Omitting Race: Politically Correct or Good Crime Reporting?
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{snip}
In general, news outlets have avoided racial and ethnic identifiers unless they were important to the case, or, perhaps, if victims’ descriptions were very detailed. They’d apply a test: Was the racial information useful to people in the community who might know the attacker or want to avoid harm themselves? Or was it so general that it only merely contributed to stereotypes about one group or another?
While many readers writing to the Bee and other outlets have attacked such reasoning as “political correctness” run amok, it’s actually plain good sense. There’s good reason to question the accuracy of most racial and ethnic identifiers, social science and legal experts have found, especially in crime situations. Why include anything that is vague and doesn’t add accurate details to a story?
First, there’s the fuzziness of the very description. The skin color of people who are black, white, Asian or Hispanic varies greatly and can overlap. {snip}
We have a long history of mixed offspring in this country, and as mixed race families grow in number, simple categories organized by skin color, hair texture and eye shape are less and less useful. {snip}
Consider, too, how “race” affects our thinking, especially in a situation like a crime. More often than any other type of error, wrongful convictions of innocent people can be traced back to mistaken identification. Memory is delicate, and especially so when it comes to emotional situations, as well as cross-racial descriptions. In one classic study testing racial prejudice, participants who witnessed an event with one black man and one white man were more likely to report that a black person held a knife even when it was the white man.
More recent implicit association tests have found that overall, white people more quickly “see” an object in a black man’s hand as a weapon, even if it is a tool or a can of Coke. {snip}
{snip}
Even if all we care about is catching the criminal, identifying race in a news report could easily do more harm than help. In one well-known case in Oneonta, N.Y., an elderly white woman whose home was burglarized remembered little except that the intruder was a young black man with a cut on his hand. Police collected the names of black male students at the local state university and stopped 200 young African Americans in all, checking for cuts. In the end, they never arresting anyone. When police and the community are blinded by ideas about what a particular race looks like, whole groups suffer from suspicion and the actual culprit can escape.
{snip}
(Posted on May 14, 2008)
Comments
“More recent implicit association tests have found that overall, white people more quickly “see” an object in a black man’s hand as a weapon, even if it is a tool or a can of Coke.”
Who knew? Social scientists are out there trying to detect evil in white behavior. I’m completely shocked…
There are a lot of {snips} in there but I’d have to say the woman who wrote this was going for comedy. Did she just say, not reporting race is good crime reporting, because other details are usually more accurate while witnesses identification of suspects by their race is often inaccurate? and in either case not helpful toward the apprehension of the subject? Then she wraps it up by saying her greatest concern is that the real culprit might escape. She is absolutely right about one thing. There sure is some ‘fuzzy’ thinking out there.
Posted by the brainwashing wore off me too at 6:12 PM on May 14
Why include anything that is vague and doesn’t add accurate details to a story?
First, there’s the fuzziness of the very description. The skin color of people who are black, white, Asian or Hispanic varies greatly and can overlap.
What a pack of out-and-out liars. Mind and language are brimming with fuzzy concepts. EVERYTHING is a fuzzy concept. One can play semantics with ANYTHING until it falls apart (depends on what your definition of “is” is). When the Bee quotes an eyewitness on anything other than race, they can and do report all kinds of “fuzzy” information, often of questionable reliability. But not when doing so violates their leftist commandments.
Red, orange, blue, green, indigo, violet; they all overlap.
(Btw, notice how they say skin color varies by race, but don’t offer to substitute skin color in descriptions)
Obviously, the Bee is just acting to protect the reputation of the black (and mestizo) race. It’s that simple. That’s not a very fuzzy concept.
Oh, btw, race is so “fuzzy” and “vague” that people self-identify racially at 99.86% accuracy:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050128221025.htm
Racial Groupings Match Genetic Profiles, Stanford Study Finds
What makes the current study, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, more conclusive is its size. The study is by far the largest, consisting of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. Of these, only five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study. That’s an error rate of 0.14 percent.
The staff at the Bee can only wish they got the facts right 99.86% of the time.
Posted by Svigor at 6:26 PM on May 14
“Or was it so general that it only merely contributed to stereotypes about one group or another?”
This is all they really care about. Most crime is committed by blacks, followed by Hispanics. Who cares if it is a stereotype or not? It’s true.
Posted by Civilized Neighbor at 6:37 PM on May 14
As anyone who has seen the original version of Hect and MacArthur’s The Front Page knows, there’s another reason that journalists don’t mention race: it might keep them from selling a story that doesn’t really qualify as news. A good example is the AP story about the two Alabama men whose argument over the late James Brown’s height led to a gunfight. If the two had been identified as black in the headline, no one would have bothered to read the story and no paper would have bought it.
