Bias, PC--What do you make of this?

Hiya Lib Buds!
It may appear Sofe took a left, when she was supposed to take a right, but I thought I would see if I could banter here.

I found what I thought was an interesting piece of opinion, and wanted to see what the Pupsters may have to say. It is old, but relevant.

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NYTimes, WaPo take their licks
David Frum on NRO has a great column today about the NY Times and WaPo's attitudes about the Dems, religious persecution and selective emphasis of facts. It's a good look at how bias reveals itself in what is selected for coverage and emphasis as much as how the material is worded. It's difficult to excerpt, because the whole thing is good - not just in approach but in content. The thing I agree with most is this:

All that said, are we forbidden to notice that religiously motivated hate crimes in the modern world are overwhelmingly committed - not against Muslims - but by Muslims? Apparently so. Yesterday, the New York Times--yes, them again!--ran this amazing headline to describe the murder of an American missionary in Lebanon: "Killing Underscores Enmity of Evangelists and Muslims." Yes, those missionaries and those Muslims really hate each other: Bonnie Witherall showed her hatred by offering free prenatal care to indigent Lebanese; the local Muslim clerics were naturally goaded by this outrage and killed her.
Frum was keying off WaPo coverage of an FBI hate crimes report, where they emphasized hate crimes against Muslims even though they were committed at a much lower rate than hate crimes against Jews, and were of a much less serious nature than hate crimes against gays.

It's just a column chock full of goodies, and even mentions bloggers!

UPDATE: While we're at it, let's visit a few more examples of liberal consistency and vehement stance for eradicating all hate speech. First, a few quotes from Mike at Cold Fury, who has lots more on his site:

"(I)f there is retributive justice (Sen. Jesse Helms) will get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it." - Nina Totenberg, NPR
"I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease." - USA Today's Julianne Malveaux on Clarence Thomas

"That herd of managers from the House, I mean, frankly, all they were missing was white sheets." - Eleanor Clift, on her principal object of adoration Bill Clinton's impeachment


Charming. And moving right along, let's take a look at how the media respond to behaviors against their favored classes as opposed to behaviors by their favored classes that would be vilified if done by anyone else. This from an article by Rod Dreher in today's NRO:

Before long, though, they were asking questions about my personal life I found intrusive and unwelcome. They wanted to know about my relationship with God. The pair were witnessing to me, which as Evangelicals is a duty of faith. I hastened to assure them that I was a believing Christian, but that didn't dissuade the two, who wanted to be sure I was the right kind of Christian... I simply took the pamphlet they offered me, smiled, thanked them and returned to my book...
You are asking: Rod, why didn't you strangle them and stuff their bodies in the overhead bin?

had I murdered these people, and had been tried by a jury of my peers ?- that is, journalists ?- I would have gone scot-free, provided my attorney had kept hidden from the jury the fact that I am neither a sexual or racial minority, a Muslim, or a member of any certified victim class requiring them to suspend normal standards of ethical judgment.

I reach this conclusion based on the deafening media silence around the savage murder of Mary Stachowicz, the middle-aged Chicago churchgoer allegedly killed by coworker Nicholas Gutierrez, a 19-year-old homosexual who reportedly snapped when the Catholic woman told him he should quit sleeping with men. According to Chicago police, Gutierrez confessed to killing Stachowicz in his apartment after arguing with her about his lifestyle. According to Chicago authorities, Gutierrez confessed that he set upon Stachowicz when she asked ?- are you ready for this? ?- "Why do you [have sex with] boys instead of girls?"

Obviously, this woman was a Nazi. As a state's attorney told the Chicago Tribune, "He got upset with her. The defendant punched and kicked and stabbed the victim until he was tired. He then placed a plastic garbage bag over her head and strangled her."

...Where have we heard of this sort of thing before? Why, when three redneck men killed Matthew Shepard a few years ago, after the homosexual young man propositioned them in a bar. Understandably, the men found Shepard's words offensive. They should have told him to get lost. Instead, they tortured and killed him.

There is no moral difference between these acts. Both were heinous, and both deserve publicity. Yet the American media made Matthew Shepard an overnight cause célèbre, and have so far said very little about Mary Stachowicz ?- just as the media said very little about Jesse Dirkhising, the 13-year-old Arkansas boy raped, tortured, and strangled by homosexuals in 1999.


The entire article is worth your time. I have absolutely no problem with the men who killed Matthew Shepard receiving the strongest penalty the prosecution can get. I deeply deplore Stachowicz's killer getting any type of pass because he is gay and she questioned it. The media's coverage of the two cases is clearly biased.

How can you tell?

Dreher does the heavy lifting with his comparisons, but ask yourself this: If someone else did this, someone who was white and rich, or someone who killed a black person because that person asked him why he used the word "nigger" - would that get more coverage? Look at the nature of the acts involved versus who engaged in the behavior, and see if there is a pattern of coverage associated more with who than what.

How many of you have heard of Jonathan and Reginald Carr? The two brothers killed five people in Wichita, Kansas; in one incident alone, they raped, sexually abused and tortured five young people before robbing them and taking them into a field, where they shot all five. One woman escaped that last killing field, and was the primary witness at the Carrs' trial. The Carrs were sentenced to death. There was coverage, yes, but not an incessant beating of the drum like with the horrible killing of the black man in Texas who was deliberately dragged behind a truck, or the beating of Matthew Shepard.

What was different? Certainly the scope of the behavior was comparable if not worse. However, the Carrs are black, and all of their victims were white. Did the Carrs choose to kill white people deliberately, as opposed to other races? I don't know, and for the purposes of this discussion their reasoning is not really important. What is important is whether the media took into account the race of the offenders and victims in choosing not to cover this as heavily as some other cases. I think it's likely that they did.

Obviously other things can have an impact on how much coverage one particular crime receives - for instance, if war were to begin, something that would get front page coverage at any other time would fall to the inside of the paper. But it's still possible to detect patterns of coverage, even given the normal ebb and flow of news, and I think the media has been caught out on their coverage of crimes that could have a hate component, although the prosecuting attorney said it did not:

Some residents in the Wichita area say the murders would have been prosecuted as "hate crimes" had the skin color of the gunmen and their victims been reversed.
However, Sedgwick County, Kan., District Attorney Nola Foulston said she would not charge the suspects with committing "hate crimes" because she believed the murders were motivated by robbery and not racial hatred.


I don't think she's necessarily wrong. But the media's coverage may have been motivated by race - ask yourself, if the race of victim and offender had been reversed, would the coverage have proceeded differently?

(As an aside, I know some people are saying to themselves, "Yes, but if the races were reversed, would the killers be more likely to get life instead of death if it were whites killing blacks?" It's a legitimate question, and one that has raised a great deal of debate about the fairness of the death penalty in this country. But an unevenly applied penalty doesn't excuse uneven coverage. Ideally the nature of the behavior would dictate both coverage and penalty, not race, religion or sexual orientation.)

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Scroll about half the page...
I was interested to hear member's opinions about the content.