Jack Shafer has some thoughts about the soft center of the supposedly hard-boiled press when it comes to stories like that of Megan Williams of Charleston, W.V., who has just recanted some elements of a sensational 2007 kidnap/assault story that sent six accused persons to prison for long terms.
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Shafer oddly omits the Tawana Brawley hoax from his list of fake victims.
Yes, he mentions the white woman-blaming-black carjacker story, but I’m fairly certain that if you add up all the fake hate crime stories of the past 20 years, whites as the putative perpetrators would be in the lead. In the case of the West Virginia fake hate crime, the press loved it because confirmed all THEIR stereotypes: vicious rednecks in the sticks of the most backward state, binding a torturing a poor black woman for days on end. It just had to be true, right? Meanwhile, cases in which the victims are white (the “Knoxville Horror”, for instance) or the perpetrators black (the four black Marines who killed a white man and his black wife) get positively censored by national media. Not that I’d be so strident as to proclaim that the media’s not interested in stories that don’t fit their agenda, and is perfectly willing to coax along hoaxes when they do.
The prison system has lots of very innocent males serving long sentences for sexual crimes they never committed, according to DNA and other forensic testing from the Innocence Project.
The pathetic excuse for “the Media” these days, is just as guilty as the rampant politically correct prosecution misconduct.
@Anonymous Attorney and Smart Dude. Hmmn. Yeah, I’ve heard lots of conservative Americans railing against the media’s “liberal bias”… and lots of liberal Americans who are equally resentful of its “conservative bias”. I rather suspect bias is in the eye of the beholder.
Random,
I tend towards the “lack of accurate news bias”. I’d like to see sombody go back to the Joe Friday standard, you know “Just the facts.” and then let us make up our own minds. Oh wait, that would require the ability to perform critical thinking and we can’t have that. That’s why it is no longer taught in schools.