Guess what? Powerline has deleted its statement that the victim is white, after I restored my statement saying that he is
Greco wrote:
Well, now Powerline has removed the reference to that victimized family in Minnesota as white. Maybe they also just assumed. I wish somebody could find out for sure.
After receiving Greco’s note, I checked out
Powerline, then wrote the following e-mail to Scott Johnson:
To: Scott Johnson
Subject: Question about your deletion of the race of the victim in the stomping incident
Initially you wrote:
The Star Tribune has no follow-up story in today’s paper or online tonight. Instead of more information on the story, the Star Tribune provides an editorial instructing us in the appropriate attitude to take in connection with this black gang assault on a white family…
Now, without explanation, you have changed that paragraph to:
The Star Tribune has no follow-up story in today’s paper or online tonight. Instead of more information on the story, the Star Tribune provides an editorial instructing us in the appropriate attitude to take in connection with the assault…
For you to change such a key fact in a story without announcing that you are doing so and why you are doing so is disconcerting.
I had already changed my article on the incident twice since the initial posting, because first I thought the victim was white, then I wasn’t sure, and then (based on your posting saying the victim was white), I changed it back again. I indeed wondered where you got your information that he is white, since I found no other reference to that in the media.
Here is my article on the incident, which includes recommendations on what society needs to to do stop this savagery. Here is my subsequent entry explaining why I changed the article three times.
You may find particulalry interesting reader Mark J.’s initial comment explaining why, even in the absence of any report on the victim’s race, it is overwhelmingly likely that he is white. Mark writes:
[G]iven how extremely careful the very liberal Twin Cities media are when it comes to racial crime stories, the simple fact that the race of the family has not been not mentioned means they are almost certainly white. If they had been black it almost certainly would have been mentioned to demonstrate that there was no racial angle to the story. The fact that the Star Tribune editorial focused on how we should not give in to any racist thoughts about blacks because of the attack also suggests it was an attack on whites. If it had been a black-on-black attack they would have pointed that out in the editorial. Also, the demographics of the suburban area where the amusement park is located, and this area in general, are heavily white, so the odds are strong that a family with a father and mother and three children attending an amusement park here are in fact white.
Scott Johnson has replied:
Mr Auster: I actually deleted the statement when I reread the post shortly after publishing it when I realized it was an assumption on my part, kind of planted in the editorial instruction that I was writing about. I called both Star Tribune reporters who have worked on the story. One (Jim Adams) had spoken to the victim’s wife and he tells me that the family is black, which he also seems to have picked up from a police report describing the wife as black.
I replied:
Thank you for this information
So your initial reasoning was similar to Mark’s: The Star-Tribune editorial was written in such a way as to point strongly to the inference that the victim is white.
But to return to my initial point to you, shouldn’t you explain all the above to your readers?
Scott Johnson tells me in reply that he had deleted the “white” reference after it was up for only a few minutes, so he doesn’t necessarily feel that it is necessary to explain why he changed the entry.
I said that this was surprising to me, because the item was posted 7:37 p.m. last night Central Time, 8:37 Eastern time. And I actually worked on it in the early morning hours, reloading the archive page of that entry once or twice during that period. Also, I think I reloaded it again around 8 or 9 a.m. So my impression was that the “white” reference was online over a period of at least several hours.
The only explanation I have is that when I reloaded the page I was getting the older version of it.
* * *
There remains the mystery of the Star-Trib editorial. Since the paper seemed to be principally concerned about warning whites not to harbor anti-black feelings as a result of this attack, why wouldn’t the paper mention that the victim was black? “See, black-on-black violence is a problem, it’s not just white-on-black violence,” the paper could have said. Its silence on a fact that so strongly served its own purpose makes no sense.
- end of initial entry -
Homer S. writes:
You wrote to Scott Johnson:
“So your initial reasoning was similar to Mark’s: The Star-Tribune editorial was written in such a way as to point strongly to the inference that the victim is white.”
I’m not so sure about that. Like most, I assumed the family was white—but I sensed the family, for whites being the victims of blacks, was being treated in an unusually sympathetic way by the Star-Tribune. At the time, I thought it was because of the element of child abuse in the story. But now I realize it may have been because the victims were black. Keep in mind that this is a newspaper that described the brutal assault of a slight 13 year-old-boy on a public-transportation bus (you can guess the races) as a “fight”.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 18, 2008 12:54 PM | Send