DISTORTING THE NEWS ABOUT RACIAL VIOLENCE

Jim Miller has a great post giving just two examples of how the media glide over racist attacks on whites by blacks whilst at the same time magnifying the slightest offence against blacks into a major story. Here is just one of the "overlooked" stories Jim relates:

"An earlier, equally dramatic, news story slipped out, but the news organizations were able to suppress it. About six years ago, I was watching a local station, King 5, at noon to get a weather forecast. One of the anchors came on with a remarkable story. A black woman had just been convicted of raping a white woman. The black woman talked her way into the victim's home claiming car problems, knocked her down, tied her up, and forced her to commit oral sex. The attacker did this, she admitted (boasted?) at the trial, because she hated whites. By the usual "if it bleeds, it leads" standards of local TV stations, this is a sensational story. I never saw another mention of the story with the essential facts. The two Seattle papers buried the story inside, giving it a few lines with no mention of the racial motive. I channel surfed the local TV stations carefully that evening and saw no mention of the story, even on King 5. The two largest alternative papers, the Seattle Weekly and The Stranger, neither afraid of controversy, had nothing on the story in their next issues. It didn't even get on the local conservative talk stations, as far as I know. It may have been sensational, but it didn't fit the script.

These last two stories are, crime statistics show, more typical than the stories that fit the script. This column has some of the numbers, including these summary statistics:

Violent white felons choose black victims for fewer than 3 percent of their attacks, whereas violent black felons choose white victims about 56 percent of the time. Statistically, the "average" African American is an astonishing 56 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa.

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