A BLACK MAN IS 15xs TO 30xs TIMES MORE LIKELY TO PERPETRATE VIOLENCE!
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WATTERS ON FRANK R JAMES' STAGGERING RACISM
Watters: How was this guy not on the FBI's radar?
Yes, the Media Bury the Race of Murderers—If They’re Not White
Free Beacon analysis shows how homicide coverage downplays the race of minority offenders
Frank James, the man arrested for Tuesday's New York City subway shooting, is a black nationalist and outspoken racist who railed against whites, Jews, and Hispanics. A careful reader of the New York Times could be forgiven for overlooking that. In a nearly 2,000-word article on the attack, James's race is not mentioned. The same is true for the coverage offered up by Reuters; the Washington Post only mentioned James's race in relation to his condemnation of training programs for "low-income Black youths."
Media critics on the right say that the conspicuous omission of James's race from these news reports illustrates a trend among prestige papers, which deemphasize or omit the race of non-white criminals while playing up the race of white offenders. But is it a real pattern?
Yes. 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.
The data suggest an alarming editorial trend in which major papers routinely omit information from news reports, presenting readers with a skewed picture of who does and doesn't commit crime. These editorial choices are part and parcel with the "racial reckoning" that swept newsrooms in the wake of Floyd's murder, which saw journalists dramatically overhauling crime coverage to emphasize the view that the criminal justice system is racist at the root—perhaps at the expense of honesty about individual offenders' crimes.
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.
Of course, journalists choose not only where in a piece to mention an offender's race, but also whether to mention it at all, and omissions can skew a reader's perspective.
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.
Doing so permits an estimate of how often journalists highlight an offender's race—or don't. 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.
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.
At the same time, major newsrooms have prioritized "racial justice" coverage, part of a push for what the journalist-cum-activist Wesley Lowery called "moral clarity" over "objectivity": writing news reports that take the sides on contested issues with the goal of advancing a political objective.
Such "moral clarity" may mean downplaying black crime and emphasizing white crime. In the case of offenders like James, it means leaving readers in the dark about an important element of the story—journalistic malfeasance that is, of course, in service of the greater good.
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Regional Racism: What It Is, and Why It's Getting Worse
In One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (LSU Press, 1982), sociologist John Shelton Reed wrote convincingly of what he called "regional racism."
The accepted definition of "racism" is "prejudice against members of a different ethnic group," with "ethnic" defined as a "subgroup ... with a common national or cultural tradition." By this definition, the South and the West, with their distinctive cultural traditions, may constitute "ethnic groups," and there is a great deal of prejudice in our national culture against both.
The relationship of these ethnicities, and particularly of the South, with the nation as a whole has a long and painful history. Long before the Civil War, there were economic and ideological rivalries between the South and the North, especially over questions related to internal improvements, tariffs, and the creation of a national bank. By 1861, these and other issues led to a fierce division, not unlike what we see today, between two competing ideas of America.
After the war, the South continued to oppose the American System, as it was called — its greatest proponent being Abraham Lincoln. Today, regional differences remain much the same, with southerners supporting limited government and with northern and coastal regions attempting to expand government in exchange for perceived economic advantages. The latest example of this conflict is southern and heartland opposition to Build Back Better.
White Southerners have been the object of the worst stereotyping, though the West, with its caricatures of dumb "cowboys" and blowsy saloon girls, comes in close behind. One would think such racism would have died out long ago, but today's progressives are actually boasting of a second Reconstruction in which whites — not just Southerners, but all whites — are to be made "woke" and forced to admit their supposed privilege and guilt. An integral part of this process is the demand for reparations, such as were passed by the California Legislature at the end of March.
The idea that whites must endure classes in racial sensitivity and that they must pay reparations to blacks — such as the enormous racially targeted sums included in BBB — is predicated on the false view that whites, especially Southern whites, are responsible for income disparity among the races. In fact, under 50 years of affirmative action, blacks have enjoyed enormous advantages over whites and Asians. Yet, according to the latest numbers, high school graduation rates for blacks (79.6%) were far below those for whites (89.4%) and Asians (92.6%). College graduation rates showed the same pattern, with 74% of Asians, 64% of whites, and 40% of blacks graduating, despite preferential treatment for blacks. These low black graduation rates are not the fault of whites.
