Fourteen of the 16 victims in Michigan were African-American, police said. Flint is a majority African-American community. In majority-white Leesburg, Virginia, two victims were black and one was Hispanic.Quite the interesting twist. First the media ignored this story, then when the composite sketch made him look like a white anglo they ran with the racist serial killer angle. Now when he turns out to be an Arab CNN runs with "Israeli citizen". Nowhere in their story can the word 'Arab' be found.
Leesburg Police Chief Joseph Price said he believed the suspect was targeting African-Americans.
"For our community ... when you look at our demographics and you look at the victims here, my belief is he selected the victims in Leesburg based on the color of their skin," Price said.
Here are two screen shots of the story for posterity. The first is the lede and a photo/headline, the second is the end of the story with Firefox's Cntl-F function to look for the word 'Arab' in the entire story:
Anyone reading the story would likely consider the suspect an Israeli--and he is--but most consider Israelis as Jewish. ABC identified the man as an Arab in the first sentence of their story, but the WaPo and the NY Times did not mention it in their early reports.
And of course almost none of them are mentioning the possibility of this being jihad or terrorism despite the suspects ties to the Detroit and lower Michigan area and despite his looks and the Israeli passport (deflection of suspicion). Even if he turns out to be a sicko Coptic Christian or Druze (or even a Jew) the press has an obligation to report on the possible terrorism angle when such things occur. After all, isn't America fighting Muslim extremists all around the world? Aren't Muslim terrorists still our prime enemy, many of whom are Arab or connected to the Palestinian struggle?
4 comments:
I think there are dangerous consequences to ignoring news, or certain facts surrounding news events. This has been going on now for quite some time. Of course, I fault leftist journalists who will only write left-leaning stories, but the editors are in charge of this patent dishonesty. We aren’t getting many human-interest stories out of Iraq and Afghanistan, only IED stories and body counts.
None of the media (beyond Fox News) covered the story about the democratic legislator who said he wished it were Palin who died in an airplane crash. Now of course, state run media doesn’t want to run an Arab story because well, it is difficult enough getting that mosque build at ground zero.
Other than the sharp decline in the number of subscribers to print media and the equally sharp drop in the number of people who watch CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS … there isn’t much we can do about media dishonesty. Other than bitch … I am frankly amazed the sponsors continue flooding the print media with so much money, aren’t you?
Frankly I'm not surprised. I think advertising has gotten so customer focused these days (they track every website we visit and most of our food purchases, for instance) that they can make money by targeting a niche viewer. Nothing else makes much sense.
I'd be interested to know the difference in advertising rates between Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. Fox still keeps getting stronger, while the others are getting weaker.
At some point there must be an acceptable loss percentage and changes will need to be made at those networks that continue to lose money.
Gotta be based on ratings.
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