Since the Trayvon Martin murder, Fox News seems to be making a full-time job of digging up news items about black people assaulting white people, and using them to bash the liberal media for selective reporting. Last night, Bill O’Reilly found another one: a tale of two reporters for the Pilot newspaper in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area, who were attacked by a mob of African-American men after their car stopped at a stoplight, and beaten sufficiently badly as to be off work for a week. What particularly outraged O’Reilly was that the reporters' own newspaper didn't report the crime for two weeks, and that police had not charged anybody (update: as of today, the paper reports, one person has been charged).
O’Reilly’s guest was Dave Parker, radio talk show host on WNIS in Virginia Beach (a station which also broadcasts Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, so you can trust it to be absolutely fair and balanced, right?) Most people, said Parker, were furious about “why in the world did our community not find out about this for two weeks and Bill, the way we found out about this was not on the front page. It was not above the fold where it should have been because this is a safety issue…But instead of that the way we found out about it, was two weeks after the event, in an op-ed piece on a Tuesday. We can't find any explanation for that whatsoever.” (Here’s the piece he’s referring to. It probably heartened O’Reilly to see that commenters overwhelmingly agreed with him.)
One reason for the silence was that the victims didn’t want the story reported; O'Reilly did note that, but dismissed it by saying it “shouldn't matter at all. I mean if you are a newspaper or a television organization; it's a story you report the story…. Whenever you have a racially charged mob, that's a big story.” (We’ll have to take it on faith that the mob was “racially charged”, gentle reader, because O'Reilly and Parker are distressingly short on details of the assault.)
Well, O’Reilly knows why the “Pilot” didn’t report the story. Because it’s a liberal, politically correct paper, obviously. At least it's been “pretty vicious” toward him in the past. Then O'Reilly referenced a 911 call made by one of the victims ….”Harrowing. It's a harrowing call.” (We’ll have to take his word on that, because he didn’t play it) and clips of people in the neighborhood, "people in the neighborhood, Mr. Parker (nobody does oh-horrors like O’Reilly) link[ing] the beating with the Martin assault, saying things like ‘And then with all that Trayvon Martin stuff going on…. you know it could be related to that or it could be people just want to act stupid.’”
Oh no. O’Reilly won’t accept that they were just acting stupid. Never mind that officials can’t say yet what motivated the attack. It’s a racially charged crime. It has to be. “If these racial roles were reversed… this would be a huge national story.”
Finally, O’Reilly said he’d asked the editor of the Pilot to come in, but he was “hiding under his desk.” The editor did, however, publish a rebuttal today, standing by its handling of the story. “Based on the facts, this story did not cross the bar to be published because as a general rule, The Pilot doesn't publish stories about simple assaults. Did we go too far holding to this standard? I don't know; I will always ask myself that question. But we made our decision based on what we knew at the time.”
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Looking at the actual case here, it’s clear that this is yet another Ramos & Compean scenario. (For those unfamiliar with R&C, that was where right wing radio and TV went nuts about 2 Boarder Patrol agents getting sent to prison for shooting “an illegal alien drug smuggler”. But when you read the actual case file, you see that they didn’t know any of that and were shooting a guy in the back as he ran away from them. Further, they made a point of covering up their crime and lied about it when they got busted. And that part didn’t get told on right wing radio or on Fox.)
In the case of this incident, it appears that the two reporters were attacked by an unfriendly mob, but that they didn’t want to have it blown up in the press. Their editor respected their wishes, particularly since it isn’t any newspaper’s business to report assaults on page 1 above the fold – particularly when it will be perceived as them covering it just to either fan racial tensions or promote their own reporters. Further, the matter is still under investigation. The editor was not “hiding under his desk”. He was busy doing his job, in spite of the attacks by the local shock jock.
But when a white neighborhood vigilante stalks, shoots and kills an unarmed black teenager, it’s “let’s not jump to conclusions.”
Bildo is a racist asshole who is only slightly less obvious than KKKlannity.