Oddly, though news outlets never use words to describe race, they sometimes publish photographs or video, both of which unavoidably reveal race. The local Atmore, Alabama, paper briefly posted a photo of the black man shot in the gunfight mention above, for example. Both the Beaumont Enterprise and Fox News published a photograph of the young black robber who’s impervious to head shots from a 9mm pistol, although it’s vanished down the memory hole now. Judging from this video about the “working poor” resorting to food pantries, a foreigner might surmise that there are no white working poor in America.
So really, the rule is never to reveal the race of criminal suspects or beggars unless the story requires photos and/or video. I’m not sure how those decisions are made.
Posted by Gringo_Malo at 6:53 PM on May 14
Well, this is about what we should expect from “The Society of Professional Journalists”. This apparently is an uber-Liberal organization of patronizing writers who are rather proud of themselves.
On their mission statement, one of this group’s objectives is listed as being: “— To encourage diversity in journalism”.
Yes, there is that ugly “D word” again. What “diversity” has to do with accurate, entertaining, or objective writing remains a complete mystery to me.
Posted by Janelle at 6:54 PM on May 14
“They’d apply a test: Was the racial information useful to people in the community who might know the attacker or want to avoid harm themselves?”
The answer to this test is, of course, yes. One of the key factors that make likely survival in most American cities is the avoidance of “Blacks”.
By concealing the race of those who are most likely to commit violent criminal acts, the “news” makes necessary the learning of this simple truth through word of mouth and by sad experience.
Ronald
Posted by at 7:24 PM on May 14
As a retired newspaperman I can see the writer’s point — up TO a point. But what he’s implying is, “When a witness says, ‘It was a black man in his 20s,’ they’re almost always wrong.” That’s irrelevant. As long as the reporter is careful how he or she words the article — in other words, “The assailant was described as a light-skinned black man,” not, “The assailant WAS a light-skinned black man,” then I see no reason not to publish what the victim or a witness said.
What it amounts to is, blacks have given themselves a well-deserved reputation for producing far more than their share of dangerous thugs. Now they want the news media to refrain from quoting such descriptions because it, in their words, “reinforces racial stereotypes.” No, it just confirms what many Whites have already learned from bitter personal experience.
Posted by Wayne Engle at 7:33 PM on May 14
As soon as I grasp that I’m reading intentionally deceitful nonsense, I always revert to stereotypes and assume the author is of a member of a “vague” ethnic group:
Sally Lehrman
Do any of the dumb posters here, who “don’t adhere to journalistic conventions,” do the same?
Posted by Nordic at 7:44 PM on May 14
“Even if all we care about is catching the criminal, identifying race in a news report could easily do more harm than help.’
Sally Lehrman
“The only time we would use race would be an extraordinary incident where it would be extremely relevant.”
Brian Schwaner
(Yesterday)
“In other words, the more American you become, the more criminal you become.”
Mark Potok
Who are these people?
Posted by Paleo at 8:20 PM on May 14
The race of a suspect in a crime is the number one most significant identifying factor, and yet most of the time it is left out.Not politically correct, because most of the time it is black.
Posted by Peejay in Frisco at 8:23 PM on May 14
To see how this organization (The Society of Professional Journalists) thinks when it comes to the paralyzing subject of race, get the April 2008 hard copy of American Renaissance and turn to p.16.
You’ll get the picture…
Posted by Mike B. at 8:48 PM on May 14
Wait till Sally gets beaten and raped by a black with aids, then we’ll see how she describes the attacker.
Posted by Wallace Stroup at 8:53 PM on May 14
Race: very easy for a college admissions office to define when deciding how “diverse” their student population is but very difficult for a victim of a crime to assign to their attacker.
How convenient.
Posted by Patrick at 9:08 PM on May 14
Why didn’t this alleged “vagueness” preclude repeated mention of the race of the players in the Duke non-rape case?
Posted by Cassiodorus at 9:17 PM on May 14
“When police and the community are blinded by ideas about what a particular race looks like, whole groups suffer from suspicion and the actual culprit can escape.”
This IDIOT should go down to the local Radio SHack and purchase a police scanner. Assuming the police transmissions aren’t encrypted, said NITWIT should ask WHY the police dispatcher continually mentions RACE in the description of CRIMINAL SUSPECTS.
