A Washington Free Beacon report last week from our colleague Charles Lehman put data behind what we all know to be true: that the media harp on violence carried out by whites and downplay it when the perpetrator is black—or should we say “Black.”
That report went up on Thursday, the day after police arrested the black nationalist who gunned down 13 people in a Brooklyn subway station. His race—and his professed bigotry against whites and Jews—were either excluded from media reports entirely or described in an anodyne way. The New York Times described his “harshly bigoted views”—against whom, they could not say.
Then came the release of video from a police shooting in Grand Rapids, Mich., an incident with a white “perpetrator” and a black victim. Video shows 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya fleeing from the unidentified officer before grabbing for the officer’s taser. The two struggle on the ground before the officer fatally shoots Lyoya.
The incident became the subject of wall-to-wall news coverage, with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN referring to Lyoya as an “unarmed Black man”—even though he had grabbed the cop’s taser.
Add to that the media’s uncritical promulgation of the grieving family’s claim that Lyoya was “killed like an animal” and family lawyer Benjamin Crump’s characterization of the incident as an “execution.” Crump pushed his claim on air with MSNBC’s racial agitator Al Sharpton, who is set to deliver the eulogy this week. It’s no wonder Michiganders spent the weekend protesting. (The press apparently doesn’t use pompous fact-checking clauses like “claimed without evidence” unless it’s former president Donald Trump or one of his allies who’s doing the talking.)