This story is from a conservative website, but all I care about here is whether the data are accurate (I assume other places will vet them). After all, you’d never see an analysis like this in the liberal mainstream media, but the topic is of interest: the racialization of American politics and media. The data adduced tell us not so much about race, but rather about how the media manipulates the mention of race to push an ideological agenda. Click to read:
I noticed soon after the murder of George Floyd inflamed American racial tension that the media seemed to emphasize race in some instances and downplay it in others. My own experience involved reading about attacks on Jews in New York City, where the race of the apprehended was often omitted from the article (the accused were often black if you looked at other reports), but was mentioned when a white person attacked a person of color. But that was just my unsubstantiated impression, produced by my wondering who was going after the Jews.
Ideally, one wouldn’t need to mention the race of an offender in a news article, whether or not he (I’m assuming male suspects here) was convicted or only apprehended. What would be the point? For suspects at large, on the other hand, race is an identifying feature that could help apprehend criminals, and should be included in descriptions.
The media, however, often chooses to identify the race of “offenders” (apparently “suspects”, those not yet convicted). But as the Washington Free Beacon claims, data show that the race of black offenders is not only mentioned far less often than of white offenders, but when it is mentioned it appears much later in the news story. That itself is evidence against structural anti-black racism in the news media, but it also shows something more: the media apparently use the mentions and placement to downplay crimes committed by blacks relative to those committed by whites. That is a choice that, the paper suggests, is made by the “MSM” (mainstream [liberal] media) to buttress a liberal antiracism by either minimizing black crime, maximizing white crime, or both (since we’re talking about differentials, we can’t tell for sure). The result is the same: differential treatment and, I think, more divisiveness.
Here’s the method used:
A Washington Free Beacon review of hundreds of articles published by major papers over a span of two years finds that papers downplay the race of non-white offenders, mentioning their race much later in articles than they do for white offenders. These papers are also three to four times more likely to mention an offender’s race at all if he is white, a disparity that grew in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the protests that followed.
The Free Beacon collected data on nearly 1,100 articles about homicides from six major papers, all written between 2019 and 2021. Those papers included the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis’s Star-Tribune—representatives of each paper did not return requests for comment for this article. For each article, we collected the offender’s and victim’s name and race, and noted where in the article the offender’s race was mentioned, if at all.
They also controlled for high mentions of high-profile white offenders by eliminating them, but more on that later.
First, the data on when in a story the race of the offender is first mentioned:
Their analysis:
The chart above indicates that papers are far quicker to mention the race of white murderers than black. (Those two races account for 92 percent of mentions in the data, so others are not shown.) Half of articles about a white offender mention his race within the first 15 percent of the article. In articles about black offenders, by contrast, mentions come overwhelmingly toward the end of the piece. Half of the articles that mention a black offender’s race do not do so until at least 60 percent of the way through, and more than 20 percent save it until the last fifth of the article.
They present no statistics to show whether this difference is statistically significant, but a simple 2 X 10 chi-square, with numbers in each cell representing a decile, could show that. But given the chart above, the difference is surely statistically significant.
There follows an analysis of how often an offender’s race—again, only two are used: black and white—is mentioned in the article. Here’s a chart showing the results, but first the method:
To measure these choices, we identified the race of the offender in roughly 900 stories where his name, but not his race, was mentioned, first by looking at the race of people with the same name in Census data, and then hand-confirming race based on mug shots or other images published in local news stories.
The hand-confirmation is important given that people of different races can have the same name. The results?
And the conclusion, as well as a caveat about oft-mentioned white offenders:
Again, the skew is startling: White offenders’ race was mentioned in roughly 1 out of every 4 articles, compared with 1 in 17 articles about a black offender and 1 in 33 articles about a Hispanic offender.
This effect is driven in part by a handful of major news stories involving white perpetrators, though the attention paid to these stories is also an editorial choice. But even after omitting reports about white offenders Kyle Rittenhouse, Derek Chauvin, and the killers of Ahmaud Arbery, the race of white offenders is mentioned in 16 percent of cases, two to three times the rate at which the race of black offenders is mentioned. (Middle Eastern offenders were labeled as Asian in this analysis, but labeling them as white results in only a small change to the race mention rate.)
. . .This disparity widened following George Floyd’s murder. Before May of 2020, papers were roughly twice as likely to mention the race of a white (13 percent of stories) versus a black perpetrator (7 percent). After May of 2020, the numbers were 28 percent and 4 percent, a ratio of seven to one. Even omitting the above-mentioned stories, papers still mentioned race in 23 percent of stories about white killers post-Floyd, a six-to-one ratio.
