have it circulate the world if it is a major issue. When it comes to Caucasians as victims, you don’t necessarily hear anything about it, especially if the crime is as severe as this one.
Now, why is it, that the USA Today, can put the faces of black African Americans on the FRONT page to tell about all kinds of crimes, but something as severe as this one, it is kept under wraps.
The worst part about this story was told today on his show. Now, this is the most appalling thing i have heard and it goes as follows:
http://www.nowpublic.com/knox_blacks_celebrate_carjacking_rapists_in_party
So, in lieu of the vigil for the 2 victims, a certain group of African Americans are constructing this “celebration.”
Now you might be wondering why I am telling you all this, but it is NOT to bring out the worst in people, but to show how the media, race, and violence of this nature should be addressed. Furthermore, I am ASHAMED of being black to think that a group of people would actually celebrate a death like this because they feel they are not privileged. I know that the KKK would celebrate or whatever, but think about it. It all boils down to this group vs. this group. And it is sick.
I’d like for you to please voice the outrage in regards to this story and please have your listeners explain to me as to why things like this get swept under the rug. It was mentioned on Court TVs website, but nothing else.
For the last portion of this email, I would like to say:
“Why is it that when it comes to lesser crimes, the media will portray African Americans in the broad spectrum of light, but when it comes to something as serious like this, why keep it under wraps.”
BTW, the Washington Post has stated that they couldn’t send an investigator reporter to the area to inquire about the story, because “they didn’t have anyone down there.” You would think that the Washington Post would have had more sense than to say something like that. Am I right?
In closing, I just want to say, thank you for all that you bring to the community and would to tip my hat off to you all and let you know that even if you don’t put this on the air, I know that at least you hear from a good fan of your show and that is all that matters.
Thank you.
Family Motto" "I see nothing!"
The media don’t want people to realize the extent of this type of crime, and so they deliberately suppress all stories of this type.
Bill is hiding under the desk with Al Sharpton. I think I can see his lip prints on Al’s derriere.
Damn! This is terrible!! Where’s the outrage!
I’m sure if the skin colors were reversed, we would get wall to wall coverage of this horrible event on every news outlet. What the hell has happened? Is it no big deal if white people die in such a horrible way?
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