..and their own paper fails to cover the story until it draws national attention. The local police also don't want to investigate it as a "hate crime".
Search warrants issued for Twitter accounts todayThe essential facts:
Quote:
Two Pilot reporters, Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami, were assaulted on April 14. Their car was stopped at a light at Church Street and Brambleton Avenue when a pedestrian threw a rock at the vehicle's window, according to a police report. The driver, Forster, got out to confront the rock-thrower and was attacked by several people, the report says. He and Rostami suffered minor injuries.
Norfolk police arrested a 16-year-old last week and charged him with throwing a missile at a vehicle, a felony, two charges of assault by mob, destruction of property and participation in a riot. The juvenile's name is being withheld because of his age. Police said last week that they are still investigating and that a handful of people were likely involved.
From the twitter accounts in question:
Quote:
In one tweet written about 90 minutes after the attack, a user wrote that she feels sorry "for the white man who got beat up at the light." Another user responded that he did not feel bad, writing "do it for trayvon martin."
16-year-old arrested 4 days agoNewspaper makes excuses for not covering the story.:
Quote:
Here is what happened. Forster and Rostami were victims of what police described as a simple assault, and, initially, they did not want to be named in a news story. If these were the circumstances with anyone in the community, we would not have done a story.
In the interest of not making the OP excessively long I didn't quote all the stories. There's plenty more, including an O'Reilly segment, and indications that, for some reason, the police have flip-flopped on if it was a "hate crime" or not, flagging it as such in the report, then later unflagging it. There's more there, but right from the start this claim is pretty much wildly unbelievable; news agencies are not in the habit of not doing stories because someone doesn't wish to be named, or even caring if someone wants to be named other than if they want to preserve a source. At a minimum, this speaks to blatant favoritism towards their own employees.
The story further indicates that the reporters who were attacked didn't hear anything to indicate that it was racial in nature.
That's the thing. Maybe it's really not. Maybe the police really haven't found anything (yet; the search warrants were only issued today apparently) to indicate it really was racial, rather than just a bunch of young people throwing a brick at a car, that just happened to have 2 white people in it. Frankly, I find the fact that the reporters weren't beaten a lot more seriously an indication it really wasn't racial in nature.
The problem is that "bias" is only investigated this way when the victims are white and/or the perpetrators are black. Had the circumstances been reversed, this is what we'd have seen:
A) a front-age story on reporters being beaten by a racist white mob, possibly with the names of the victims withheld.
B) The police being loudly castigated for not investigating it as a hate crime, and screaming and yelling about how its "yet more evidence of racism by the police."
C) The police being loudly castigated for taking too long to investigate the case (the incident occurred April 14th) and "not caring" about assaults on blacks by whites.
D) Jesse Jackson and/or Al Sharpton ranting and carrying on in their usual fashion.
E) Marches, protests, and the whole nine yards of outrage at the mere suggestion that it's anything but a "lynch mob". (and we definitely wouldn't see any public acknowledgement that the reporters didn't hear anything indicating racial motivation).
And there's the rub. It's entirely possible this really is just an assault, not a hate crime, and that it's been investigated in keeping with the severity of the crime, and that it really wasn't a priority story as the paper claims it was not.
But if the circumstances were reversed, it could never be treated in a calm fashion. Outrage is manatory for blacks assaulted by whites. If whites get assaulted, outrage is to be avoided until evidence of a hate crime is incontrovertible.
The problem isn't how we treat cases with white victims. That's how every case should be handled; we should be reluctant to call something a "hate crime". We shouldn't even have "hate crimes". The problem is how we treat cases with black victims. It has become, by virtue of the concept of a "hate crime" a more serious crime to assault a black person, or be white and assault any minority, than to be assaulted by a black person, or to be a white victim.
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