Editor’s Pick: Free Beacon on Dangerous Fallout of NYC Subway Shooting

The Washington Free Beacon penned a Monday morning editorial warning that, based on the liberal media’s minimizing of the racist and hateful views of the NYC subway shooter and use of a Michigan police-involved shooting to harm race relations, future race-based acts of violence could soon be around the corner thanks to the their penchant for racial division.

The editorial began with a reference to a Thursday study from editor Charles Lehman that found, in their summation, “the media harp on violence carried out by whites and downplay it when the perpetrator is black.”

Here were highlights from Lehman’s outstanding study (click “expand”):

Frank James is an outspoken racist, black nationalist, and rabid against Jews and whites. It is important to read the entire article. New York TimesYou could forgive yourself for forgetting that. James’ race isn’t mentioned in the nearly 2000-word article about the attack. The same holds true for the coverage by Reuters. Washington PostJames was only mentioned in connection to the condemnation of “low-income Black youths” training programs.

(….)

Washington Free Beacon reviewed hundreds of articles from major newspapers over the span of 2 years and found that they downplayed non-white offenders’ race, including mentioning it later than white offenders in their articles. The papers also tend to not mention an offender’s race if the victim is white. This discrepancy grew following the death of George Floyd in 2020, and subsequent protests.

The Free Beacon has collected information on almost 1,100 articles related to homicides that were published by six leading newspapers, and all of them between 2019-2021. Those papers included the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis’s Star-Tribune—representatives of each paper did not return requests for comment for this article. Each article was analyzed by collecting the victim’s and offenders’ names, as well as the relevant race. We also noted the places where it was mentioned in the article.

These data indicate an alarming trend in editorial writing, where major newspapers routinely leave out information from news reports. This presents readers with a biased picture of crime and who it is. 

(….)

About half of all articles on a white offenders mention the offender’s race in the first 15% of an article. The majority of articles on black offenders mention their race at the very end. About half of all articles that discuss a black criminal’s race don’t mention them until 60 percent or more of their article. More than 20 percent keep it up until the final fifth.

This editorial stated that the study was published a day following the attack on the subway. The suspect is a black nationalist who has what The New York TimesThis could be described only as “harshly bigoted views.”

The Free Beacon put that in contrast with a Grand Rapids, Michigan shooting in which 26-year-old black male Patrick Lyoya was killed after a white officer fatally shot him during a struggle that began with Lyoya fleeing a traffic stop and grabbing the officer’s taser amid a struggle.

The media have uncritically promoted the rhetoric of Benjamin Crump and other racist arsonists in the aftermath.

To see more of the editorial, click here and to go here to see Lehman’s full study.