Violence, Race and Media Bias

Crashes and injuries are part of the excitement.

A lot of people in the US died in mass shootings on the first weekend of August. Sadly, there was nothing unusual about that.

There was also nothing unusual about the way the national media distorted the events.

On a Saturday morning, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius walked into an El Paso Wal-Mart store and opened fire on shoppers, killing over twenty of them. In the early hours of the following morning, 24-year old Connor Betts let loose a shooting spree on bar patrons and pedestrians in Dayton, Ohio. The toll from both incidents: over thirty dead and many others wounded, some gravely.

But on the same weekend, 59 people were shot in a series of incidents across Chicago. At least seven died.

A fair minded person would expect the news media to devote equal coverage to the three shooting episodes. That didn’t happen.  The national media devoted intense, hour-by-hour coverage to the El Paso and Dayton shootings, but only limited coverage to the Chicago shootings. Why?

The Chicago shootings were part of a larger pattern of continual black-on-black violence that passes for normal in Chicago and many other large cities. Each spike in black shooting deaths elicits a now familiar condemnation from citizens, city officials, politicians and an assortment of race hustlers and outraged Black Lives Matter ideologues.

Despite the best efforts of police and government, these killings continue on a regular basis. In that sense, the Chicago shootings were not “new,” and thus they were less worthy as news reports—-or at least the media thought so. Despite the lack of novelty of the Chicago events, these day-to-day shootings, taken as a whole, are far deadlier than the more highly publicized mass shootings like those in Dayton and El Paso.

Black Ghetto Culture

The lopsided news coverage of the three shootings illustrates more than press bias.

In reporting mass killing episodes, the news media routinely obscure the identity of the perpetrators when they belong to groups favored by the left. So for example, reports of urban killings tend to avoid naming the race of the perpetrator or perpetrators if they are black. This also happens in reporting on knock-out punches, flash mobs and sideshows. The uninitiated will need a glossary here.

The knock-out punch phenomenon refers to young men who “sucker-punch” random passers-by hard enough to render them unconscious. There is never any apparent provocation or rationale for the punch.

Large groups of young people of both sexes who launch an organized and unannounced attack on stores are called flash mobs. These mobs may be organized via social media. Their purpose is to conduct mass robbery, with the size and violence of the mob sufficient to overwhelm store security personnel and police. It is lucrative and I suspect that, despite security cameras, few perpetrators are apprehended.

For sheer drama, few crimes approach the excitement of sideshows. Here, young men take over urban streets with souped-up cars. They speed and careen up and down streets, often late at night, attempting to outdo every other sideshow performer in daring maneuvers. Crashes and injuries are part of the excitement. Local residents are forced to flee indoors for protection.

All three of these depravities are associated with black “ghetto” youth. But unless the viewer sees a video of these events, he would have no way of knowing their association with young blacks. That is because the media obscure or hide the race of the perpetrators.

By failing to document the association of these dangerous activities with black ghetto culture, reporters and liberal intellectuals are doing the black community no favor. They are merely smoothing the way for a minority of criminals in the black community to terrorize their neighbors and destroy opportunities for business development in these areas, and hence, jobs.

Can We Talk?

Liberals often say, “We need to have an honest discussion about race.” Invariably what follows is a discourse about white privilege and white racism.

We also need an honest discussion about black ghetto culture. We haven’t seen much of that so far because the media, race promoters and intellectuals have convinced the rest of us that such a conversation would be “blaming the victim.”

It is ironic that left-minded people tell us that open discussion of the contribution of ghetto culture to bad social outcomes is racist. Such misguided people don’t see that applying a lower standard of behavior to minorities—-or excusing bad behavior because it is supposedly caused by white racism—-is itself racist. It is racist because it applies different standards to different racial groups.

Let’s have that honest discussion about race—-without excuses and without double standards.