Posted by at 9:40 PM on May 14
Such absolute tripe to try to spin their reasons for being assinine and incompetent.
Posted by at 10:05 PM on May 14
When police and the community are blinded by ideas about what a particular race looks like, whole groups suffer from suspicion and the actual culprit can escape.
So, let me get this straight - by omitting the vital identifiable characteristics like racial appearance, they’re actually aiding law enforcement officials and the public at large?
Just goes to show you that these journalists-turned-social engineers could really care less about any potential victim’s safety or life in their pursuit of a “color-blind” society.
Posted by ZKR at 10:58 PM on May 14
You need to know what you’re after. If you don’t know the difference between a cow’s tail, and a pump handle, you shouldn’t be sent to fetch the water.
Posted by THE OLD SAGE at 12:35 AM on May 15
It’s stories like this that make feel sympathy for the extreme among us extremists - as counterproductive as they usually are. What a convoluted rigmarole of tortured logic. Why must we be subjected to this every time we hear something from the information-class - which is basically anyone you might learn something from outside of a personal friend? They can’t release the race of crime perps? They have no problem educating us about hate-crimes committed by whites no matter how badly these events are skewed the other way around. The only thing consistent in their reasoning is that whites = bad, non-whites = good.
Posted by Dinosaur Hatchling at 12:53 AM on May 15
“In general, news outlets have avoided racial and ethnic identifiers unless they were important to the case, or, perhaps, if victims’ descriptions were very detailed. They’d apply a test: Was the racial information useful to people in the community who might know the attacker or want to avoid harm themselves? Or was it so general that it only merely contributed to stereotypes about one group or another?”
Like the Duke “rape” case, correct Comrade Lehrman?
No stereotypes or unwarranted racial categorizations that might “mislead” the public there, right Comrade Lehrman? “Reporting” in the media never has been “so general that it only merely contributed to stereotypes about one group” (white men) in a derogatory manner. In fact, when applied to white men, it is almost unequivocally and “empirically” demonstrated to be favorable because of their gender and white “privileges,” correct?
Why, if the same “scrutiny” that had been applied to the unfairly racially “sensationalized” Knoxville “hoax,” also had been applied to the Duke “rape” case, those “guilty” white boys might be swinging on a gallows today, right?
Utterly and abjectly laughable!
Here are the hard facts, Comrade Lehrman. If the press reported only 25% of the racially motivated violent crimes (such as rape and murder) directed against whites by nonwhites, as robustly and tenaciously as was the Duke “rape” case, nothing else would be on the “news.” There would be no time for “upbeat” stories dealing with increasing interracial marriages in the USA, or the multiplying number of multicultural bingo parlors here, since all that would be focused on would be the true colors of crime and its victims.
Despite all the flawed, but “unbiased” studies of blacks with Pepsi cans or Latinos with yo-yos being mistaken by “racist” whites as “stereotyped” marauders, the real truth would come out. That truth, over time, would clearly indicate the “mainstream” media’s and their accomplices in “academia’s” true preconceptions and preoccupations.
As always, God help us all!!!
*KRONOS*
Posted by John PM at 1:28 AM on May 15
When I left the USA almost 3 years ago, I remember seeing very few people who could not easily be grouped by race and almost no mixed race marriages (except Asian-American like my own). Has the USA changed that much since I left, or is Sally Lehrman just imagining these people to support her article?
Posted by Lost in Paradise at 3:39 AM on May 15
We now know why black males under 30 make up 65% of all Americans who have to ask permission to use the toilet and are forced to eat with a spoon. The media has allowed millions of gentle folk to be stero-typed into the joint.
Restorative steps are being taken to break this cycle of injustice. The news media has neglected to cover nation wide the race riot at Locke High School in L.A. Over 600 African American potential Rhodes Scholars and previously peaceful Chicano Cherubs battled it out for racial supremacy last week. Not one major news carrier had it on the news. It was thought to be to devisive and not of national interest.
Sometimes I believe the media is more interested in the biological and cultural destruction of American society than in mkaing a buck, how Un-American can you get.
Charles B. Tiffany
Kissimmee, Florida
Posted by Charles B. Tiffany at 6:20 AM on May 15
It’s funny then that every single newspaper report you will ever read makes a very big play of mentioning the age of the ‘dramatis personae’ very quickly and very prominently after their name has been mentioned - this surely must be the first rule of journalism.
But surely isn’t a person’s age completely irrelevant to the details of a juicy story?
Posted by Kenelm Digby at 6:39 AM on May 15
A complete lie. The media hide the race when a Black attacks a White, but hype the race when a White attacks a Black.
