For those who think that media bias started with the coverage of Donald Trump, I invite you to journey back with me to 1998…
All the world was up in arms, and it should have been, when 21-year-old gay college student Matthew Shepard was beaten to death in October of that year. Not content to label the killing merely as a senseless, brutal murder, the media called it a “hate crime.” Presumably, if there were no "hate" in the motive, Shepard would have been less dead.
Shepard's death was used as a rallying point for all the politically correct to rail against conservatives, religious people, and anyone else who seemed a convenient target. However, reports afterward played down the gay aspect of the crime, and there was some indication that one of the assailants may have been gay himself. Shepard himself was likely a crystal meth addict. Needless to say, these revelations did not fit the narrative, or, frankly, the Matthew Shepard “industry” that followed his death.
Did you ever hear about 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising from Arkansas? I'm betting that you didn't.
In September, 1999, Jesse died from suffocation, after being bound, gagged with his own underwear, blindfolded, taped to a bed, and sodomized by one gay man, while another watched.
Incredibly, this story barely made the national media even AFTER it was written up in the Washington Times. Demonstrating a politically correct orthodoxy that Tomas De Torquemada himself would never have dreamed of, the Associated Press kept this story off the national wire for as long as it could.
As it was, the local dispatches that the AP did write never described the perps, Davis Don Carpenter and Joshua Macave Brown, as gay men. The very best that the Associated Press could do was put it on the national wire three weeks after the perps had already entered pleas.
As always, the national press corps, that constantly wails about censorship and the first amendment, ends up being its own best censor. Naturally, when called to account, they did proffer…an “explanation.”
A national AP spokesman said he was "perplexed" by the comparison of the Shepard and Dirkhising Cases. "One was a hate crime, the other was a sex crime."
Demonstrating enough gall to be divided into three parts, Sue O'Brien, editor of the Denver Post editorial pages, blows off their lack of coverage of the Dirkhising case, and then turns it back around with this gem:
"But unfortunately, Jesse's story itself has become a hate-crime story. But it's the use that the story is being put to that's a hate crime, not the crime itself. It is being used to fan hatred, to excuse discrimination--to say it's OK to target people for abuse because they're gay." So, it’s OK to identify the victim as gay, but not the perp.
And finally, the Washington Post:
"Arkansas authorities have not characterized the Dirkhising death as a hate crime. Matthew Shepard's death sparked public expressions of outrage that themselves became news. That Jesse Dirkhising's death has not done so is hardly the fault of the Washington Post."
Forget political correctness. What we have here is far worse. By categorizing an event, and thus immediately placing its own value judgment on it, the media can now change its entire nature, or at least distort it to serve its own purposes. Many are unduly influenced, but then again, many others are upset and call into talk radio.
When Shepard leaves a bar with two thugs and is killed, it MUST have been because he is gay. This is beyond mere murder. This is a HATE crime.
The Reagan/Pat Buchanan comment that the German soldiers buried at a certain cemetery were just as much victims of the Nazis as anyone else is unacceptable and somehow "anti-Semitic." The notion that a teen-aged German, forced into military service, and then dying is tragic is never even considered. Is this because we hate the Germans, or because the media has already defined the official Nazi victim franchise?
Oh, and questioning the narrative on COVID-19 will get you canceled—if not drummed out of medicine. If your credentials exceed the feckless bureaucrats in charge of public health, most of whom have never actually treated patients, so much the worse for you.
How far back does self-censorship based on ideology go?
At least to 1924.
In the celebrated Leopold/Loeb case, it was never brought out at the time that Leopold was drawn into the murder of Bobby Franks with the promise of a homosexual relationship with Loeb. The acid being poured on Franks' penis was explained away as a means to hide his circumcision. Of course, he was STILL identified as Bobby Franks, and thus Jewish! Moreover, Franks' dilated anus received scant, if any mention.
In the early 1960's, there was extensive coverage of the Civil Rights movement in the South. The prevailing image was of Blacks who were discriminated against, and they wanted their rights. Nothing wrong with that.
But, when dispatches were filed by reporters on the scene describing the seamier side of the whole business, which included public fornication (largely involving paid outside recruits), and the purposeful targeting of tiny county clerk offices with huge lines of hundreds of people--designed to cause big trouble—the stories never made the national media.
As far as I can tell, the mainstream media has always been biased, even if one can make the argument that it is more so today. At least nowadays, alternatives exist; and truth be told, they always did, but never with the convenience of the Internet.
Agree. Agree. Agree.