Racial murder and the fact-value distinction

Commenting on my efforts to get at the facts in the Knoxville atrocity, Josh writes:

I have always admired your straightforward manner, but I am somewhat perplexed about your lack of speculation involving the inexplicable silence on these horrific murders? I agree that anyone reporting on a crime with such sadistic and evil undertones should be thorough in sourcing such crimes and its purported details, but isn’t this lack of solid sourcing a reflection of the concerted effort to bury (no pun intended) this unbelievable crime? Why have you not used your excellent insight and speculated as to why or who seems determined to hide this crime from the national consciousness and from white traditionalists in particular?

LA replies:

There are two levels to what you’re talking about here.

First, there’s the story with the details as they were reported from the start back in January, which I commented about strongly at the time. That was horrific enough, and we already know it did not get into the major media, as none of these minority atrocities against whites ever gets into the major media. So there’s a complete story right there. It’s also, sadly, nothing new, it’s happened over and over. At the same time, we cannot say that the media has not covered it at all. The local media have repeatedly given the basic horrible facts of the crimes, at least in outline. Yet there is a “bloodlessness” in the way it is reported. There is no question that the aim, unconscious or conscious, is to turn down the “affect” of this story, so that people will not react strongly to it. It is a self-deadening of modern society, or rather a systematic deadening of society by the mainstream media, to cut off the normal sources of outrage that would threaten the liberal pro-minority anti-white regime.

The second level has to do with the even more horrifying details that I was informed about in the last few days: the alleged rape, sexual abuse, and mutilation of the male victim, Christopher Newsom. I could not rely on the first blogger I read who talked about this, for the reasons I gave, and so I did not cite him or quote him. I asked readers for more sources on this. Of the many stories that were sent to me, two went beyond what all the others repeatedly said. I reported on what I found in those two articles.

This aspect of the story is purely a matter of trying to pin down what the facts are. It has nothing to do with expressing outrage or engaging in analysis. Was Newsom sexually mutilated? The only thing we have on that is the student reporter Williams’s statement that she read this in unspecified “reports.” Given the sensational nature and importance of this, her lack of specificity as to her sources is maddening and shows a certain insensibility on her part. Further, since even this student reporter who was more enterprising than the professionals in getting at the facts of this atrocity failed so signally to provide usable facts and sources, what’s the point of charging, as you do, that the “lack of solid sourcing [is] a reflection of the concerted effort to bury … this unbelievable crime?” Obviously Williams is not part of some concerted effort of concealment, yet she also failed to do the job. My point is, there seems to be a societal dullness at work here that cannot be immediately linked with a liberal intention to cover up black savagery against whites.

So again, as to the things that are claimed to have been done to Newsom, we have to get the facts before we say anything else.

However, to qualify what I’ve said, leaving aside the mutilation allegation, we can say—on the basis of Jamie Satterfield’s story in which he report on the evidence that was presented to the grand jury—that the alleged rape of Newsom seems to have been reported only ONCE in one local news source, and in an extremely low key way, in the middle of Satterfield’s very dryly written story. So, in addition to the blanket MSM ignoring of the story, we can say that here is a factually established part of the case, that even the local media have barely touched.

If you would like to call the reporter, Satterfield, whose number is listed in the earlier thread, and ask him about this, and find out what the known facts of the crimes are, and also what his insights are about how widely if at all this has been covered by the mainstream media and why certain salient and shocking facts of the crimes have barely been reported, and pass what you learn onto me, that would be interesting.


Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 13, 2007 02:08 AM | Send
    

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