Russell
Posts: 1082
Joined: April 2005
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Since the "Will a "Gay Gene" Refute Evolution?" discussion – which had morphed into a gay marriage discussion - got sidetracked by Ghost of Paley's obsession with the supposed leftward bias of the mainstream media, think of this thread as a budding off of the media discussion into a separate thread. A speciation event, if you will.
A quick recap. The GhostMan – and correct me if I misstate this - contends that the U.S. media have a liberal “multicultural” agenda, and that the reporting of “hate” crimes is filtered in such a way as to give an inflated impression of majority on minority crimes. (Originally straight on gay, but the GhostMan segued into racial incidents – apparently seeing these as part of the same media anti-majoritarian agenda). In support of this view, he listed (April 25 2006, 14:29) 12 news items - melodramatically labeled “Exhibits” A through L – signing off with | Quote | | Oh, this is nothing. I just wanted to give you a little sample for now...... |
I’m inclined to agree: the list really did nothing to make his case. And if it’s just a “sample” of the “more” he promised, he should not waste his – and our – time.
I pointed out that his list of horrors ignored by the media was culled from, ahem, media reports. But, he protested, those were merely locally reported stories:| Quote | | Let's get one thing straight from the start. Local coverage does little for people who don't live in the areas where the crime takes place. As a citizen, I want to be informed about major events in the whole nation, because this influences my political and social choices. So the difference does count. |
I.e. “exhibits A-L” should have received national attention –like the Mathew Shepard story, and the reason for the difference in treatment is – you guessed it – the liberal agenda of the mainstream medium. (On a side note, I think Ghosty can be assured that his “political and social choices” are as safe from factual input anyway as are his "thoughts" on evolution. Would his choices lean any further rightward if the press consisted entirely of Fox News and clones thereof?)
I went through (April 25 2006, 23: 03) all 12 of his horrors. I stipulated at the outset that they were, indeed, all horrible. I proposed, though, that their lesser notoriety relative to the Mathew Shepard and James Byrd incidents reflected (a) the fact that the bigotry involved in those two stories was an important component of their newsworthiness AND the fact that most of them were, well, less spectacularly horrible than those two stories. (Please note the emphasized words; let’s not get sidetracked, yet again, by all-or-none, “either it’s the Manson murders or it’s jay-walking” caricatures). While the Shepard and Byrd incidents involved spectacularly brutal, vicious, hateful torture/murders, most (9/12) of Ghosty’s incidents did not involve killings. I pointed out the national press – and the national attention span – can’t deal with more than a very small fraction of them.
A little arithmetic. There are about 300,000,000 people in the country. The homicide rate is about 8x10^-5 per year. That works out to about 66 murders every day. (Note: All of them are horrible.) I don’t think anyone would quibble with an estimate that criminally nasty hateful incidents of the order of the nonfatal ones on Ghosty’s list occur at least 10 times as frequently. That’s more than 600 such incidents every day. Today’s New York Times had 22 stories in its “National” section. Most of them dealt with the doings of the President, Congress, stories with economic impact… only a couple of them had to do with crime of any sort. (And, no, I didn’t choose the NYTimes because it’s a left-wing rag intent on distracting its readers from the real news of the War on White Christians. The Columbus Dispatch had only 23 articles covering national and international news.)
Well, according to the GhostMan, my challenge to the evidence supporting his “liberal agenda of the mainstream media” theory was unpersuasive:
| Quote | | Russell, I'll have to deal with your pathetic rebuttal later |
I was, of course, crestfallen, but I figured our vaporous friend was either (a) doing the Disdainful False Confidence display characteristic of his species (where bluster and bravado substitute for data and logic) or (b) he would bring something new to the discussion we hadn’t considered.
Alas, it turns out to be (a). The Insubstantial One “destroyed” my case with his eventual comment (April 26 2006, 20:45). Exhibit A: [I had pointed out, after stipulating that all of the “exhibits, A-L” were indeed deplorable, that this particular story didn’t quite rate national news, in light of the limitations outlined above. Ghosty implied that I was quoting selectively to downplay the seriousness of the crime:]
| Quote | | (GoP: ) Let's read a little more, shall we? All emphases are mine. [quote]"Just a whole bunch of people rushed the car. I was thinking 20 girls; my husband said more like 30," said Michelle Essig, who was driving to the hospital when the people stormed her car. "They opened up my car door and started punching my friend, who just had a C-section three weeks ago..." |
Of course, that’s newsworthy because the mob in question had undoubtedly done their research and had known that the friend in question had had a C-section three weeks before. | Quote | ..."Essig said she attempted to escape the mob.
