No conspiracy, just another heinous crime - Media didn't try to cover up black-on-white murders

What happened to Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, is almost too horrible to contemplate. The Knoxville, Tenn., couple fell victim to four crazed young criminals during a carjacking. The perpetrators allegedly kidnapped Christian and Newsome and brutally raped both of them before killing them.

Newsom was shot, his body burned and dumped beside the railroad tracks. Christian was strangled and left in garbage bags.

This heinous crime occurred in January. But it wasn't until recently that the tragedy has been talked about outside of blog posts on the Internet. Maybe that wouldn't have been the case had people not felt the need to embellish these already sordid facts with outright fiction.

Because Christian and Newsom were white and their alleged killers are black, the couple's brutal murder has been fodder for people who are convinced that the "mainstream" media conspired to keep this sickening black-on-white violence out of the news.

Lurid details fabricated Most of the complaints I get are from readers who claim that murders of black victims are often ignored or downplayed, while a homicide involving a white victim -- especially one from an affluent suburb -- is front-page news. It doesn't do a lot of good to try to explain to them that there are so many homicides involving black victims that the media could not possibly report them all as front-page news. So it is a little surprising that we are now being beaten-down because this story didn't go national. Last week, that changed when several national columnists stepped up to sort the fact from fiction in this case. And on Sunday, the Chicago Tribune ran a front-page story on the murders under the headline: "What is a hate crime?"

It probably took so long for this story to get legs, so to speak, because of the incendiary claims about what happened to Christian and Newsom before they were killed that have been spread on the Internet. For example, a Web site dedicated to debunking urban legends posted an e-mail that is reflective of the e-mails I've gotten about this crime:

"The animals pictured below car-jacked, then raped Christopher Newsom, cut off his penis, then set him on fire and fatally shot him several times while they forced his girlfriend, Channon Christian, to watch. . . . Channon Christian was beaten and gang-raped in many ways for four days by all of them, while they took turns urinating on her. Then they cut off her breast and put chemicals in her mouth. . . . then murdered her."

Frankly, the truth is horrible enough. So it is difficult to see the embellishments as anything other than a white supremacist rant.

Was it inspired by hate? Fortunately, the painful truth about this terrible crime is slowly emerging -- painful because it's just another tragic example of how lost and how disturbed some young people are. We know now that Christian and Newsom were not mutilated, that Christian was not raped over four days and she was killed within one day of the kidnapping.

But even without the explosive false accusations, these murders raise legitimate questions about the way in which some crimes are labeled "hate crimes."

For instance, while Newsom's father, Hugh Newsom, initially agreed with law enforcement that the crime was not racially motivated, the heinous nature in which the killings were carried out has him wondering whether race did indeed play a role in the murders.

"I don't think it started out that way, but from all indications we have, it developed into that," Newsom said in published interviews.

That would mean that there's reason to believe the four black attackers would have treated black victims differently. It would mean that these criminals probably would not have kidnapped and raped a black couple, or that they would not have tried to cover up their crime by killing their victims.

Black-on-black crime just as vile I understand how Newsom's father feels. What happened to his son is incomprehensible. But given the coldhearted black-on-black crimes that continue to tear apart urban communities, there's not much basis for such an argument. Black victims have often been killed in horrible ways, and those murders weren't reported, either.

Like all senseless murders, even if it's not classified as a hate crime, it is still a matter of hate.

Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and David Evans are household names because of a “crime” that never happened.

Channon Christian and Hugh Christopher Newsom were victims of a horrible crime that most certainly did happen, but for some reason, their names wouldn’t ring a bell with the average American, no matter how well informed.

The Duke University lacrosse team’s falsely accused troika had their young lives disrupted and good names dragged through the national media mud for more than a year based on evidence that was suspect almost from the start. The national media took great pride in figuratively lynching the three students because they are white, privileged and went to a prestigious school. It didn’t matter that the case had crumbled — that the media were left with a mentally unstable accuser and a corrupt, power-abusing, race-baiting, liberal, “rogue” prosecutor. To many, the three young men were still the bad guys.

