The job of the mainstream media today is to make you think that the views of ten percent of the country are actually the views of 80 percent of the country.” – Shant Mesrobian
One of the biggest transgressions the legacy media commits is the lack of identifying suspects of crimes, if the suspects are minorities. If the suspects are White, straight, males, that is almost the first thing the talking head report. If the suspect is Black, Hispanic, gay, transsexual, Muslim or an illegal immigrant, those descriptive identifiers are rarely, if ever, mentioned. Why is that?
The reasons can be found, indirectly, in the justification for not publishing booking photos by the Kansas City Star which is part of the McClatchy Company which publishes 29 newspapers. The first reason given is: “At the time of booking, the person being photographed has been charged but not convicted. This means in some cases published mugshots are permanently available for people acquitted of the crimes for which they were charged.” That sounds logical and fair.
The second justification is, at best, specious: “Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness.” While this doesn’t specifically address the media’s prohibition on listing the race of a suspect in a violent crime, (unless the suspect is White), it illustrates their thinking. Almost all of the network, cable news, and print media have similar policies. In other words, the mainline press is saying that if they publish descriptions of the suspects of violent crimes, their viewers and readers will know that the majority of violent crimes are committed by minorities. This is a well established, documented fact. Would anyone know it if they saw or read the descriptions of suspects reported by most media?
As a result of this misreporting, the mainstream media is ripe for, and always falls for the false reporting of so-called hate crimes. The most infamous of these is the Jussie Smollett farce. Jussie reported that he was attacked by two MAGA white supremacists, in the early morning hours in Chicago, in -20 degree weather, who told Jussie that “this is MAGA country”. Smollett has been prosecuted and convicted of perpetrating this hoax. Jussie Smollet’s case was just one of many. Another high profile hoax pushed by the media was the Duke Lacrosse team’s false rape allegation. Not only do these false allegations disrupt and often ruin the accused person’s life, they also give a false impression of how much racism is actually in our country.
In his 2019 book, Hate Crime Hoax, political scientist Wilfred Reilly, collected data from 346 hate crime allegations. Reilly found that only one in three of those accusations were genuine. From the information promoted by the mainstream press, the public probably calculates that racism is three times as bad as it actually is. What is worse is that communities that are hit worse by violent crime, are unaware of what the actual criminals look like.
The job of a free press is to report the facts so that the public can form opinions from those facts. When the media omits facts, or spins the facts to fit their social or political agendas, they do more harm than good. This is surely a leading reason why public opinion of journalists is at a near record low.
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1 thought on “Media Shell Game – Buz Blog”
As usual; Buz, you are true to the real world of factual policing. In identifying a fleeing suspect a description of the suspect must include his-her skin color.
Today I know a white grandmother who was called a “racist” by her 16 year old granddaughter in Seattle. Washington for being a conservative. My oh my, how far we have come from Martin Luther King Jr’s “I look forward to the day my little children are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.” That’s my judgement too.
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