If anything, whites and Asians should be granted reparations to compensate for the effects of affirmative action.
At last, whites are beginning to see how badly they are treated. According to a study by Tufts and Harvard researchers, whites in general "now believe that anti-white racism has increased and is now a bigger problem than anti-black racism." Even blacks admit that anti-white racism is rising. Those beliefs reflect the reality that whites are discriminated against at every turn, from college admissions to professional advancement to social recognition.
And for whites in the South and West, that discrimination is amplified by the fact that blacks and liberal whites often treat them with contempt and exclude them from opportunities on the basis of accent and other cultural qualities. How many whites from the South and West are serving in the Biden Cabinet? There are none.
One would imagine that in 2022, more than 160 years after the Civil War began, the regional wounds would have healed, but that is not the case. In a popular culture that appeals especially to Northern and coastal liberals, white Southerners are depicted as hillbillies, buffoons, racists, and religious extremists. In depictions stretching from Tobacco Road to The Grapes of Wrath to Driving Miss Daisy and beyond, and in hundreds of thousands of films and television episodes, national audiences have despised, laughed at, and condescended toward the South. The long-running series Hee-Haw was the Southern equivalent of Amos and Andy, with southern whites rather than blacks (or whites in blackface) being the butt of the humor.
It's not just Southerners. In spite of admiration for its natural beauty and the romantic cowboy culture, the West has always seemed irrelevant to the national debate. Its population is too small and, according to progressives, too culturally illiterate to count for much. George W. Bush was derided as a "cowboy," which meant an uncultured, poorly educated, and mentally inferior individual, despite his degrees from Yale and Harvard and his membership in Skull and Bones.
In reality, Bush was far from uneducated or unintelligent. Likewise Westerners Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. The view that almost everyone residing between the Mississippi and the Coastal Range is a dense cowboy with no right to be heard amounts to racism, and liberals need to admit it.
More than anything else, regional racism is based on economic rivalry. New England was always a poor cousin of the South and West as tobacco made Virginia rich, and then cotton, oil, and ranching brought wealth to other heartland states.
The assault on fossil fuels, mostly produced in the South and West, includes racial overtones. From the progressive point of view, only ignorant heartlanders, especially Texans and Okies, would continue to produce such "dirty" fuels — even though the use of natural gas has driven America's carbon emissions to 1990 levels, well below those of China or even Europe. Yet the national culture has long depicted the "Texas oilman" as crude and uncultured, using his wealth to buy whatever he wants. It's the same old prejudice based on oil rather than cotton.
Through it all, Northerners maintained their air of superiority. "We may be poor," they reasoned, "but at least we don't live in the heartland," failing to realize that the wealthiest U.S. states, adjusted for cost of living, are Utah and Virginia, while California and New York are subpar. Adjusted for both taxes and cost of living, living standards in Kansas (9th) and Oklahoma (15th) rank far above New York (29th) and California (37th).
Not only are real incomes higher in the West and the South, but the future is looking worse for the North and the coasts. In 2021, the "cost index" in California was 152% of the national average; New York was 139%, and Massachusetts was 132%. Meanwhile, Tennessee was 88.7% and Texas 91.5%. No wonder Elon Musk moved his operations to Texas.
It's not just money. Crime is lower in most heartland locations. The climate is better. And, though harder to quantify, people are happier and friendlier.
The only thing going for the average New Yorker is the false sense that he is better than those in the South and West. That baseless prejudice is the essence of racism. And those feelings of superiority translate into actions.
Regional racism is deeply embedded in American culture, and the Obama and Biden years have seen an uptick in policies that discriminate against heartland whites. Biden's policies are filled with mandates, minority carve-outs and race-based exclusions and preferences that advance minorities over whites.
Conservatives have worked since the 1850s to create a racially neutral society that would be supportive of Americans from all backgrounds. It is only progressives who continue to push for more regional division. Surely, it's time to bury our regional prejudices and work together, equally, to build an even greater nation.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on politics and culture in America.
Image: stevepb via Pixabay, Pixabay license.
Business owners considering arming themselves amid crime surge
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