Posted on 05/16/2007 5:33:02 PM PDT by Sybeck1
(CNSNews.com) - The national news media demonstrates a double standard in covering "hate crimes," as evidenced by the lack of attention given to the murder of a white couple in Tennessee last January, a conservative columnist charged on Monday.
However, a media analyst responded that a crime is not necessarily a hate crime simply because the victims are white and those accused of perpetrating it are black.
Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, were out on a dinner date in Knoxville, Tenn. on Jan. 6, when they were carjacked, kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered.
According to published news reports, the two were tortured at length in each other's presence, strangled and shot. Newsom's mutilated and burned remains were found along a railroad track the following day. Two days later, Christian's battered and burned body was found in a trash bin.
Five men and a woman, all African-American, have been arrested and face up to 46 charges, including carjacking, kidnapping, rape, premeditated murder, theft and robbery.
The case sparked considerable debate on Internet blogs, but mainstream media coverage has been modest.
AP wire reports of the killings were carried by Knoxville news outlets, CBS News and Fox News, but other major media outlets including CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post apparently have yet to mention the story. This so angered Mark Alexander, executive editor and publisher of the online Patriot Post, that in a column entitled "Murder in Black and White," he said the attack was "more than a case study in sociopathic evil. It is also a case study in journalistic malpractice.
"True, there are some 17,000 murders committed in the U.S. each year, but this double murder was clearly far more barbaric, far more monstrous than most," he wrote. "Yet, this story has failed to attract the attention of the national media.
"Could it be because the two victims were white and the five defendants are black?" Alexander asked.
He pointed to the case in 1998 when "three white men in Jasper, Texas, beat James Byrd -- a black man -- then chained him to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him three miles to his death. Not surprisingly, Byrd's murder received national media attention -- as it should have."
When Democratic politicians seized on Byrd's murder to call for hate crimes laws, "then-Governor of Texas George Bush said there was little need for such legislation -- after all, two of the defendants were sentenced to death and the third received a life sentence," Alexander stated.
"Clearly, hate was a motivating factor in Jasper, but it was also a motivating factor in Knoxville, which leads us to ask: Why do white-on-black hate crimes invariably result in a media feeding frenzy, while black-on-white hate crimes receive nary a mention?" he asked.
Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute -- a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. -- told Cybercast News Service on Monday that just because a crime involves black perpetrators and white victims "doesn't mean it's a hate crime. You have to have specific evidence, such as some sort of racial epithet," which was the case in the Byrd murder.
The Knoxville double homicide "sounds like a horrible, heinous crime, but horrible, heinous crimes are not the standard for what become national stories," she said.
One reason the networks haven't run this story "is because they can't fit it into a narrative of anything other than shock and horror, and you can find that in any crime story anywhere."
In addition, "the suspects are not still at large, so it won't fit into a 'this could happen to your child' kind of story," McBride said. And most importantly, she added, the crime was not perpetrated on a lone white female. The fact that she was accompanied by a man at the time of the attack was a factor.
"The crimes that make national news tend to be Elizabeth Smart [the 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2002], Natalee Holloway [the Alabama teenager who disappeared during her senior class trip to Aruba in 2005] -- that kind of story," she said.
In the Knoxville case, the fact that the alleged perpetrators are black and the victims are white would be an argument in favor of the crime getting press, McBride said. "The national media tend to play into black-predator-white-victim-type stories much more than they're comfortable with."
The Patriot Post's Alexander told Cybercast News Service that he strongly disagreed with McBride's arguments.
"Although blacks represent just 12 percent of the U.S. population, black perpetrators are convicted by their peers in more than half of all murder and manslaughter cases," he stated "Per-capita black-on-white crime is far more prevalent than the inverse."
While "these cases happen with some regularity, they never get picked up by the national press -- and that's my point," Alexander said. "I would suggest to anybody that you can't take the hate out of this kind of crime. Who knows whether the attackers said racial things to these victims? They're dead and can't report it.
