On Saturday, a man drove his car onto a Seattle freeway that had been closed by a Black Lives Matter crowd. The driver killed one person and seriously injured another after going the wrong way up a ramp and then around a barricade. Reports noted that police “don’t believe impairment was a factor.”
Over the weekend, news outlets replayed the brutal hit, but there’s one thing you won’t learn from their coverage: The driver was black and his victims were white.
NPR linked this attack to other car-ramming incidents by “right-wing extremists targeting Black Lives Matter protesters.” They quote a researcher about how these right-wingers were “trying to intimidate the most recent wave of BLM protesters, to stop their movement.”
The driver was a Seattle local named Dawit Kelete. But you’ll find scant mention of the driver’s ethnicity in mainstream media coverage. You might have more easily learned that Kelete was black by going to the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. The American national media also doesn’t note that Kelete’s two victims were white. You can find that out over at the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
Among the few U.S. outlets to mention the race of the driver is Heavy.com. The rest of the news media seemingly would rather just have people assume that a white driver attacked two black protesters. Acknowledging the driver’s and victims’ ethnicity wouldn’t advance their narrative of oppression, so it apparently isn’t newsworthy.
One case doesn’t prove a pattern. It could just be that while the American media knows almost everything about this killer, including his name, age, and where he lives, they couldn’t find information on his race. Possibly the foreign news outlets were just lucky to discover that information.
Of course, the media outlets might honestly not view race as essential to the story. But their selective reporting of it shows that they think race is important when it involves certain races. The problem is that it gives readers a biased perspective, inflaming prejudice and creating stereotypes.
Research conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center, of which I am president, on all police shootings from 2013 to 2015 found that while local news coverage will often mention the race of the officer and the suspect, the national coverage is much more selective. While the evidence indicates that black officers are no less likely to shoot suspects than white officers, local news coverage of black officers shooting black suspects gets picked up by the national news in just 9% of cases. By contrast, 38% of the cases in which local news reported on a white officer shooting a black suspect get national coverage.
The selective coverage creates the belief that white officers are the problem — they are the ones shooting blacks, presumably because white officers treat black suspects differently than white ones. Watching the news, you would never guess that the research found that black officers were just as likely as white officers to shoot an unarmed black suspect.
The media’s selective coverage has done real harm. It has heightened racial divides and sown distrust of the police in the communities that need them most. Now, with police sidelined and facing “defunding,” gun violence is rising fast in major cities around the country.
npr loved the gay, mulin, terrorist obama-shit. they stroked and licked the content of his testicals for over 8 years. if you recall during Trump’s second debate with slut hilary, the entire rebate review board for one of the major channels was the entire npr acting team – alleged journalists. npr never printed the story of obama-shit’s two gay lovers being killed a few months prior to his run for the senate. recall in chi., and cook country the banks were being pressured to give black families 110-123% mortgage for expensive home of which the banks knew not a cent would b paid back. obama-shit, who has never been barred in any state, was the lead lawyer harassing these bankers for mortgages that failed before the ink dried on the paper.
-the media is now the propaganda arm of the new communist party. no different than in 1933, under Hitler.
-DEFUND NPR
The left has been inventing and promoting the fallacy of widespread and systemic racism since the Obama administration. Racism is one of their primary political weapons and, to them, that’s ALL it is… a tool. When they can’t find any (that isn’t their own) then they invent it. Destruction and deaths caused by their irresponsibility is all more that can be exploited.
These scumbags need to be kept as far from political power in our country as is possible.