Thread: Black-on-White Crime: HuffPost Writer Justifies the Double Standard

Last week, my friend and podcast partner Chez Pazienza wrote a piece about a case involving several African American youths in Norfolk, Virginia who allegedly beat up a pair of reporters from the Virginian-Pilot newspaper, Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami. Forster happens to be white and Rostami is Iranian. I hastened to mention the races of everyone involved because it applies to the rest of the story. The incident went largely unnoticed in the press, mainly because the the Virginian-Pilot only published news of the incident in the form of a opinion piece written by Michelle Washington two weeks later. There's another reason it wasn't covered by the Pilot, and I'll get to that shortly.

Washington's opinion piece reached Matt Drudge's yellow-journalism desk and BLAM! Drudge posted a link to the op/ed with the predictably misleading headline: "100 Black Teens Beat White Couple in Norfolk... Media Bury Attack."

Every angry right-winger looking for an excuse for their ridiculous false equivalences about white racism versus "black racism" had a brand new hobby horse to ride. On Fox News Channel, Bill O'Reilly issued one of his personal jihads against the Virginian-Pilot, sending his creepy stalking danger-boy, Jesse Watters, to Virginia to accost the editor of the paper, Denis Finley, and find out why he was obviously helping to oppress the white majority. Why would the newspaper wait for so long before publishing the story? Why won't this newspaper get its boot off the neck of white people?! Why does the news media hate white people?! I'm paraphrasing, of course. But that was the subtext of O'Reilly's segments.

During one segment, O'Reilly and contributor Bernard Goldberg, in a fantastically propagandized illustration of the wealthy white majority playing the oppressed victim, lamented what they considered to be a journalistic "double-standard." The Trayvon Martin case, a white-on-black crime, received and continues to receive ample media attention while the reportedly black-on-white Forster/Rostami case was only given an initial opinion page write-up two weeks later (there have since been numerous stories about the assault).

Chez defended Bill O'Reilly and Fox News Channel for saying that there's a double-standard at play: on one hand the press and, specifically, cable news continues to be outraged by the Trayvon Martin case, while, on the other hand, the Virginian-Pilot case didn't receive any attention at all, thus ignoring a black-on-white crime and illustrating some sort of double-standard epidemic. (I should note here that this column isn't necessarily a refutation of Chez's piece. Consider this another point of view on double-standards.)

In a way, both O'Reilly and Chez are correct. In a way. There's absolutely a double-standard because the crimes -- the Trayvon Martin case and the Forster/Rostami case -- are vastly different in almost every way and should, therefore, be treated with vastly different coverage. They're different in terms of outcome, they're different in terms of details and each have very different historical and contemporaneous contexts.

The truth is, not every white-on-black crime is given Trayvon Martin-level coverage. Not by a long shot. So why was there so much outrage swirling around Trayvon?

Let's do the list.

First, Trayvon was a kid walking through a white neighborhood armed with nothing but snacks. Second, Trayvon was shot and killed. Third, and most suspiciously, law enforcement released George Zimmerman without charging him with any crimes, and Zimmerman was allowed to keep his firearm. Fourth, there's a sinister gun violence meets gun control meets NRA component here. Fifth, there appeared to be details that the Sanford police were withholding from the public, making it seem like yet another example of whites covering-up a white-on-black crime. Sixth, there's evidence of racial profiling by Zimmerman. And finally, and most importantly, the historical context is far more complicated when it comes to white-on-black crime, as well as the white presumption of African American guilt when the racial roles are reversed. More on that presently.

Meanwhile in Virginia, even though the attack was clearly traumatic for Foster and Rostami, they weren't hospitalized nor did they receive medical treatment for their minor injuries. There's no evidence of racial profiling -- in other words, there's no evidence that the attack was racially motivated and it probably wouldn't have happened at all if Forster hadn't jumped out of his car to confront the youths. Even though a rock hit Forster's car window, the window doesn't appear to have been shattered. And the police have already arrested a kid for throwing the rock, while there are warrants out for another assailant. Again, while traumatic, it's a far cry from the ugliness and inexplicable mysteries of the Trayvon case. No potential cover-ups. No fatalities. No serious injuries. The initial characterization by Michelle Washington and Drudge that "hundreds" of black teens wantonly beat a white couple (only "a handful" were involved), hospitalizing them, while their car was trashed appears to be highly exaggerated because, if true, the injuries wouldn't be nearly as minor and, as it turns out, the reporters drove their own vehicle home that night and voluntarily declined to be named in a news story. Police chief Sharon Chamberlin said, "This is a situation where you had a whole bunch of [movie theater] events let out all at once, you had a lot of people on the street, you had an assault occur and that was isolated with a small number of people." So another major question here: is this even newsworthy? Perhaps it would be in a small town police-scanner rag, but Norfolk is not a small town.

Bob Cesca: Black-on-White Crime and the Reasons for a Media Double-Standard

That wasn't logic.

There is a reason why the term "Class bully" was invented. One person obnoxiously abusing many others without justification.

Whites are a world minority. By his logic it impossible for whites to oppress anyone in any location on the planet for any reason regardless of the behavior.

'It's not persecution when there are more of you to persecute."

His non white reasoning means that when Tyrants commit mass murder it cannot be persecution of his subjects because Tyrants are the minority and subjects are the majority.