It could be that there were more stories in which a white offender’s race was relevant after Floyd’s death than before. But it is also easy to see how the increased attention to white murderers represents a change in what reporters and editors thought it was, and was not, important for their readers to hear about, particularly after they publicly committed to revamping their crime reporting following Floyd’s death.
Again, I’m guessing the differential in all cases would be statistically significant because the samples are large and the differences substantial. But newspapers don’t do statistics.
It would be interesting to see if newspapers of different political stripes have different data here, but since many of them draw their stories from the same wire services, I wouldn’t expect to find much of a difference.
There are several explanations for this disparity, of course, but the obvious one to me is that newspapers are downplaying crimes by black and playing up crimes by whites as part of a social justice agenda. (For similar reasons, papers like the New York Times capitalize “Black” as a race but not “white.”) This conclusion is supported by other things highlighted in the article:
Newspapers across the country—including the Inquirer—stopped publishing mugshot galleries in part because, two Florida newspapers wrote, they “may have reinforced negative stereotypes.” Others committed to overhauling their language, substituting phrases like “formerly incarcerated person” for “felon” to respond to what the Poynter Institute described as an “inextricabl[e]” link between reporting on crime and “race and racism.” And the Associated Press amended its style guide to discourage the use of the word “riot,” which allegedly has racist connotations.
If you control for high profile murders by whites, as the article did, the only explanation that makes sense is an ideological one. (One might think that the race of the offender is useful for sociological analyses of crime, but that’s of interest mainly to sociologists.) And there’s no acceptable reason for the disparity. Either give the race of the offender all the time when it’s known, or leave it out all of the time unless crimes are racially motivated and that needs to be known as a potential social trend. And if you do mention race, the placement in the article should be the same for all races. If you really do think the race of an offender is relevant, why should it appear in different places in an article based on the race itself.
If the conclusion be correct, then newspapers, in the name of perpetrating social justice, are not only selectively reporting the news, but are actually increasing racial divisions in America. If there’s anywhere that equality should and actually can be mandated, it’s in the way crime is reported.
*********************
In today’s guest essay in the NYT (click screenshot), Margaret Renkl takes on the “race of perpetrator and victim” issue with respect to the recent kidnapping and murder of Memphis schoolteacher Eliza Fletcher, who is white, by the accused murderer, Cleotha Abston, who is black.
Renkl’s view:
We need to work continually toward making our cities less dangerous and our criminal justice system more just. We need news coverage of everything — not just crime — to be completely accurate and completely fair, particularly on a subject as sensitive as race. God knows we need to find a way to make it safer for all women to move through the world at any time of day.
Any discussion of such subjects is bound to become heated, and that’s as it should be. Open public discourse is a privilege of living in a democracy. But while this kind of conversation is appropriate in a discussion of public policy, it is not at all appropriate in the discussion of an innocent person who lost her life to a seemingly random act of violence. Tragedies will always garner public interest. That’s just human nature. But tragedies should never be reduced to tweets and talking points or turned into a narrative to justify a political agenda.
h/t: Luana
A similar media bias is that (according to work by PhD student Zach Goldberg) killings by the police of black people get 9 times the coverage in the MSM than killings by the police of white people.
I have definitely noticed this. It’s interesting to see actual empirical data. One word: wokeness. The goal is to promote a political narrative (along with some obligatory news).
For several years, from around 2015 to around 2019 I became acutely aware that whenever there was a shooting of an unarmed person by police, if that person was Black, the NYTimesheadlines would go something like this: “Police [or white policeman] shoot and kill unarmed black men”.
I don’t think there was ever a headline like that for an Hispanic person…..and am fairly sure there was definitely never one for a white person.
This is one source, I think, of progressives wildly overestimating the number of Black unarmed men shot and killed by police each year. As I recall the number of unarmed Black men shot and killed by the police in 2022 was 8….Washington Post database.
That year should be 2021, not 2022.
I miss people talking openly about ‘mixed race’ (in an inclusive sense, of course, not decades-old crime reports labelling someone as a ‘octoroon’). I would love to see humanity collectively ignore race (and caste, gender, etc.) much more. Mentioning mixed-race individuals might help remind us how broken the system really is. I think we’re going through another period where mixed-race people are being stripped of their identity (similar to bisexual erasure) because it is politically advantageous to label them all as ‘black’.
