Gray Lady Down. William McGowan
York Times. Malkin quoted one Wichita resident in a letter to the local paper: “If this had been two white males accused of killing four black individuals, the media would be on a feeding frenzy and every satellite news organization would be in Wichita doing live reports.” Malkin concluded: “If you read The New York Times or The Washington Post or watched the evening news this week, the Wichita Massacre never happened.”
In October 2004, in New York’s East Village, a black man from Brooklyn shot three people and terrorized patrons in a bar, threatening to burn the place with kerosene and a lighter. At one point he held fifteen people hostage. At trial, prosecutors charged that the man was “on a mission of hate” to kill white people, and explained that the police had found tapes of anti-white rap music interspersed with the man’s own anti-white rants. “Get ready to pull your guns out on these crackers, son. All they do is party and have a good time off of our expense, son,” one tape said. “Blast the first couple you see having a good time. Let them visit your side of the tracks.” If the racial roles were reversed, the Times would have given the case far more attention and used it for a springboard—as it has often done—for pieces that searched for Larger Racial Meanings. Instead, the case was buried in the Metro pages.
In April 2006, a New York University student emerged from the subway for a visit with an old friend who lived in a Harlem neighborhood. A gang of black teens attacked him. Fleeing into traffic, the student was struck by a car and died a few days later. The story was newsworthy: in a gentrifying neighborhood, gangs of black teens (“wolf packs,” as the New York Post called them) were on the loose, systematically preying on people who appeared well-to-do, overwhelmingly white. Indeed, a similar case involving a black man chased into traffic by a white gang in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens in the late 1980s was given wall-to-wall coverage by the Times and eventually brought down Mayor Ed Koch. The death of the NYU student was covered by other New York papers. “Harlem Thugs Yuppie Hunting,” read the New York Post headline. The Times mentioned the case in a one-paragraph “Metro Briefing.”
Black crime in general causes skittishness at the Times, leading to classic liberal avoidance and denial. The perpetrators of these crimes are often portrayed as society’s victims, with the high rates of black crime and incarceration blamed on institutional racism and “racial profiling” in the criminal justice system. This representation is actually a disservice to the very minority group that the Times would like to think it is protecting. Although blacks attack whites at a much higher rate than the reverse, the vast majority of victims in black crime are also black.
In January 2007, a young black man named Ronnell Wilson was convicted of killing two undercover police officers on Staten Island several years before. Both of the undercovers were black. Wilson faced a federal death penalty and, as Trymaine Lee put it in a Times report set in Wilson’s neighborhood, “much of the [defense] testimony this week focused on Mr. Wilson’s upbringing, on his struggling existence from an early age that his defense lawyers contend played a role at the moment he pulled the trigger.” Lee’s piece largely echoed the mitigating arguments of the defense attorneys. “While prosecutors paint Mr. Wilson as a cold-blooded killer, bully and gang member who depicted his violent lifestyle in rap lyrics,” Lee wrote, “neighbors who knew him said he was just a young man lost.”
After quoting other residents of the projects on the justice of the death penalty, Lee closed with the perspective of twenty-two-year-old Fred Tuller, who made Wilson seem like a mere victim of his environment. Tuller had told Lee that “it was a rough neighborhood to live in, that violence and poverty are seared into who they are and how they see themselves. He saw his first dead body at age 5 or 6. The victim had been shot and left for dead in the stairwell of his building.” Lee described Tuller looking into the hills where the big houses seemed to be leering down on the neighborhood: “Look at us, in the middle of the projects, down here like lab rats,” he said. “They’re laughing at us.”
Wilson’s death sentence was reversed on appeal in July 2010, a decision the Times seemed to endorse in two news reports. The first one ended with Wilson’s defense attorney saying she was “thrilled.”
Another story that showed a little too much victimology involved the suspended season of Brooklyn’s Paul Robeson High School basketball team in February 2007. Written by another young black reporter, Timothy Williams, the story was headlined “A Team Feared by Rivals Now Sits Idle, and Angry.” Williams explained that a violent brawl during the final minutes of a game had led city athletic officials to bench the team for the rest of the season. The Paul Robeson team was perennially ranked among the best in the city, Williams reported, and had a chance to win the city title that year. It attracted scouts and coaches from basketball powerhouses, and players regularly received scholarships, some to NCAA Division One schools. But there was something “toxic” about the school’s basketball program, Wilson noted. “Its popular former coach, Lawrence Major, committed suicide in 2005 at age 45 after being charged with statutory rape, accused of carrying on a three-year relationship with a student that started when she was 14.” In past seasons, “several rival coaches have agreed to play games in Robeson’s gym only if they bring their own security guards, saying they are fearful of being assaulted by Robeson fans. At least one coach has vowed never to take his basketball teams to Robeson again.”
The incident that led to the suspension came after a hard foul on a rebound with thirty seconds remaining in a game against Thomas Jefferson High. A Robeson player then shoved the ball into the chest of the Jefferson player who had fouled. Benches of both teams cleared and the crowd surged out of the stands. The Jefferson team was trapped in a corner as a violent confrontation ensued. The Jefferson team coach said it was a “Brooklyn mauling” and that “we had to fight for our lives.”
Despite the obvious pathology of the Robeson team, Williams chose to focus on the dashed hopes of the players and their anger over being suspended, reporting that one player started to cry. Williams also endorsed the school principal’s complaints that the punishment was too rough for the crime: “They wanted to send a real strong message, but it is not proportionate to the offense. The question we should be asking is, what lesson are these kids learning about fairness and justice?”
A hallmark of the Times’ coverage of black crime is a fixation on racial profiling, which it sees as an expression of institutional racism in the criminal justice system. One example involved a study of speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike, conducted by the state in 2002, which concluded that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to speed than other drivers. The Metro editor, Jonathan Landman, proposed a story on it, which would have been an exclusive. But the study’s conclusion rankled the sensitivities of Howell Raines, who had not read the report but nevertheless said that the methodology was flawed and that the Times was being “spun.”
The story was held for a week. When it did run, it acknowledged a sizable gap between minorities and whites in speeding behavior, and noted that the issue was a political hot potato between civil libertarians and state troopers, but finished with liberal conventional wisdom: “Whatever the reasons for the speeding rates found in the study, civil rights advocates and lawyers said they cannot obscure the state’s acknowledgment that racial profiling was an accepted tactic in the department for years.”
The fixation on racial profiling appeared also in a 2007 report by Trymaine Lee, under the headline “As Officers Stop and Frisk, Residents Raise Their Guard.” Its pull quote said, “In Brooklyn, some neighbors see searches as police harassment.” Set in one of the most violent housing projects in the city, Brooklyn’s Red Hook Houses, the piece was about the aggressive “stop and frisk” tactic taken up by the NYPD under Commissioner Raymond Kelly. It had taken many guns off the street and played an important role in dramatically reducing New York’s murder rate.
Lee’s story emphasized that more than half of those stopped and frisked by the police citywide were black. One of the Red Hook residents he interviewed, Mikel Jamison, said that in Brooklyn it was “hard being an African-American, hard to live and walk down the street without the police harassing us.” After having a police officer jam a gun in his chest a few years ago, “in an incident he said he would rather not discuss,” Lee wrote, “Mr. Jamison said he converted to