With a verdict of guilty returned by an Arkansas jury last week in the case of a 13-year-old boy kidnapped, raped and murdered by homosexuals, the murky political mission of much of the national media becomes a bit more transparent than it was before. Despite the horror and shock the Arkansas atrocity offers, virtually no national news stories about it have appeared—in contrast to the massive coverage of the "hate crime" murder of homosexual Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1998.
The Arkansas case concerns an admitted homosexual, Joshua McCabe Brown, who says he had a homosexual relationship with 13-year old Jesse Dirkhising for some months before Brown and another male "lover" repeatedly assaulted the boy sexually for five hours until he suffocated on Sept. 26, 1999. Last week, a jury found Brown guilty of first-degree murder and the judge handed down a life sentence.
Still, there is virtually no coverage—of the crime, the criminals, the victim, the trial or the trial's outcome. New Republic columnist Andrew Sullivan, himself a homosexual, conducted a survey of the news coverage of both the Dirkhising and Shepard murders. He found that in the month after the Shepard killing, there were 3,007 news stories about it, compared to a whopping 46 about the Dirkhising killing. And some folks still think the media's not biased.
Of course, the media and its apologists have their reasons. The Washington Times' Robert Stacy McCain asked various news outlets why they didn't cover the Arkansas story but did cover the one in Wyoming. "Obviously we can't cover every story that happens in this country every day," a CBS spokeswoman snorted in reply. Some are important and some aren't. "It appears to be a local crime story that does not raise the kind of issues that would warrant our coverage," another spokesman from ABC said. "Every day we're striving for fair, accurate and objective reporting," pronounced a CNN spokesman.
Yes, but then why do they cover the Wyoming killing, when two heterosexuals murdered a homosexual? That too was a "local story," a "crime story" with no connection to national issues. The spokespeople don't say exactly, but we can infer why pretty easily.
The Shepard killing was not just a "local crime story." It did "raise the kind of issues" we want to talk about. When heterosexuals murder a homosexual, that proves the country and its culture are "homophobic," you see, that religious and moral sanctions on homosexuality lead to the murder of those who practice it. When homosexuals murder a heterosexual, well, that's just an anomaly, not worth bringing up.
Both Mr. McCain in the Times and Mr. Sullivan in the New Republic are convinced there was a double standard, and there's no convincing reason to disagree. As Mr. Sullivan remarks, the Shepard killing "was hyped for political reasons: to build support for inclusion of homosexuals in a federal hate-crimes law. The Dirkhising case was ignored for political reasons: squeamishness about reporting a story that could feed anti-gay prejudice."
"The same politics," Mr. Sullivan writes, "lies behind the media's tendency to extensively cover crimes' against blacks, while ignoring black 'non-hate crimes' against whites. What we are witnessing, I fear, is a logical consequence of the culture that hate-crimes rhetoric promotes. Some deaths—if they affect a politically protected class—are worth more than others."
A tip of the hat to an honest liberal like Mr. Sullivan. What he says and what the discrepancies in coverage by the national media of the two killings in Wyoming and Arkansas come close to proving is that inherent in the very concept of "hate crimes" is a hidden political agenda. The agenda is to show that some people are victimized because of what they are—their race or their sexual orientation—and those who victimize them do so because of what they are—a persecuting race or sexual orientation. A story becomes newsworthy only if it serves to expose and thereby discredit the cultural and racial identities that drive such killings. Killings that don't expose and discredit such identities are not newsworthy; they're just "local crime stories that don't raise the kind of issues" we want to cover.
The double standard in reporting on race — and sex-related crimes and the political agenda the double standard reflects — should have been obvious well before now, but apparently it took the brutal murder of a boy in Arkansas to force it into the national consciousness at all. Now that the national consciousness has been made to grasp the truth about the major media and the political purposes they harbor and try to hide, we should keep that truth in mind the next time they start preaching their standard sermons about "hate crimes."
COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
April 03, 2001