On the theme of mixed race, this may interest you.
https://fairforall.substack.com/p/not-fitting-in?r=2xi1r&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The racialization of discourse functions both as virtue-signaling for those mis-reporting or obscuring many facts and as a distraction from any data-driven analysis which might disrupt the regnant narrative, which currently possesses hegemonic authority and is far too seldom subjected to empirical refutation. An excellent example of this unfortunate trend (part of The Great Awokening) occurred over the last year or so, during which incontrovertible evidence proved that dozens upon dozens of heinous attacks on Asian-Americans in large cities (LA, SF, Chicago, NYC) were not, in fact, being committed by the group whom most reporters wished to find responsible.
You mean that these attacks were made by blacks on Asians, right?
Or other Asian people. Most attacks weren’t even related to the victim’s (or perpetrator’s) race.
Nearly all, although last year, Jennifer Ho (U of Colorado-Boulder) wrote that “when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled by white supremacy.”
Sub
I could usually tell whether a suspect was of a non-PC background already more than a decade ago. How? Newspapers try too hard to conceal the facts. They will use euphemisms for ethnic groups or describe the clothing of criminals without mentioning their skin color. I also recall right-wing websites which owed their existence largely to mentioning all the missing facts. They are probably easy to obtain, e.g. by reading local police reports.
The best defence of this I can think of is that it’s “man bites dog” vs. “dog bites man”.
That assumes, of course, that your audience is in touch with background reality. IIRC there was some recent study asking people to estimate these things, and the numbers were way off. So the audience is not understanding it this way.
I wasn’t. As a European, I had lived for decades with the belief that the much higher homicide rate in the US was due to a culture of violence among US whites. That was the impression news media gave me (all those white mass murderers and serial killers, all those white rednecks insisting on gun rights). Media in the form of fiction and history books or opinion pieces also gave me the impression that white on black homicides and rapes were much more frequent than vice versa. Imagine my surprise when in 2016, in the context of police killings of black people, I had a look a US unified FBI crime statistics.
… maybe the media just wants to be absolutely sure…
Also
The … you know … hair color … of the writers of the articles and their editors would potentially show a pattern, if matched up with the … hair color … of the subjects in the articles.
Something is missing from the Free Beacon analysis – the background frequency – what percentage of the killers were from each race.
For example, if the data came from Montana where less than 1% of the population is Black, wouldn’t the more frequent mention of White killers be expected?
An even more important thing is the proportion of murderers each race has. To confirm or deny bias in the reporting, the percentage of Whites (or Blacks) mentioned as a percentage of the White (or Black) murderers is what’s relevant. Hypothetically, if 13% of the murderers were committed by Blacks and 70% by whites, unbiased reporting would have this 13/70 ratio among cases where race is reported.
“For example, if the data came from Montana where less than 1% of the population is Black, wouldn’t the more frequent mention of White killers be expected?”
I don’t think so. I think you’re using the wrong denominator. It seems to me that the correct expression to test is; “mention of race/news article“, not “…/offense.”
The Montana mention was a quick and dirty example of why background data is important. Does my reply to Prof. Coyne clear up what denominator I’m using?
I think you’ve got it wrong here. What the article analyzes is the percentage of time that the perp’s race is mentioned WHEN IT IS KNOWN. That is irrelevant to the relative frequency of races. Also, the placement of the race in the article doesn’t hinge on proportions, either.
I didn’t mention the relative frequencies of crimes and homicides committed by whites versus blacks, but that data is well known, and doesn’t buttress the media narrative.
Sorry let me try to be clearer. I’m trying to make an important point about methodology and how people are confused by statistics, not racial issues.
I assume the study is restricted to cases where the killer’s race is known. Unbiased would be reporting White killers in the same proportion as that of known White killers to total cases where race is known and likewise for Black.
What the article compares is the percentage of White mentions vs. Black mentions. Without the background data – percentage of killers of each race where the race is known.
I wouldn’t consider it sexist if the 99+% of the time a rapist’s sex was reported as male, since I know there is a vanishingly small number of non-male rapists.
I still don’t follow: I think Jerry has answered your point.
But it is a question of percentages of what. The 23% for whites on the second graph, is the percentage that mention race of all articles where the murderer is known to be white. Similarly for blacks, the 6% is the percentage that mention race of all articles where the murderer is known to be black.
The absolute numbers of each race are not needed to compare the percentages.