Posted by at 7:31 AM on May 15
Note that she does not give a single example of a case where someone mistakenly identified the race of the perpetrator.
I wonder if she suggests we don’t identify race in the few cases of white on black crime.
Posted by Jason at 8:04 AM on May 15
I always listen for the race of a perp on the news. They always say it was a man or woman but it seems to be 50/50 or so on giving the race. Since I can only guess I figure street crime black dude, white collar crime white guy. I don’t think its good reporting to withold that information.
Posted by mike t. at 9:08 AM on May 15
The “racial stereotyping” excuse is exactly that… an excuse!
We are fully aware that probably 90% to 95% of all domestic crime (other than your white collar crimes of the Enron genre) are the work of either Afro-Americans or Hispanics. Both races making up our two largest minority populations.
You want to see who commits the most violent crimes? Just google the CRIMESTOPPER Most Wanted List for your city. See for yourself what races our vilest of the vile belong to.
Shucks, even though our media stupidly caves in to the Mexicans and Blacks, it doesn’t take super intelligence to deduce what the perp probably was by what the crime was, where it happened.
I mean seriously, how many White teenagers do drive-by shootings. How many Whites fight other Whites for drugdealer territory — as opposed to Blacks.
Three years ago, NPR Radio interviewed a claimed spokesman for the Mexican community. He was railing out about the media putting an emphasis on crimes by Mexicans. His attitude could be described as: “Sure we Mexicans do a hell of a lot of crimes! But WHY do you have to tell the world about it?” No, he didn’t say it in those exact words… but his meaning was amply clear. No apology for the disproportionate amount of crimes by Mexicans. He just preferred to keep this fact a secret. ‘nuff said!
Posted by Fed Up at 9:14 AM on May 15
This article is so misguided. First of all about the police stopping 200 black college students. Are you kidding? You only mentioned that because you thought that was police overreacting. Maybe it was. Just because the police did not find the burglar among 200 black college males does not mean that the victim’s description was wrong. That mention of the 200 black college students was totally irrelevant.
The media should mention the race of the victim and the suspect every single time. All of society needs to know what’s going on, where the danger is, and who it’s coming from. End of story.
Posted by Lyn at 9:14 AM on May 15
If half-jewish, ivy league educated intellectuals like myself were responsible for half the crime in America, I would be in favor of honest reporting of the fact.
And of having my “community” profiled by every police dept, in the country.
If we were responsible for ca 100% of international terorism, I would be in favor of us being subjected to extra scrutiny at airports.
All of this concealment and censorship is rank idiocy, and it costs lives.
BTW, the woman reporting that burglary was probably black herself - black elderly women are the favorite prey of black thugs, I doubt most are confused about why so many black men are in prison.
Posted by elitist at 10:18 AM on May 15
I’ve written to the Buffalo News about their policy and I was told that their rule is that they only report race if it’s relevant to the crime such as in a ‘hate crime’.
Of course, the New violates this policy all the time. Once I caught them when they printed two articles on the same day on the same page. The first article reported on a violent robbery on Buffalos black east side involving the use of automatic weapons. The race of the suspects was omitted. The second article reported on a robbery of a convenience story in my neighborhood in which no weapon was displayed; only a statement that the robber said he had a gun. The robber was described as white.
I wrote to the same person at the Buffalo News quoting their own policy about not reporting race unless it was relevant to the crime. He wrote back saying that in the first instance, the police didn’t provide a description of the suspects. He said that in the second example, he said I didn’t understand the Buffalo New policy correctly and that the reason the suspected was reported as being white was because it was part of a complete description given to the police.
I wrote back and pointed out that local news had shown the surveillance video of the armed robbery and the suspects were clearly black.
He never responded.
A few months back, the Buffalo News ran a special piece about a series of rapes and attempted rapes in a mixed race area of town. They printed surveillance photos showing a black man. The kicker for me was that this guy had committed 7 assaults and attempted assaults before this made news.
Women are being raped and assaulted by black men and the Buffalo News believes it’s more important not to show black men as rapists than to give women living in this neighborhood the information they need to protect themselves.
