As is inevitably the case in a 24-hour news cycle, the outrage over last week’s literally-in-your-face clash between Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and the president has subsided, but not before the equally inevitable shouts of racism were heard around the web. MSNBC “News analyst” Al Sharpton helped those with a code deficit decipher the incident, which he called “another example of disrespect and ‘deligitimatizing’ this president.”
As though he needed backup, Sharpton enlisted the services of Sirius XM black radio host Joe Madison, who explained that the governor is just one more white conservative “who cannot stand the fact that this is an African American who is now one of the most powerful individuals on the planet.”
Now that that controversy has died down, time to ask, as Daniel Tosh might, “What’s next?” That would be a story by a reporter named Stephanie Farr, who writes at the Philadelphia Inquirer website philly.com:
In a horrific assault in Center City on Saturday night, three teenagers who were spouting racial slurs pulled a man out of a cab to beat him. And when the cabdriver intervened to stop the assault, the teens turned their rage on him, police said yesterday.
About 8:25 p.m., a cab was stopped at a red light at 15th and Chestnut streets when two 17-year-old boys and a 15-year-old boy approached and started calling the male passenger in the back seat racially derogatory names, police said.
The boys then threw an unknown liquid at the cab before they opened the door, pulled the passenger out and started to pummel him, police said.
When the cabbie got out of the car to see what was going on, the passenger ran away and the teens turned on the cabbie. They punched him in the face, kicked him and threw a liquid on him, police said.
Before anyone pages Rev. Al, I should point out that, after continuing in this vein for another two paragraphs, reporter Farr writes, “Police said the three teens were black and the cabbie and passenger were white.”
If the topic were anything else, the reporter (or conceivably her editor) would be guilty of burying the lede, a cardinal sin that is deligitimatized in Journalism 101.
It is one thing for the mainstream media to perpetuate the widely held liberal notion that the United States remains a fundamentally racist nation. But to report a story about a racially motivated crime and ignore until the seventh paragraph the fact that the perpetrators are black is to engage in the worst kind of race baiting.
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