Sorry Jeremy, maybe I’m being thick today or just am in general, but you and Prof. Coyne haven’t grasped the point I’m trying to make, and perhaps that’s due to my inability to express it.
I have not said absolute numbers are needed. Only as part of a proportion.
I wrote only about percentages. Percentages of the mentions do not necessarily show bias exists (the method I’m suggesting would actually show greater bias if the known background data were used).
The percentages that I say are important are:
white race mentioned where race is known/murders by whites where race is known
black race mentioned where race is known/murders by blacks where race is known
If these ratios are starkly different, the reporting is biased.
You are addressing Jeremy and Dr Coyne, but it’s clear what you meant, now, to me. My apologies for misreading you.
But isn’t this…
…what you meant?
What I mean is – my reading of this suggests they did the tests, shown in the 2nd plot above, in the way you sugggest.
No, I’m assuming the data used is accurate for the sake of discussion. My comment is really about lack of Bayesian analysis which is behind much of the “replication crisis” – the failure to replicate results from many scientific papers.
At the risk of me confusing things more, consider this example that doesn’t involve race.
You test positive for a disease. The test is 99% accurate – 99% of those testing positive have the disease, and everyone testing negative does not have it. How worried should you be? Not very if the disease is rare (background information). If the disease appears in only 1 of 10,000, then the 99% accuracy rate means 1% or 100 will test positive, 99 of whom don’t have the disease. Your chance of having the disease is only 1% without additional information.
In the discussion here, I have been calling attention to the omitted, useful background information: the percentage of murderers of each race (where race is known). If 50% of murderers are black and 50% white, then the article would have bias correctly diagnosed (though the scale would be even worse than shown and perhaps 50/50 is close to correct – though saying so would ignite a completely different controversy).
Not necessarily. If the articles were from Montana based media, I’d expect that the race would not be mentioned at all if the murderer was white, because that would be the assumed default. If I read a UK story about a murderer, unless the race was explicitly mentioned or there were other cues (e.g. it happened in Brixton) I would assume the murderer was white because most people in the UK are white and the media don’t bother to mention it unless the murderer is still at large.
My try to clear this up: The base rate of killers of each race is important for judging wether the media’s decision to report or not report the crime is biased. But that was not the question the article asked, it was about bias in explicit race reporting in cases with (known) black and (known) white defendants. How many of each race there are is irrelevant for that question, as data is given as percentage within the two groups. The choice to report or not can add an additional level of bias, and indeed it will, as black on black murders hardly ever make national new, but this was simply not tested here.
Also, more than 50 % of homicides are committed by blacks, so the 13 percent in your example are way off. But you probably know that.
Bravo Ruth, you have cleared it up for me (and maybe I was the only one who needed it). Your first sentence after the colon is exactly what I was trying to get across. And I see much or all of the confusion came from my uncareful reading of the article and commentary – my fault for debating one thing with people who were debating something else.
Indeed – base rate – Steven Pinker -Rationality has a nice discussion of error due to… read his book!
Whoa! “Reports about white offenders Kyle Rittenhouse, Derek Chauvin, and the killers of Ahmaud Arbery.” That’s a weird way for Lehman to characterize Rittenhouse, and to lump him in with those other guys who were indeed murderers.
Rittenhouse was not an offender. He killed two people and shot a third person in the riots that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. Rittenhouse did that in self defense after being threatened, chased, and then assaulted by those individuals. The third person he shot was aiming a handgun at Rittenhouse. All three individuals were convicted felons, and the first person he shot and killed (after being chased and assaulted by the guy) had just been released from a mental health facility and was not in any real sense a BLM protester. This all came out at trial, and Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all counts. He didn’t murder anyone.
Reporters and pundits could fairly say (and many did say) that Rittenhouse had terrible judgement wrt the riots and Wisconsin open-carry laws, and that his parents should have kept him home instead of letting him go to a riot with an AR15, even though he was later found to be well within all of the relevant laws. But instead pundits falsely described his acts as racist crimes and libelled him in the process. He subsequently ended up in possession of a lot of money that was formerly held by various media companies. I peaked when I listened to Jesse Singal on the “Honestly” podcast about the Rittenhouse trial and its media coverage.
The Rittenhouse incident was a good lesson on media coverage. I remember some coverage where it was implied that he was a White supremacist who killed peaceful unarmed Black protesters. That was implied, but not explicitly stated. The implication was strong enough that people retelling the story did include those details as facts.
