nypress.com 1/9/2001

by Scott McConnell

Unfit to Print

The news reached me over New Year’s weekend. A horrible murder took place in Wichita, KS, 10 days before Christmas. It had received virtually no coverage beyond the local news.

The victims–three men and two women, white and in their 20s–were gathered in a home in a middle-class neighborhood. Two were teachers; two were engaged; one intended to become a priest. At 11 in the evening, two black men, Reginald Carr, recently released from prison, and his younger brother Jonathan, allegedly forced their way into the house, abducted the five at gunpoint, drove them around in two cars, forcing them to withdraw money from ATMs. Then they took the victims to a soccer field and forced them to kneel in the snow. They undressed the women, and raped one or perhaps both of them. Then they shot all five execution-style in the head. Four died, but one woman lived. Bleeding from her wound, she ran naked through the snow for a mile, miraculously reaching a house where she got help. The suspects were arrested the next day.

Wichita is shaken and mourning. A thousand people turned out for the funeral of one victim, Jason Befort. Rev. James Dieker, celebrant at the funeral Mass, told those gathered to look not for vengeance, but to the wisdom of Jesus on the cross: "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what to do."

Assuming that the criminal justice system will do its duty, those words may be the right ones. Yet in the current national context–with a divisive confirmation hearing looming for John Ashcroft and leading Democrats littering the airwaves with incendiary charges about the racist Republican heartland–some questions about the (non)reporting of the murder need airing as well.

If Michael McDermott’s shooting of seven in their Wakefield, MA, office on the day after Christmas deserves front-page treatment, or if James Byrd being dragged to his death by three white attackers should become a symbol of national shame, why don’t Americans know about Wichita?

They don’t because the victims were white, the suspects black. National news editors prefer a different script. Despite the raw drama of the story–the killers might still be at large were it not for the heroic effort of a woman raped, shot and left for dead in the snow–it doesn’t conform. What does fit are stories like the Byrd murder: since he was hideously dragged to death by three white men in 1998 The New York Times alone has made references to his killing in 102 separate stories, most published before the NAACP spent millions on a national campaign to boost black voter turnout by linking George W. Bush to the crime.

Occasionally facts are invented to fit the script. Several years ago, America’s evening news viewers were inundated for months with stories about an epidemic of burnings of black churches–carried out, it was charged, by racist whites. A federal investigation eventually concluded there was no racist conspiracy behind the church fires, indeed no epidemic of arson at all: just a normal rate of fires, some in white churches, some in black, some set in insurance scams, some as pranks, some because the arsonist wanted to become a hero by reporting a fire he had himself set.

But a few civil rights and anti-hate "watchdog" groups hyped stories of the black-church arson epidemic, probably for their own fundraising purposes, and the press lapped it up.

If asked, many editors would claim that one sort of crime (a racially motivated killing like James Byrd’s) deserves substantial coverage because it is a "hate crime," while the murder of four Wichita young people is not. The distinction is both false and pernicious. First, though no bias crime investigation is under way in Wichita, there is no reason whatever to think that a murder involving so much gratuitous and symbolic humiliation of the victims (forcing one to watch the rape of his fiancee in his last moments) is not motivated by "hate." Indeed, what might a thorough hate crime investigation turn up? Could the suspects have been stirred to anger against whites, for instance, by Jesse Jackson’s overheated charges that vicious racism was at work in the Florida election?

The hate-crime rubric itself is a blueprint for corrosive double standards. In law, it requires classifying crimes purportedly motivated by certain kinds of "bias" as more grave and deserving of serious punishment than others. The dual standard at once weakens a force that could unite Americans of all races and cultures (horror at crime) and threatens to transform the criminal justice system into an arena for exacerbating the country’s fault lines of race and ethnicity.

I suspect some promoting the dual standard feel virtuous and progressive–that they are advancing the multiculturalist cause by hyping news of crime of one sort and suppressing another. Some might see whites, and particularly the sort of straight, normal heartland Middle American types, as obstacles to desired social change and not deserving of very much sympathy. Others simply adapt to prevailing newsroom expectations, internalizing the double standards. Either way it’s a shameful spectacle, which does no honor to American journalism.

-- (justice@no.where), January 09, 2001

Answers

Fox News reported it. Dan Rather probably knew it and gritted his teeth. Cute, perk, little Katie Curic said nothing. Matt Dillon should have been there and the world would have known!

-- Boswell (fundown@thefarm.net), January 10, 2001.

Yep, now thats what i call racial predudice, It's ok to print about the terrible wrong whitey does but, don't give Jesse Jackson any room to preach on how the black men were put down in society, so the were victims too.

-- Red Johnson (Red Johnson@member.net), January 10, 2001.

Justice,

Be thankful. Remember the newsman's motto: "it's not news if a dog bites a man, it's news if a man bites a dog".

Frank

-- Someone (ChimingIn@twocents.cam), January 10, 2001.

There is no such thing as "black racism". Racism is power and prejudice so blacks by defintion cannot be racist.

This terrible event must be viewed in context. For 400 years, African Americans have been oppressed, exploited, humilated and enslaved. This oppression is the legacy which the Carr brothers inherited from the society into which they were born. They have no responsibility for that legacy or for their own behavior. They are the true victims here.

Reparations now!

-- (LeonTrotsky@justice_is.as_justice_does), January 10, 2001.

Leon,

Your patronizing attitude toward blacks is what is racist. We are all responsible for our own behavior, blacks included.

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), January 10, 2001.

Now we find reasons to justify racism. In the past it was because it they were not quite human, now we can pick and choose examples for being bigots.

Two wrongs don't make a right.
Why aren't all crimes blown up in the national news?

Yep, Bush the uniter, we get closet bigots crawling out of the woodwork now.

-- Cherri (jessam5@home.com), January 11, 2001.

Cherri--

I'm trying hard to understand you. Feel free to enlighten me.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), January 11, 2001.