Ever Hear Of The Channon Christian Case?

[Gotch]

I placed this here because of some of the content and the fact that a web search often links to some hate speech.

This happened in Knoxville and yet we hear very little about it here?!?!?

I would think that double standard would be the only way to describe the near total media blackout of this case.

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She was tortured and raped for 3/4 days. Urinated on repeatedly and finally killed. It appears that race was a major factor in her becoming a victim. Yet we hear about a few "hurtful words" over and over in the media.

I don't consider myself reactionary, in fact I like to think of myself as somewhat calculating and I certainly don't see myself as race fixated, yet a close look at this case exposes a clear double standard in race incident reporting.

I also believe that the hate speech from people like Al Sharpton is a factor in what happened to these young people.

I also believe that the media blackout is to blame for some white hate groups being able to latch onto the story and use it. Report the news, not just the news that fits your narrow view of the world is what I'd tell the networks.

More details? Run a web search.........I can't even bring myself to go into detail....

[TheBeast]

The story was given a few brief mentions on the AP wire, which were in turn carried on the Fox News and ABC News websites, but you'll find no mention of the crime in the online archives of CNN, MSNBC, CBS News, the New York Times, or the Washington Post. Run a similar search for stories on the Duke case and you'll be sifting through the results for hours. It's not as though these news providers have shied away from crime since being embarrassed in the Duke case. For example, when Tara Grant went missing from her suburban Detroit home in February, the investigation grew and grew in media attention until it became a national story. An AP story appearing on the MSNBC website ran under the headline, "Mich. case a perfect recipe for media frenzy."? And indeed it was. When Grant's dismembered body was discovered inside her home, triggering a manhunt for her husband and his eventual arrest, the coverage ramped up nearly to the point of Laci Peterson-type saturation. Only the carnival surrounding Anna Nichole Smith's death kept the Grant murder from being the Story of the Month. Yet the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome are known to almost no one outside Tennessee. Why?

It's simple: the four suspects accused of killing Christian and Newsome are blacks from the inner city of Knoxville.

Uh oh, we're not supposed to talk about such things, are we. We're careful to step ever so gingerly around issues of race and crime, except of course when there is an opportunity, as in the Duke case, to point to a group of privileged whites and say, "See? Look at how badly they've behaved! Look at how they treated that poor black single mother!"? And in the Michigan case we can look down our noses at a prosperous suburban white family and say, "Look how screwed up they are!"? A visitor from a foreign land might read the news and suspect America was plagued by rampaging hordes of collegiate lacrosse players and middle-aged suburbanites. And all the while the far more serious problem of violent crime among minorities in our inner cities is almost completely ignored.

To even broach the topic of inner city crime is almost a social taboo, rather like discussing the bride's old boyfriends at a wedding reception. But the figures, as they say, do not lie, and we do no one a service by trying to ignore them. Here in Los Angeles, for example, there were 481 murders investigated by the LAPD in 2006, but almost half of them occurred among the 18 percent of the city's population living in South and South-Central L.A. These areas are almost exclusively black and Latino.

Looking at the numbers more closely, blacks are about 11 percent of the city's population, but in 2006 they were 36 percent of its murder victims and 40 percent of its known murder suspects. Latinos make up 46 percent of the city's total population and were about half of its murder victims and suspects. Whites are about 29 percent of the population in Los Angeles but last year were only 4 percent of the city's murder victims and 2 percent of its known murder suspects.

To its credit, the Los Angeles Times has begun bringing some small measure of attention to these disturbing numbers in the form of its new online feature, the Homicide Report, which tracks every murder occurring in Los Angeles County and includes information on each victim's race. The inclusion of this information has been criticized in some quarters, and the Times's response to this criticism deserves quoting at length:

. . . The Homicide Report departs from this rule [against mentioning a victim's race] in the interest of presenting the most complete and accurate demographic picture of who is at risk of dying from homicide in Los Angeles County. Race and ethnicity, like age and gender, are stark predictors of homicide risk. Blacks are vastly more likely to die from homicide than whites, and Latinos somewhat more likely. Black men, in particular, are extraordinarily vulnerable: They are 4% of this country's population, but, according to the Centers for Disease Control, they represented 35% of homicide victims nationally in 2004. Local numbers mirror these national disparities. According to an analysis for The Times by county health officials of homicide data between 1991 and 2002, Latino men ages 20 to 24 were five times more likely than white men the same age to die, and black men were 16 times more likely.

The Homicide Report recognizes the peril of dehumanizing victims by reducing their lives and deaths to a few scant facts "? particularly racial designations which provide only the roughest markers of ancestry and history. But given the magnitude of difference in homicide risk along racial and ethnic lines "? and the extremity of suffering which homicide inflicts on subsets of the population "? we opt here to present information which lays bare racial and ethnic contours of the problem so conspicuous in the coroner's data. The goal is to promote understanding, and honor a basic journalistic principle: Tell the truth about who suffers . . .

Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald has pointed out the same type of stark disparities in writing about crime in New York City, but you can choose any city you like and find a similarly alarming set of figures. In the time Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and all the lesser voices in the Choir of the Perpetually Outraged have spent bellowing about the rantings of an aging radio gasbag, how many young black men have been busying themselves killing each other?

Only when the true magnitude of this problem is acknowledged can its solutions be identified and implemented. It will come too late for Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, of course, but in at last daring to report the grim but persistent truth in these statistics, perhaps the Los Angeles Times has opened a door through which the remedy to inner-city crime is found.

[jtw61194]

Both of these are wonderful posts that really make you do some thinking. If I tried to put into words what I feel about this particular subject and the popular media, it would be a rant and people would think I'm nuts. This is very troubling. I did take time to read that LA Times blog and it is eye-opening. I had heard the same types of crime statistics coming out of Richmond. Basically, most of the violent crimes occur within the city's public housing area. I will say this about the media. They are very dangerous and policies and procedures do change on their whims. The recent examples are certainly proff of that, but those of us who are older remember the starving children of Somalia, which led to U.S. military involvement and we also remember the dragging of killed U.S. soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu. Both examples of media coercion changed how we deal with foreign policy and how the world views the U.S. I almost wish I was in a log cabin in the middle of the woods with nobody to worry about but my own. I'm sickened by media and social hypocrisy.