The underlying narrative is that Dukies, Enron, Halliburton, George W. Bush, and mainstream America are all the same. They are “the problem..” They’re racist, sexist, “homophobic,” and they get away with it. The Duke case affirmed this premise. The fact that no crime was ever committed seemed unimportant. The frenzy in the national media served its purpose. For more than a year, they were the bad guys

In the absence of an agenda, why would this story have the resonance it had in the MSM? Was it really the alleged “crime” itself that drew the news-sharks to the smell of blood in the water? No. It was the socio-political (i.e., liberal agenda) factors.

If it had actually been the “crime” that drove the coverage, then the people of Tennessee would have been overwhelmed last January by an invading army of reporters coming to cover a terrible real crime there.

On January 6th, 2007 a double murder was committed in Knoxville that would make Dirty Harry throw up. It has many of the elements that the Duke not-a-rape story had. It has race, and class and gender, as well as rape — but made more horrific by murder. A terrible injustice had been committed against innocent, helpless people at the hands of vicious thugs.

On that night, 21-year-old Channon Christian, and her boyfriend, 23-year-old Hugh Christopher Newsom were carjacked in Knoxville by three thugs. Their attackers were sadly not satisfied with the Toyota 4-Runner that they commandeered at gunpoint. They kidnapped the young couple and took them to the house where one of the perps lived. They were joined by a fourth man and a woman. They proceeded to commit the stomach-churning crimes.

All four men are charged with the anal rape of Christopher Newsom. They did so in the presence of Channon Christian. They then shot him to death, wrapped him in bedding, soaked him in gasoline and set him on fire. He was the lucky one.

Channon Christian was a senior at the University of Tennessee. According to the charges and a source close to the investigation, she was repeatedly gang raped by the four men — vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, apparently in an effort to kill the DNA they had placed there. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused “by the tearing,” or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials won’t say.

It was several days before the police found her body. She had been stuffed into a garbage can in the house. According to a story posted on the WATE T.V. News web site, she was, “in five separate dark trash bags.”

The four men and the woman were eventually arrested. They are all black. Christian and Newsom were white. Two of the murderers had prior felony convictions.

So why would the national media treat America to full-immersion coverage of the Duke not-a-rape case, while burying this horrible story? Certainly the editorial yardstick here is not the nature of the crime or the Knoxville murders would easily supercede the Duke not-a-rape. The appalling truth is that the railroading of the Duke students served an ideological purpose, and the Knoxville case does not.

The news media’s collective decision to studiously ignore the Knoxville horror reveals their consistent practice of burying stories whose facts conflict with their established narratives. You don’t hear much good out of Iraq but Paris Hilton’s DUI gets more attention by far than the Knoxville horror. It’s politics, not news.

In “newsroom-think,” giving the Knoxville story the coverage it merits would serve only to reinforce negative notions and contribute to hurtful stereotypes.

Any editor in any major newsroom that showed the poor judgment to push the Knoxville story would be accused, or at least suspected, of racism by their peers. So it doesn’t happen. It’s not as if they sit around the newsroom and openly conspire. They don’t have to. The rules for this sort of thing were laid down years ago. They all know how the game is played. These are the institutional and cultural norms. There is very little dissent.

Importantly, although it is unarticulated, pursuing this story would not contribute to the broader liberal social narrative as the Duke story did. It wouldn’t be another example of white racist violence, as was the case when the media focused extraordinary attention on terrible murder of a black man named James Byrd who was dragged to death in Jasper, Texas by three sick white racists. I’m not arguing that was not a legitimate story: it was. But if it is legitimate for the media is to burn the name of James Byrd into the national consciousness, then why not the name of Channon Christian? Is it because we are not certain that her murderers used racial slurs during the commission of their crime?

Calculated or not, the fact is that the news media’s obsessive focus on stories that fall into the “America bad” category — to the exclusion of stories that may conflict with their narrative serves only to misrepresent the broader realities of our society.

