Yet Another Story the MSM is Ignoring Because it Doesn't Fit Their Agenda

(CAUTION: Contains some graphic description of the crime.)

A young couple go out on a date, they are carjacked & kidnapped at gun point. They are taken to a home where the guy is gang raped (prison style) & his penis cut off while she watched. Then he is taken to a nearby railroad track shot & set on fire. They return to to gang rape her, repeatedly & in various ways over the next 4 days. They cut of 1 of her breasts. They pour bleach down her throat to destroy any DNA. She is still alive at this point. They take turns urinating on her. They then set her afire. Her body was found in the residence in 5 trash bags. 5 people were arrested & charged with a wide variety of crimes.

Didn't hear about this on the evening news? Sad to say this really happenned. It happenned in Knoxville, TN to 2 University of Tennessee students, Hugh Christopher Newsom, age 23 and Channon Gail Christian, age 21. They were out on a date on 6 January 2007 when this happenned. They were taken to 2316 Chipman Street where the brutal torture, rape, mutilation & 1 of the murders took place. 1 other thing, the couple (picture right) was white, the suspects, black.

The Knox County DA has charged the following 5 people: Lemaricus “Slim” Davidson, age 25 (owner of the home where the crime occured), 46 charges; Latalvis “Rome” Cobbins, age 24, 46 charges; George “Detroit” Thomas, age 24, 46 charges; Vanessa Coleman, age 18, 40 Tennessee State charges; & Eric “E” Boyd, age 24, federal charge of accessory after the fact. (You can read the complete list of state & federal charges here: Rape, Mutilation and Murder)

& while it hasn't received much media coverage, the blogosphere is beginning to take note. Some questions about why this hasn't received the same coverage as the Duke Rape case have been raised. & the MSM is coming off the worst for how its appears that they are handling it.

On her blog La Shawn Barber said: "In light of the blanket coverage the Duke “rape” case received, the paucity of coverage in this case seems a bit unbalanced. I mean, isn’t the brutal, black-on-white gang-rape, mutilation, and murder of two people more than or at least as newsworthy as a white-on-black gang-rape (which obviously was phony)? Even if the stripper’s allegations had been true, why was the Duke case burning up the airwaves while the Christian-Newsom case barely emits a spark?"

She goes on to comment: "The media should be swarming around this story. What happened to Christian and Newsom should be all over the airwaves and printing presses." She goes on to question the silence of "so-called black leaders", "feminist types and hate-crime proponents".

Her take on why this is so: "But if you try to pretend that it’s not a serious problem that blacks commit a disproportionate share of crimes — an incontrovertible fact — or that the lack of blanket media coverage and outrage has nothing to do with race, you’re being willfully blind and foolish.

As I see it, black crime is so commonplace that it’s just not interesting to white liberal journalists, especially black-on-white crime. And white liberal feminists are more outraged when white men use a so-called sexist term than they are with black-on-white rape statistics. I have yet to hear a feminist condemn what was done to Christian." (Media Blackout On Christian-Newsom Murders?)

Matthew Sheffield, co-founder of RatherBiased.com, had this to say: "The sudden force that the liberal press brought to bear on the falsely accused Duke lacrosse team has been curiously absent on a much more grisly crime committed against a white couple by a group of black youths."

Later he adds: "(T)he media's coverage of crime by race is tough to characterize because the same national press that is refusing to cover this story is also the same media that obssesses over missing white women to the exclusion of women of any other race. It also seems true that the press is more likely to show pictures of criminals if they are black than if they're white.

What to make of all this? My preliminary theory is that the media at both the local and national levels is more interested in the white audience than the black one. That makes sense from an economics point of view considering there are more whites than blacks in America. Accordingly, the media are more likely to tailor news coverage to white viewers. This explains why you continue to see "news" stories about cold cases such as Natalee Holloway or JonBenet Ramsey and are more likely to see pictorial coverage of black criminals than white ones.

Things change at the national level, however, because there is an added component--political correctness. The national press is more liberal than most local media outlets. In the guilty liberal worldview, it's wrong to promote stories about minority criminality. This explains why the Duke "rape" case was so extensively covered and the lacrosse team not afforded any presumption of innocence and why stories of black hate crimes are underreported. The same thing happens often in coverage of crimes committed by Islamic young people being blamed on "youths" that Charles Johnson is so adept at pointing out." (National Media's Refusal to Cover White Couple's Murder Suggests PC at Work)

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit on if it is a hate crime: "Well, "hate crime" goes to motivation and I'm not so sure that there was a racial motivation here -- and I don't really like the "hate crime" concept anyway. Murder is murder either way. And the story's bad enough without that."

"(I)t's certainly true that if the races were reversed the media would be employing an irrebuttable presumption that it was a hate crime. This double standard, though, is actually unfair to blacks, assuming that horrific crimes by white people must be motivated by something special, like racial hatred, while similar crimes by black people are just par for the course. Like so many of those double standards, it manages to be racist in both directions at once." (12 January 2007 post)

Michelle Malkin did a Vent for HotAir entitled "When is a horrific story not a story?" that looks at the coverage of the crimes by the blogs while being ignored by the MSM. (The local media such as the KnovxilleNews Sentinal is the 1 natural exception to this.) As Michelle sees it: "The mainstream media finds some crimes more useful than others." "It doesn't fit any particular agenda."

She thinks it is a national story. Why? "The details of the crime make it a national story. The brutality and the horror make it a story. The trial may include capital punishment. That should make it a story." But "Somehow it ain't fit to print or air my MSM vultures who are too busy picking at the latest celebrity carcasses."

Is the MSM ignoring the story? Obviously. Why? I think that there are several good reasons that the blogs have raised that may be the answer. Which 1 or 1s? I'm not 100% sure. It may be 1 or a combination of them all depending on a specific network or paper. What I am sure of is that this is more evidence of the fact that the MSM is allowing itself to be marginalized by going after an agenda that is anything but main stream, rather than reporting the news.

An agenda isn't always bad, lets face it. I have an Pro-Life or pro-Catholic Church agenda for many of my posts. I don't hide it. & when it is for a just cause letting the agenda motivate your coverage is good. But, don't hide the agenda & claim that you are unbiased. It will destroy you & the message, even if it is for a good cause.