were first subjected to the
media circus that was the so-called and now-dropped Duke*** Case. For
months thereafter, you couldn't
pick up a newspaper or turn on the television or radio without learning some
new tidbit about the
accused lacrosse players, even as their accuser remained shrouded in
mystery. Today we know there was no
rape and now not even a case at all, but even in those early days it was
apparent enough that there were
glaring problems with the accuser's story (or, as it happened, stories). But
not even those problems
prevented the case from consuming the attention of the sages in our national
media, whose foot soldiers
decamped from New York and Los Angeles and such places to descend on Durham,
North Carolina, as quickly
as they could find it on the map.
The case was simply irresistible to our sophisticated betters in Manhattan
and the tonier zip codes of
southern California. The "victim" was black and a single mother, each in
itself a shield against
criticism, but taken together an impregnable defense against any judgment of
her own behavior and
motives. Furthermore, she claimed to have been attacked by a group of
southern white elites, thus
justifying the low opinion of such elites held by those who live within
sight of the Pacific Ocean or
the Hudson River. (Never mind that none of the accused were actually from
the south.) Only when the
evidence of the defendants' innocence and of the prosecutor's misconduct
accumulated to an undeniable
critical mass did the media slink off to await the next Big Story.
Compare the attention given the Duke case with that accorded a far more
heinous crime, one whose victims
have thus far failed to arouse the sympathies or even the notice of those
who found so much enjoyment in
their condemnation of the lacrosse players. Chances are, unless you live in
Tennessee, you will not
recognize the names Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Christian, 21,
and Newsome, 23, both of
Knoxville, were driving through that city together on the night of January 6
when they were ***ped
and ***ed. Newsome's burned body was found along some railroad tracks on
January 7. Christian
remained missing for two more days until her body, stuffed in a trash can,
was found in a home not far
from where Newsome's was found. Police and prosecutors allege both victims
were***d before being
killed. Yes, both. Three men and a woman have been charged with the crimes
in a 46-count grand jury
indictment handed down in Knoxville on January 31.
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 *** from being the Story of the Month. Yet the
***s 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 *** 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 ***s
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 *** victims and 40 percent of its known
*** suspects. Latinos make up
46 percent of the city's total population and were about half of its ***
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
*** victims and 2 percent of its known *** 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 ***
Report, which tracks every ***
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 *** 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 ***
in Los Angeles County. Race and ethnicity, like age and gender, are stark
predictors of *** risk.
Blacks are vastly more likely to die from *** 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
*** victims nationally in
2004. Local numbers mirror these national disparities. According to an
analysis for The Times by county
health officials of *** 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 *** 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 *** risk along
racial and ethnic lines - and
the extremity of suffering which *** 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.