The Lois Gibson police artist sketch that electrified the national media on the left, and a more accurate rendition of the murderer by iSteve commenter Harry Baldwin on the right.

The New York Times, having run a dozen news stories on the shooting of a little black girl in the Houston area in the hopes that she was murdered by a Great White Defendant, now says that, actually, the story is really boring, so just forget all about it and don’t draw any lessons from yet another media Hate YT fiasco.

It’s kind of like Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus” disaster for Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, which turned out to be incredibly boring. It didn’t have anything to do with interesting subjects like, say, ethnic animus, such as who hates whom. Instead, it was all about journalistic methodological miscues and other tedious topics that you would find dull beyond belief. Why do you even care about technical foul-ups like Rolling Stone asserting that a UVA fraternity conducts an annual gang rape on broken glass fraternal initiation. Ho-hum!

So don’t pay any attention to this soporific subject. What could be more boring that that the most influential media property in the world, the New York Times, is out to frame horrific hate crimes upon your personal race, even in the most dubious of circumstances? If you were a real man, you wouldn’t care that the New York Times had been making up insane libels about your race:

Arrest in Jazmine Barnes’s Killing Allays Hate-Crime Fears

By Manny Fernandez, Sarah Mervosh and Mihir Zaveri, Jan. 6, 2019

HOUSTON — It was a face that haunted many people in the nation’s fourth-largest city: The police sketch of the unshaven white man who witnesses and the authorities said had opened fire on a black family in a car the day before New Year’s Eve.

A second grader riding in the car with her mother and three sisters — Jazmine Barnes, 7 — was shot and killed. And the man in the sketch — thinly built, in his 30s or 40s, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, driving a red pickup — became the focal point of what appeared to be a racially motivated shooting that rattled black residents, elected officials and civil-rights activists in Houston and around the country.

… But it has turned out far differently.

On Sunday, the authorities charged a suspect with capital murder who is not the man in the sketch. He is a 20-year-old African-American man named Eric Black Jr. Investigators with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said that Mr. Black acknowledged taking part in the shooting, and that Jazmine’s family’s vehicle may not have been the intended target.

“This is most likely a case of mistaken identity,” the Harris County sheriff, Ed Gonzalez, said at a news conference on Sunday. …

The developments in the case took officials and residents by surprise.

After all, who has ever heard of the concepts of “Hate Hoaxes” and “the hunt for the Great White Defendant?” Not New York Times readers, if we can prevent it!

There was widespread relief that Jazmine’s killer was off the street, but there was an acknowledgment that in today’s racially charged climate, nothing is what it seems. The end result, though, was just as tragic: a little girl was dead.

The initial description of the gunman as a white male came from several witnesses, including Jazmine’s teenage sister. With few other clues to go on, that description solidified as the official narrative of the shooting.

And although Sheriff Gonzalez said repeatedly that he did not want to speculate about a motive and could not say whether the shooting was a hate crime, he could not quell the assumptions that people made about the case, fueled by outrage and raw grief for young Jazmine. The notion of a white man opening fire on a black family was too potent for people to ignore, and seemed all too plausible after hate-motivated mass shootings at churches, synagogues and elsewhere in recent years.

As opposed to a few hundred thousand black-on-black murders in recent decades, very few of which got much play in the New York Times, much less black-on-black murders in far off Texas.

“We live in a time where somebody could do something like this based purely on hate or race,” said Shaun King

A.k.a., Talcum X. But not to Google:

Remember, kids, always report inappropriate predictions! Back to the NYT:

, a civil-rights activist who raised money for a reward in the case and who helped crack it by forwarding a tip about the gunman to the authorities. “That it turned out to not be the case, I don’t think changes the devastating conclusion that people had thought something like that was possible.”

Sheriff Gonzalez said a red pickup truck had indeed come to a stop at a traffic signal next to Jazmine and her family when the shooting happened. But the authorities now believe that the driver — the white man in the sketch — was a bystander.

“This just went down very quickly,” Sheriff Gonzalez said. “When the gunfire erupted — we are talking about small children, they witnessed something very traumatic. And it’s very likely the last thing they did see was that red truck and the driver in that truck.”

Or snitches get stitches, which makes it sound funny, but it’s not. LA Times homicide reporter Jilly Leovy estimated perhaps a dozen witnesses of homicides were murdered each year in South-Central L.A.. That has a big impact on how trustworthy black witnesses’ allegations are. This is one reason so many high-profile cases promoted by BLM types turn out to be factual fiascos.

Lee Merritt, a lawyer who represents Jazmine’s family as well as relatives of several African-American victims of high-profile police shootings, said the arrest of Mr. Black shocked the family, who are preparing for Jazmine’s burial on Tuesday. …

“This New Year’s tragedy deserved the mass attention that it got, and it shouldn’t only be weaponized for political purposes when the suspected killer is white. The whole movement of Black Lives Matter is about the attention and care that is given to people of color in the face of violence.”

Uh, no …

… Research has shown that the accuracy of eyewitness accounts can be undercut by stress and by conditions at the time of a crime. “Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable evidence you can have,” said Lori Brown, a criminologist at Meredith College. People generally try to understand how a traumatic event could have happened by using what they already know about the world, Ms. Brown said, and “unfortunately, we fill in the gaps.”

In other words, they stereotype based on all those cruelly handsome white male criminals on Law & Order and burglar alarm commercials.

… At the sheriff’s news conference on Sunday, Ms. Lee, the congresswoman, said that even though the killing no longer appeared to have been a hate crime, “I certainly hope that people would accept the fear that young mother experienced.”

It was her Lived Experienced that White Racism was to blame, so who are you to dispute that just because it wasn’t true?

iSteve commenter Kyle notes:

Obviously the mother knows who the killer is. She is afraid to rat on the guy because she knows she’ll get killed if the does that. My heart breaks for her.

We have to be a little bit easier on the mom. She isn’t trying to make this into a Haven Moynihan witch hunt, the media is. In fact if the snow flakes covering this story had any street smarts, they’d back off the story a little bit and let her lay low.

None of this media attention is good for her. It’s gonna get her killed.

In 2018 america, “some white guy did it” is the equivalent of “some puerto rican guy did it.

iSteve commenter Jack D writes:

The arrest of Jazmine Barnes’s evil white killer was going to be the opening shot of the 2020 campaign. It was going to be good for a million black votes, it was going to tear down all the remaining Confederate monuments, it was going to sway Texas to the D column by turning out 110% of the black vote. Accordingly, running a dozen stories on this local police blotter item from a distant city was NOT overkill.

Of course, now that the killer is black, well never mind. It will be memory holed and the search for the next great white defendant will resume unabated.