Carnal Reason

I recently argued that the national media has been deliberately ignoring the hideous Christian-Newsom murders because the victims were white and the suspected murderers are black. I am far from alone in believing this, and the story is creeping into the papers. John Leo covers it today in the New York Post.

Ted Diadiun, writing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, takes the opposite point of view. I’d like to consider his arguments.

But it [a story about the murder] didn’t appear in The Plain Dealer until yesterday, when we ran an AP story that summed up the complaints about the lack of national play.

The reason for that is straightforward: Regrettably, rapes and murders are committed around the country every day. While this one was horrible for the victims and their families, the early reports about the attack were not different enough to make editors think that it was a story our readers needed to read.

Mr Diadiun writes this in a column dated May 20, 2007. By Mr Diadium’s account, Channon Christian’s dismembered body was recovered on January 8, 2007. He would have us believe that during the intervening 131 days no interesting details emerged. It seems that kidnapping, rape, torture, murder, and dismemberment must be so common around Cleveland that one of the most horrific murders in American history did not merit a story in the Plain Dealer.

Certainly, as some have alleged, if the races had been reversed and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton had descended on Knoxville with their publicity machines, it would likely have become a national story.

But it is also true that if you changed nothing but the location, and put the crime in a media center larger than Knoxville, it would likely have been more widely reported.

Of course. The murder occurred in the hick town of Knoxville, Tennessee. Had it occurred in a real metropolis, say Durham, North Carolina, then there would have been some media coverage.

Some have pointed to the national furor that surrounded the false rape allegations by a black stripper against white members of the Duke lacrosse team. But the two situations defy comparison. The accusations in the Duke story were directed toward a privileged, organized college athletic team, not a group of neighborhood thugs, and it was as much about class difference as it was race difference.

In the Duke case, there were white college students and a black stripper. In the Christian-Newsom murders there were white college students and black thugs. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Crystal Mangum, the stripper, is of at least equal class status to the thugs. So whatever class difference exists in one case exists in the other. If anything, the class difference is more pronounced in the Christian-Newsom case.

The problem is that any progressive narrative must posit that the oppressed class is good and the privileged class is evil. Since the Christian-Newsom murder violates this axiom, correctness demands that it be ignored. And it has been. Wrongheaded divisive throwbacks are starting to bitch about it.

But it is wrongheaded and divisive to make race the central issue here. It takes more than the fact that the victims and villains were of different races to make this a racial issue. The Knoxville police chief said his investigators had found no evidence to indicate that the crime was race-based. Even Christian’s parents have said they do not believe it was a racial attack.

Mr Diadium does not seem to understand “the central issue”. Whether racial animus was a motive for the crime is of no interest to me. The crime is monstrous no matter what its motive. The issue I am discussing is entirely different. I am interested in the mainstream media’s motives, not those of the murderers. I believe the media intentionally ignored an explosive story because it does not fit the liberal political agenda. I think Mr Diadium understands this criticism perfectly, and is being deliberately obtuse.

I have neither the space nor the wisdom to explain why some crime stories achieve national attention while others do not.

I think he had the space.

Six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found strangled in her parents’ Colorado basement. Twelve-year-old Polly Klaas died after being kidnapped from her California bedroom. Gay student Matthew Shepard died after being beaten and left tied to a Wyoming fence post. Laci Peterson, pregnant with her first child, was murdered by her husband.

All were household names as their stories unfolded in the national media, while at the same time somewhere else in the country, children were being brutalized, men were being killed for being gay, wives were being murdered by their husbands.

If your argument is that race was behind the news decisions in the Knoxville case, let’s remember that all the above victims were white.

And all the murderers in those cases were white. Did I mention that Mr Diadium is disingenuous? I could be wrong; maybe he’s just a blockhead.

Posted on May 22nd, 2007 by pwyll
Filed under: culture