Webloggin » Dog Bites Man

Before seeing this Hot Air Vent video (linked at Michelle Malkin), I’d never heard of Channon Christian and Chris Newsom. Theirs is an absolutely horrifying story: a young man and woman carjacked at random, gang-raped, tortured and murdered. The details are stomach churning, giving us a look into the heart of irredeemably evil people. Given the “if it bleeds, it leads” and the “there are no more local story” paradigms that permeate the modern media, this murder ought to have dominated the headlines. As I noted, however, I’d never heard about those poor souls.

Michelle Malkin’s video makes the point that not a single major media outlet picked up the story. She then asks why, and comes up with the answer: The Christian/Newsom case is not a politically useful murder. It’s not about whites victimizing blacks (especially rich whites and poor blacks), as was the case with the false charges in the Duke rape story; it’s not about a white on black hate crime in a Southern state putting forward a potential Republican presidential candidate, as was the case with James Byrd in Texas; nor is about the straight-on-gay murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. Each of those fit in a nice media/liberal paradigm about victims and malfeasors.

I’d go one step further than Malkin in explaining the media silence. All of us are familiar with some variation of the age old newspaper aphorism: dog bites man is not a story; man bites dog is. While the media gulps up the Duke rape, James Byrd and Matthew Shepard stories because of their political heft, they’re also newsworthy to the American public precisely because they’re so unusual. The fact is, white men don’t go around raping black women and, in today’s America, while people may still be racists and homophobes, racially and homophobically motivated murders rarely happen — that’s why they’re all newsworthy, and why the public tolerates it as the media plays them for all they’re worth. To the public, they’re fascinating as man bites dog cases; to the media, they help make political points. Everybody’s happy.

Sadly, however, if one ignores the illusion created by air time, black on black, and black on white crime, are still normative. Whether they’re on the committing end or the receiving end of murder, American blacks top the charts, with blacks being murdered at 6 times the rate of whites, and blacks committing those murders at 7 times the rate of whites. (These are 2004 statistics.)

The rate of black victimization is a whole area in itself, because while the press is moaning about the rare white on black crime, the fact is that blacks are mostly being victimized by predators in their own communities. (Over an 18 year period, 94% of black victims were killed by fellow blacks.) This is appalling. The dominant culture is utterly failing to protect its black citizens from violent crime. I strongly believe that this failure comes from the fact that predators are given a free hand by the liberal policy that excuses them their sins because of their race.

What all of the above means is that, whether the victims are white (less common) or black (more common), reporting on the Christian/Newsom story, and other stories like it, would force the liberals to face the fact that their rich, straight, white male crime spree is a complete fantasy. Doing that isn’t just politically inconvenient, it attacks an article of faith, which is that rich, straight, white males are evil, and that everyone else, in some way or another, is a victim of that evil.

Aside from representing really bad reporting, the media’s three monkeys attitude has very grave consequences. By ignoring the evil that really exists, the media fails to allow America effectively to address and correct it. Plastering papers and TV with the rare crimes that fit a political agenda means that society is incapable of engaging in the type of dialogue that would enable it to focus on the real victims — those blacks trapped in neighborhoods where small numbers of violent young men (accompanied by a handful of equally violent young women) have unleashed a type of savagery that ought never to exist in a civilized country.

UPDATE: I just discovered that, in California, I’m the minority now. What the heck is going to happen to all the liberal paradigms with white people legitimately claiming minority status?

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