I assume that was the intention behind how the original story was worded.
News reports of crime serve multiple purposes. If a maniac is on the loose, known information about the suspect can help identify and report them to authorities, and can help potential victims raise their awareness and possibly avoid being victimized. Race and sex are the two easiest categories for gross identification of suspects.
If an elderly White woman is going around the city slashing people with a straight razor, her race, sex, and age are important information to know.
Our host knows more about human evolutionary advantages than I ever will, but it is my understanding that pattern recognition is a key human survival strategy. I would much rather learn ongoing trends in violent crime from the media than find out by being repeatedly and personally victimized.
Modern media do not seem to care about the things I mentioned above. They have some stereotypes that they very much want to dispel, and others that they want to reinforce, regardless of reality.
Of course, the best way to eliminate a stereotype is to just not conform to it.
The people actually engaged in violence do not seem to share the woke desire to dispel those stereotypes.
I am glad someone is brave enough to try to quantify this issue. I am always happy when we can put numbers on things and do math with them.
Mostly, this is something that everyone knows is true, but most pretend is not the case.
Yes. Many of the same folks who remember that Rittenhouse murdered three unarmed Black protestors also remember that the Kenosha police killed Jacob Blake.
The distortion, omission, and finally suppression of mere facts is standard practice under a totalizing ideology—whether labelled “social justice” or “building socialism”. as in that former galaxy far away. In the latter case, the avoidance of facts led not only to the special qualities of Soviet genetics, but to that society’s entire structure, and its economy in such areas as agriculture, housing, consumer production, the absence of export-led production—and to the eventual outcome of these conditions. In fact, one could reasonably conclude that the outcome is still under way in that galaxy.
I would hesitate to draw any conclusions based on this article. It was first published 5 months ago, and I cannot find any careful review of the methods used by the Washington Free Beacon (WFB). One big reservation comes to mind, however:
• The writer (s) chose 6 newspapers, without any explanation as to why they chose those six, and not others or additional newspapers (though one could hazard a guess). For example, why did they not include the two newspapers with the highest circulation in the US, US Today and the WSJ?
The results of their analysis do not represent how “the media” reports on the race of victims and perpetrators of crime. They represent the results of an analysis of 6 newspapers chosen not at all at random, by the WFB.
This is not to say that a better understanding of how race is reported in criminal cases would not be welcome. But the methods need to be much more rigorous than the ones used by the WFB.
I wonder if the given name of the suspect correlates with the “race”. That might factor into decisions to label the person with a “race”.
Here’s a link to an article I wrote years ago on ‘reporting on race’ for Quill, the official magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists: https://www.quillmag.com/2013/09/10/when-race-is-relevant/
Former 30-year daily newspaper journalist here (reporter, columnist, editor).
It’s astonishing to me that this is where we are in media (and I’ve been noticing this trend anecdotally for some time).
The worst thing, for me, is that having noticed the glaring disparity, I cannot stop myself from paying attention even more, then becoming — surely not what the promoters of such biased presentation hope for — ever more cynical and, I’m afraid, **less** sympathetic to contextual arguments regarding crime and race of the perpetrator.
This fits into my general thesis regarding the “woke” world’s effect on how many otherwise (or at least potentially) neutral media consumers: When powerful people constantly protect a demographic group in ways it does not protect other groups, it’s all but inevitable that some people are going to start thinking of the “protected” group as weak, pitiful and helpless.
Is **that** what Malcolm X wanted, or Martin Luther King, Jr.? Doubt it.
“Having noticed the glaring disparity, I cannot stop myself from paying attention even more.”
Yes me too. I now have a mental over/under on the race of the person who committed a violent crime described in an article I read online, and often catch myself googling the suspect’s name to test my expectation when the person’s race is not mentioned in the article.
Similar to the running clock I start when driving in the car and listening to CBC Radio 1: how long before the current news report or interview or commentary or analysis turns to racism, trans rights, or decolonization? Again the current over/under is about 3 minutes; some instances run to <10 seconds 🙁
Not me. I start thinking that the protected group is in thrall to a dangerous, uncontrollable subset and the media are simply afraid of them. I form this impression not from what the media say about them but from the videos they themselves post on social media celebrating their exploits and predations. As well as their awful music.
I’ll leave it for others to speculate on what Malcolm X and MLK wanted.