"They shook the car, they were jumping on the windows. There was a guy on the roof of my car," Essig said. "They tried to pull me out of the vehicle, that's when I gassed it and floored it. They continued to assault my vehicle."
She said the incident was unprovoked, but she has one theory about why it happened.
"I took great offense to the stuff they were yelling. It seemed to be a racially-motivated thing," Essig said.
"'You white b's, you racist b's.' I don't remember everything -- I was caught up in the moment," said Sharon Roffitt, who was in the car when it was attacked. "My window was down. They were swinging at me and hit me."
Whatever the motivation was, witnesses said the attack escalated fast.
"They were shaking this car. It's hard to shake, but the group could have rolled it over," witness Russell Anderson said.
Essig called 911 after the attack, but she could not give a good description of any particular person in the crowd who rushed her car -- only that many of the attackers were black and that they were wearing green. |
(GoP again: )| Quote | | What would have happened to them if they hadn't escaped? The mob was attempting to beat them and drag them out of the car. Some "contretemps"! |
Now, I repeat: unfortunate, deplorable, illustrative of brutish, hateful, racially charged nastiness? – yes. National news? – no. The objects of the mob’s ire call it “unprovoked”. Well… “uncalled for” perhaps; but not completely out of the blue. The incident followed what I characterized as a “traffic contretemps”:| Quote | | KMBC's Chris Nagus reported that two cars with two different couples were on the way to Children's Mercy Hospital when another car cut between them. One of the drivers asked the cutting driver not to block them. Then, things got out of control when a mob came out of nowhere, Nagus reported. |
But then Ghost more than implies that I had called the whole mob scene a “contretemps” – when clearly I was referring to the obnoxious driving behavior that had led up to the mob scene. Now, is Ghost being intentionally deceitful here, or just not reading very carefully? Only Ghost knows for sure. But if the latter, is he really ready for the >100-fold increase in reading load he seems to be demanding from his daily national police blotter? (See the arithmetic interlude, above).
OK. At this point, the Ghost Guy skipped over to Exhibit D. I had pointed out that the scene in question, involving a mob of Hawaiian natives menacing some white people, was – though, again, not pretty - not the stuff of national news, and may have been as much alcohol-fueled as hate-fueled.
A vigilant and indignant Ghost, exercising his on-again off-again attention skills, pointed out:| Quote | You snipped out the previous sentence. Here it is:
Quote
Kai Dechape said yesterday that he heard one attacker say, "Any f..... haoles want to die?"
Know what a "haole" is? |
Why, yes, I do. For the benefit of readers who might not know, it’s a pejorative native Hawaiian term for white people. Sort of like “cracker”, I guess. But – again – someone involved in a (nonfatal – sure: nasty, deplorable, criminal, etc. - but apparently not resulting in serious injuries) incident saying that he heard threatening abusive language… it’s just a few ticks shy of the Mathew Shepard or James Byrd horrors.
Finally, Ghost pleads for a little “balance” in reporting, citing an item from that model of journalistic balance, David Horowitz's e-zine, and finished up with another lurid vicious horrible grisly terrible deplorable sickening incident involving black criminals and (presumably) white victims. A story in which the criminals were arrested and charged with “second-degree lynching”, but apparently Ghost and – not coincidentally – Fox News is outraged because | Quote | | local prosecutor David Schwacke commented, "We haven't been able to establish hate as a motive." |
.Now I have a few things to say about this. First, and most importantly, horrible vicious etc. etc. things happen. They happen way too often. But reporting one of them – or even lists of them – culled by idealogues like David Horowitz (or the RightWing Roundup, or whatever) does absolutely nothing toward demonstrating that the media is selectively exaggerating anti-minority, or ignoring anti-majority, hate crimes.
Second, this incident may indeed have been a “hate crime”. But. As the prosecutor noted, the fact that the criminals were of one race, and the victims were (I guess) of another, is not enough for him to make – let alone prove – the case that it is.
Finally, I read in Ghost’s parting shot:| Quote | | Does this meet your level of brutality? |
an insinuation that I – or anyone else who thinks his LAMSM theory is as unfounded and, frankly, ridiculous as his view of evolution – am selectively insensitive to brutality depending on the political correctness of the victim/perpetrator minority/majority identities. I find that way beyond offensive. If I’ve read that wrong, I’d be interested to learn what the purpose of the question really was.
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Must... not... scratch... mosquito bite.
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