If I was a family member who was assulted after the first assult, I’d find myself a laywer and go after the Buffalo News for suppressing this information. After the first assult, in my opinion, the Buffalo News is complicit.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 11:57 AM on May 15
I seem to recall that at one time (apparently before the era of pc) that journalists focused on answering the questions who, what, when, where, and why in reporting. Now in our new colorless society, such a trivial fact as the prepetrator’s race is seen as irrelevant, confusing, and heavens “a cause for more harm than good.” So journalists (I prefer to the term urinalists) now eschew any reference to race unless the perpetrator is idenfied as white. Of course if race is of such insignificance why report race at all? That probably doesn’t matter much to those of the ilk as the enlighened Ms. Lehrman’s of journalism. Their efforts to hide the unpleasant truths of black criminality and violence, grossly disproportionate to their share of the population, behind these “speech codes” is failing. With the internet the MSMs lockhold on information is gone and is seen by the decline in newspaper readership and viewership for the broadcast networks. There is no small amount of irony here in that the print and tv medias’ efforts to deliberately take race out of crime reporting have contributed to their decline. The more the better.
Posted by Man of the West at 12:13 PM on May 15
The last time I saw such convex/concave movements was watching a show about Circ de Soliel. Sally is really in the wrong business.
I wonder if she has contacted the Rev. Wright to lecture him on stereotyping?
Posted by George at 12:47 PM on May 15
As far as public perception is concerned, it’s irrelevant as who to who commits what crimes. Irregardless, the media will sensationalize, i.e. report on, one specific crime, or one type of circumstance in our society to the exclusion of all others leading the public to accept as reality and debate whatever it is they would wish us to. I seriously doubt this propensity to mislead us travels the direction Sally Lehrman, Quill (Society of Professional Journalists), would have us believe it does. Once again, we are taught something that is the opposite of the truth?
Posted by Dr. Smith at 2:03 PM on May 15
So, the Society of UnProfessional MSM Journalists want to cover up non-white crime. As opposed to what the MSM does now, and that is to be completely honest about race and crime.
Posted by Question Diversity at 2:18 PM on May 15
Who does the press think it is kidding? How many times have we read a crime article in which the suspect’s clothing is described down to the last detail, but the race of the perpetrator is left undescribed? How many times have we heard about someone named N’Deshawntavious Jackson or LaQuineesha Washington being sought for questioning, but no physical description given?
The mainstream press often bemoans the fact that newspapers are dying while people get their news online, but really, who’s fault is this? Is it the consumer, or the mainstream media who insist on trying to foist a shoddy product onto us?
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 7:38 PM on May 15
People know that Blacks commit a huge proportion of crime, and that Hispanics are not that far behind them. But without some documentation, the topic can only be spoken of among friends, unless Whites are willing to put their jobs at risk. Very few Whites will search the web to dig up crime statistics, and we know that official statistics are corrupted anyway. But honest newspapers, without publishing crime rates, could do a lot to inform the public if they chose. Thirty years ago, I could go through my local paper and quickly figure out that 80 percent of the violent deaths were caused by Hispanics, shootings, knifings, and car wrecks. The central fact of violent crime in this country is that it is largely done by minorities. Most people suspect that, but can’t back it up with anything but statistically insignificant personal experience, like that British idiot from last week who had been mugged three times by Blacks. The MSM know this, information is their job, but they’d rather that we did not know. They are in the business not of disseminating information, but of suppressing it.
Posted by Schoolteacher at 12:25 PM on May 16
There’s no need to mention race. It’s easy to guess. My friends and I play “name the race,” based on the headline. Whenever I see a headline involving multiple offenders in a brutal crime, e.g 15 people beat a man to death and then urinate on his dead body or youths corner a mentally handicapped man in an apartment lobby and beat him to death with soda bottles “‘cause then we could all laugh,” I rank the difficulty of “NTR” as “easy.”
Posted by Phillip McKann at 3:25 PM on May 16
I always listen for the race of a perp on the news. They always say it was a man or woman but it seems to be 50/50 or so on giving the race. Since I can only guess I figure street crime black dude, white collar crime white guy. I don’t think its good reporting to withold that information.
You point to a potential weapon against these propagandists: use the Internet to spread the idea that every unidentified violent perp is black. Spread the info far and wide. Then the propagandist’s silence is hurting their cause, in direct proportion to the “reach” of the countervailing “disinformation.” To that extent, if and when they clarify by publishing the facts, we win, and otherwise they lose.
Posted by Svigor at 9:29 PM on May 16
They always report age. So why report that? How is age relevant? Or gender?
No, not reporting perceived race because the enlightened journalists don’t think you should have that information despite that every reader wants to know and it lets you know if race was perhaps a motive, is just plain CENSORSHIP.
Besides they ALWAYS report race, and emphasize it, even if it had no relevance, when the accused is WHITE: An example, the Rodney King incident.
Posted by at 11:16 PM on May 18