My take on this in the media (the false panic of the “Anti Asian Crime Wave”)
https://democracychronicles.org/on-the-anti-asian-hate-crime-wave/
I publish at 2 places, the other one was afraid of publishing it. When they later decided to I pulled it myself BECAUSE… I was afraid of that publication’s possible ruin risk.
Democracy Chronicles.org, however, is hardened to that possibility.
As an proprietary trader on Wall St. 15-20 years ago I developed a spidey sense when it comes to ruin risk in numerous domains.
D.A.
NYC
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
Very nice. Definitely gets the Nassim Taleb seal of approval.
Like many others, I have noticed a possible trend of downplaying race in certain circumstances and highlighting it in others.
Another possible source of bias relates to the backgrounds of media reporters – which I have done in light-handed fashion, simply out of curiosity. Do their social, ethnic and ethnic backgrounds represent US or UK demographics or are minorities over-represented today? I make no judgement here and feel that, in general, it is refreshing, absolutely necessary and only fair to hear the perspectives of diverse people, rather than those of white males only. But reporters and journalists of any background are equally capable of writing pieces that mirror the world views of their own group, with intent to influence public opinion.
If there is over-representation of minorities in a statistical sense, could it partly explain a progressive left and anti-colonial orientation within our media? If so, then again I make no judgement.
If such over-representation exists, could it partly explain, for example, an evident pro-Palestinian slant on the Israel/Palestine issue?
Could it partly explain the great media emphasis on the George Floyd murder (justifiable, of course) but so little coverage of the murder of a five-year-old white boy (Cannon Hinnant) or high levels of engagement in crime and offending of minorities?
One can understand any motivation to bring out the perspectives and lived experiences of people who have experienced racism and other forms of marginalization but, in the end, journalism should be as free of bias as humanly possible – whatever that bias may be. But is it?
I wrote a piece on media bias a few weeks ago. Here it is, if anyone is curious.
This article was originally published here:
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2022/07/dr-david-lillis-reflections-on-reading.html
David Lillis
Did anyone else notice that the headline seemed to imply that there is a race of murderers which can be buried? 🙂
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belong-on-girls-sports-teams/?fbclid=IwAR22G8E4N5PBeMKMQTASAVqD8aMX1tKpUr2GJInJ3Iw0rrrZlD6gnRbyRQk Please comment on this article, Dr. Coyne. Seems pretty egregiously wrong.
It is, and science says otherwise. It’s also by Turban, a notorious trans activist who is wonky on data. I don’t want to take it apart; see my other articles on the athletic advantage of biological men who transition to women after puberty. Those advantages are clear. Scientific American is beneath contempt.
It’s also interesting to note how often a story is hyped if the perp is suspected of being white, but then the story disappears when it’s discovered that he was black.
A few years pre-pandemic, I used to subscribe to the ACLU’s and Southern Poverty Law Center’s [SPLC] email newsletters. For a few months, both orgs devoted considerable space to a series of anti-Semitic attacks. Someone(s) was mailing envelopes of white powder that they claimed was anthrax [determined to be cornstarch and something else, not dangerous at all] to several synagogues in a certain geographic area (I forget where.) Both orgs rightfully condemned these terrorist attacks and updated readers like me on the status of the FBI investigation.
Then they both went silent about the matter.
After a couple of months, I wondered what had happened with the faux-anthrax case. I searched both ACLU and SPLC websites and found nothing. I then goggled it, and numerous sources said that the FBI had in fact arrested someone — a black man. They showed his mugshot.
Gee, why didn’t ACLU and SPLC report this?
I emailed both orgs asking this question. I never received a reply.
Interpret this as you will.
ISTR that when Trayvon Martin was murdered in FL, when perpetrator George Zimmerman said he was Hispanic, liberal/woke groups got their knickers in a twist. Hispanic-on-black crime? BIPOCs killing other BIPOCs? How can such things be?
Things have changed in the past decades. From 9/11, pictures of dead Americans were taboo in the mainstream press (I read the NYT every day back then). Dead soldiers were also nowhere to be seen (coffins started being pictured, and then not, out of respect – not respect for the facts, that s for sure) The only exception was a pic of the charred bodies of US contractors killed in Irak but they were contractors and unrecognizable.
This lasted until Hurricane Katrina. All of a sudden, pics of dead Americans came back on front pages. They were dead Black Americans, unfortunately, of New Orleans.
Now, even race of offenders is blotted out. Not only in the US. In France there was not a single mention of the ethnic origin of the mass killings of Original People in Canada the other week. You had to look far and wide to confirm that the killers belonged to the same community.