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This incident happened only 15 miles from the little coastal fishing village where I retired. Local media covered the story as far as Savannah. I found that my friends in Los Angeles and Seattle had no knowledge of this incident because the national media avoided it. There was a reason for this, but it wasn't all that stuff in Florida.

What the media fear is something that will set back race relations to the way things were before the Sixties, especially in the South.

Had this incident occurred as recently as the 1920's, the fathers of Brunswick would have donned their sheets and pointy hats, marched by torchlight to the police station, taken the suspects to a bridge or live oak, and lynched them. The bodies would have been burned.

Then the fathers would have taken those torches to the Brunswick ghetto and burned it to the ground, an action reminiscent of Tulsa (1921) and Rosewood FL (1923).

It is precisely this that the media wishes to avoid. They call it "being a responsible steward of the press and public airwaves." Bottom line: They fear what would happen to race relations if white folks got really riled up. There is an ancestral memory of Jim Crow in the South, and people here are wary of it.

Unfortunately, Publius, that KKK lynch-o-rama is precisely what most of today’s media are trying to provoke in my opinion. They want to be there when it happens, so they can gloat and say “I told so!” They want their prejudicial profiles and social justice templettes proven correct beyond dispute.