When the suspects in the Christian-Newsom case next appear in court on May 17, he said, "it's safe to say that they will do so without a satellite news-link truck anywhere in sight."
I can’t find it.
Only if they were killed by non-Muzzies, of course.
Just type in "Knoxville" in the FR search. You will see that most of the threads on this horrible case have been moved to chat by the moderators.
Don't be suprised when this thread gets moved to chat. For some reason, Mods don't like this story.
Likely because the tone of the conversation goes racial.
By the way, hit Sybeck1’s profile page.....
This crap also reminds me of the Jesse Dirkhising case.That case brought me to tears.
That's because black criminals attacking black victims is the norm.
Statistics seem to suggest that the majority of crimes are not racially motivated. In fact most crime tends to be either white on white or black on black mostly for reasons of neighborhood demographics. Where you get crossovers usually happens where different or racially mixed neighborhoods are studied and happen to be near to another racial population. This is why race rioters usually wind up setting fire to their own neighborhoods, instead of the homes of their "oppressors." In a case of a capital murder case of this sort that also has a sexual dynamic, I can't help but observe that racial motivations are the prime motivating factor given the aspect of brutality and torment present. At least that what I learned when I got my degree in Criminal Justice.
This was a HATE crime, but liberals can't seem to bear the thought of condemning even a small percentage of such a key part of their strength -- any minority, but especially blacks.
Can't understand why that would be.
But there is also this interesting tidbit from that link:
"If you come down here, you're either visiting someone or you're buying drugs," said, Misty Boshears, 31, who lives near Washington Pike. "I'm shocked, but I'm not shocked," of Christian and Newsom's murders, Boshears said. "I don't allow my girl to play outside because of the danger."
I had wondered how these two got picked - what random chance drew the murderers to them. If actually they were in the area trying to buy drugs, then perhaps the crimes weren't quite so random as FR posts have led us to believe.
Stay away from certain activities and out of certain neighborhoods, and you reduce your crime risk by about 99.9%. These two kids might have failed to heed that lesson, and it cost them dearly.
This is one case where I’d absolutely love to see the punishment enacted in the same way as the crime was carried out...publicly.
I don’t abandon my Constitutional principles lightly, but these animals deserve to be made a spectacle...sorry if that offends anyone.
In this case, cruel and unusal does not apply.
Kelly McBride is engaging in the standard double speak that her fellow liberal journalists do all the time. The unspeakable acts committed against this young couple in the hours before their murder clearly make this a hate crime under any definition.
Lord, please forgive me for the intense dislike and disgust I’m feeling toward these liberal journalists right now...
Meanwhile, here in Pennsylvania, admirers of black copkiller Mumia Abu-Jamal are rallying once more to prevent the Commonwealth from reinstating the death penalty for his crime.
His admirers include members of the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as the usual media-idiots and Hollywood ‘tards.
I’ve forwarded this story out to a lot of people. But they’re just white folk so....
ANIMALS
Ive seen countless storys on FR about hispanic gang members targeting blacks-but what the people on FR and the media ignore is the amount of crime blacks committed against latinos.I am from LA and can tell you most every latino I know has a story about Blacks: robbing,raping and murdering,beating a hispanic person.Yet we are called the instigators of this conflict??White America ignored us when we were the targets of blacks racism-but now hispanics are nothing short of slaughtering blacks in LA.Now it racial?simply because blacks are on the recieving end of what they been dishing out for years.The hispanic gang memebers are taking out black thugs left and right and the crips and bloods will soon disappear..Evry day there is a story about a mexican shooting a black person in LA but what they dont get is that what happened to that couple in Tennessee was a common even t for many latinos in LA.
Jim Quinn told this story on his radio show. It was bloodcurlding to hear the details of this crime....
And will someone tell us again why the death penatly is a bad thing again????
I can’t believe the apathy even here in FR. It’s like these people’s lives count for nothing.
Quinn and Rose have talked about this several times on their morning show.
Jim Quinn has been on this as well.
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