February 07, 2007

The Fulford File, By James Fulford

Hate Crimes, Real Crimes, And Relevance

We've done a lot of writing over the years on the media's unwillingness to report on race, starting with a reprint of Peter Brimelow's 1993 review of Paved With Good Intentions. But, despite our express instructions, it gets more and more blatant every day.

Recently, Internet128.com had a post titled The case has not raised issues of race, sex and class:

“The Boston Globe has a long article on two lesbian women who were attacked by 'teenagers' after leaving a park in East Boston, where they had watched a 4th of July fireworks display in 2003. There’s barely a word in the article about the perpetrators, so I take it they aren’t lacrosse players from Duke University. The article’s bottom line is that the women got a $205,000 settlement last fall, apparently on the grounds that the agency policing the area should have realized that if you don’t have hordes of police at events in East Boston, somebody will almost die. Well, duh.

“One of the victims needed 220 stitches according to the article. That’s some serious savagery.”

It took me a while to find the solution to “guess the criminal’s ethnicity” game.

I actually found a clue in an SPLC report about “teenage hate”:

After the teens allegedly taunted the family with anti-gay slurs and threats, 15-year-old Anita Santiago allegedly slugged 35-year-old Lisa Craig hard enough to knock her to the ground. According to police reports, Santiago and her fellow gang members then bashed Craig’s head against the sidewalk and kicked the woman so brutally that her brain hemorrhaged and she needed more than 200 stitches. [SPLCenter.org: Age of Rage]

Oh, that kind of teenager! You mean a Hispanic teenager! East Boston, known as Eastie, is being taken over by Hispanics, including Hispanic gangs.  There's nothing about that in the SPLC report, of course, nor about traditional Hispanic homophobia.

The Hispanic girl, who was the only one of the teenagers charged, was not charged with a hate crime. (I'm going to take a wild intuitive leap and assume that if one member of a teenage mob is Hispanic, they all are. If there's one thing teenage gangsters aren't, it's multicultural.) And when she came up for trial, she wasn’t really punished. (A year of probation, and she was ordered to get her  GED and take anger management counseling.) [East Boston teen sentenced in beating, Boston Globe, July 12, 2005]

You may know that the Associated Press Style Guide is used by almost all papers in the United States.

Race: Identification by race is pertinent:

In some stories that involve a conflict, it is equally important to specify that an issue cuts across racial lines. If, for example, a demonstration by supporters of bussing to achieve racial balance in schools includes a substantial number of whites, that fact should be noted.

This is the excuse the Associated Press invokes when it gets caught, as it regularly does, failing to report the race of a criminal who is still on the loose, when lives might be saved by knowing what the suspect looks like.

A particularly bad case recently: a black man who was raping young white men at gunpoint in the Houston area. (See Nicholas Stix, Uncensored: Another Associated Press Scandal: Wire Service Covers Up Black-Male-on-White-Male Rape Spree for full details.) The point here is that, knowing the race of the suspect, and of his potential victims, said potential victims can take precautions.

While the AP Stylebook doesn't say why  they treat race as not "pertinent", a similar stylebook put out by a Canadian paper (the Toronto Globe and Mail) says this:

"We must be especially scrupulous about avoiding irrelevant references  in stories about criminal charges or other matters in which identifying a person's  race or national origin may unfairly associate an entire group with criminal or antisocial activity."

It's that little word “unfairly” that does it. Many groups are fairly associated with criminal or antisocial activity. And perhaps the public needs to know that.

The people who write the news stories, and the stylebooks, don't want you to think about the "color of crime," or the color of “antisocial activity" so they've decided to suppress it. They believe stereotypes to be "inaccurate, resistant to change, overgeneralized, exaggerated, and generally destructive,"  rather than, as conservatives tend to think, fairly accurate and not so bad.

I think I may have found the chronological origin of this peculiar suppression of the facts

October 25, 1896: The [New York] Times slogan: “All the News That’s Fit to Print” makes its first appearance on the editorial page. 

August 11, 1946: The Times introduce an editorial change announcing they will no longer refer to the race of persons suspected of a crime unless race is relevant to the story. [The New York Times: A Chronology: 1851-2006, Researched and Compiled by Bill Lucey, June 25, 2006]

In 2005, Newsweek ran a story falsely alleging Koran desecration by American troops (one group the media is willing to stereotype). This resulted in Muslim rioting all over the world, Muslims being willing to riot for almost any reason.

At the time that happened, Instapundit wrote this:

"If they had wrongly reported the race of a criminal and produced a lynching, they'd feel much worse—which is why they generally don't report such things, a degree of sensitivity they don't extend to reporting on, you know, minor topics like wars".

I remember thinking that was very peculiar, since there haven't been any lynchings in the United States for forty years or so. What exactly is going on here?

Well, one thing that hasn't been abolished is rioting.

The article above that gave the date of the New York Times 1946 venture into what we now call "Political Correctness" gives another story:

“May 29, 1964: The New York Times published a page one story about the Blood Brothers, a black youth gang operating in Harlem who were reportedly recruiting and training forces planning to kill whites.

“The Times met with an outpouring of criticism once the story rolled off the presses. Questions were raised, for instance, whether there ever was such a gang by that name. Even if they existed, a Times editor acknowledged, they carelessly relied too much on police accounts of the gang and the danger they posed to the community, which later were to be found exaggerated. The reporter who wrote the story eventually resigned. Other papers picked up on it reshaping it with sensational headlines, such as “HARLEM MAU MAU”—creating a sense of hysteria in the community and may have contributed to the riot that inflamed Harlem on July 18th (lasting through the 23rd) after a black youth was shot by an off-duty white police lieutenant, leading to scores of arrests, injuries, and causing $50,000 in property damage.”

The claim here is that five days of rioting were partly in response to claims of black gang violence, which were, of course, essentially true, and have since gotten many times worse.  But it's not the newspaper that's at fault, it's the rioters.

That's not the only problem with telling the truth. Now any writing on race risks some kind of consequences for the writer—Scott McConnell used to have a job at the New York Post. Sam Francis used to have a job at the Washington Times.  The list could go on.

When I discussed this on VDARE.COM a few years ago, I said:

“But media blackouts on race and crime produce what Marxists call a ‘false consciousness’. People don't know the facts about crime. And they can't decide on public policy because they don't have those facts.”

Remember, most newspapers in America use the AP stylebook, which tells them to suppress facts that the Liberal Consensus has decided you don't need to know.

And these are important facts—sometimes life and death important.

What can you do? Well, now there's the Internet, so that you can find these things out for yourself.

There's also VDARE.COM. We don't even own a copy of the AP stylebook, and we're not planning to buy one.

Sometimes this shows up as stylistic errors, but mostly it shows up as a commitment to the truth about race and society.

Religion writer Terry Mattingly founded a blog called GetReligion, because he felt that most of the press doesn't "Get Religion".