Like it or not, the demonization of mainstream, establishment America is perceived in newsrooms as legitimate. It is also — coincidentally — the goal of the liberal left. On the planet “News,” the perpetrators of this hideous crime in Knoxville can’t be vilified because they have been pre-designated as “victims.” The Dukies on the other hand are ideally suited for vilification because they represent “the establishment” and he “power structure” and are therefore pre-designated as “victimizers.”

The narrative is there to convince us that, “this is who we really are.” It is not.

While the national news media was advancing the agenda by destroying Don Imus for uttering five insulting syllables (“nappy-headed hoes”), they were ignoring this terrifying Knoxville story because it doesn’t contribute to the narrative.

While they were hanging on Duke prosecutor Mike Nifong’s every self-serving and duplicitous devious word, they were ignoring this terrible crime.

Once you view the media product through this prism, it all makes sense again. It doesn’t make it right, but it makes sense. And we can continue to expect blitzkrieg coverage of stories that advance their talking points.

Now back to the latest on Paris Hilton. But that’s a discussion for another day. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=20794

The Truth of Interracial Rape in the United States
By Lawrence Auster

FrontPageMagazine.com | May 3, 2007 Like Ahab's search for the Great White Whale, liberals' search for the Great White Defendant is relentless and never-ending. When, in 1988, Tawana Brawley's and Al Sharpton's then year-old spectacular charge that several white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones (whose name Brawley had picked out of a newspaper article) had abducted and raped the 15 year old was shown to be completely false, the Nation said it didn't matter, since the charges expressed the essential nature of white men's treatment of black women in this country. When the Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper last year, liberals everywhere treated the accusation as fact, because, just as with the Nation and Tawana Brawley, the rape charge seemed to the minds of liberals to reflect the true nature of oppressive racial and sexual relations in America.

To see the real truth of the matter, let us take a look at the Department of Justice document Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2005. (Go to the linked document, and under "Victims and Offenders" download the pdf file for 2005.)

In Table 42, entitled "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," we learn that there were 111,590 white victims and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, an ill-defined category that covers various types of criminal acts ranging from penetration to inappropriate touching, is conflated with the more specific crime of rape.) In the 111,590 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was white, 44.5 percent of the offenders were white, and 33.6 percent of the offenders were black. In the 36,620 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.

The table does not gives statistics for Hispanic victims and offenders. But the bottom line on interracial white/black and black/white rape is clear:

In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.

What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man.

The Department of Justice statistics refer, of course, to verified reports. According to the Wikipedia article on rape, as many as half of all rape charges nationally are determined by police and prosecutors to be false:

Linda Fairstein, former head of the New York County District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit, noted, "There are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen.... It's my job to bring justice to the man who has been falsely accused by a woman who has a grudge against him, just as it's my job to prosecute the real thing."

No wonder there was such absolute belief in the guilt of the Duke students among the leading sectors of liberal America. A drug-addled, half-deranged, promiscuous black stripper accused three young white men of raping her. There are virtually zero rapes of black women by white men in the United States, and half of all rape charges against specific individuals turn out to be false. But in the gnostic, inverted world of liberal demonology, the white students had to be guilty.

Meanwhile, in the real America, week after week, the newspapers report the rapes of white women by black men—though, of course, without ever once using the words, "a white woman was raped by black man." Just last week in the New York Post there was a story about a serial black rapist who invaded women's apartments on Manhattan's Upper West Side; you knew the rapist was black from a police drawing accompanying the story, and you knew the victims were most likely white from the neighborhoods where the attacks occurred. But even when news media's reports of black on white rape make the race of the perpetrator evident (which the media only does in a minority of instances), no explicit reference is ever made to the racial aspect of the case. Each story of black on white rape is reported in isolation, not presented as part of a larger pattern. There is never the slightest mention of the fact that white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists. In the inverted world of liberalism, the phenomenon does not exist.

Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation . He offers a traditionalist conservative perspective at View from the Right.

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