When does the media cover a horrific crime?

When the perps are white

white
Pakistani immigrant and Uber Eats driver Mohammed Anwar (Anwar family)
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What makes a tragic death a major news story? The races of the perpetrators and the victims, of course. As the media goes all in on critical race theory, many journalists have decided to only provide obsessive coverage of horrific crimes when they can be used to advance the idea — as so eloquently explained by NBA star LeBron James — that minorities are being ‘literally hunted’ by evil white people.

Proof of this phenomenon has never been so clear as in the past several weeks.

It all started when a white man was charged with killing…

What makes a tragic death a major news story? The races of the perpetrators and the victims, of course. As the media goes all in on critical race theory, many journalists have decided to only provide obsessive coverage of horrific crimes when they can be used to advance the idea — as so eloquently explained by NBA star LeBron James — that minorities are being ‘literally hunted’ by evil white people.

Proof of this phenomenon has never been so clear as in the past several weeks.

It all started when a white man was charged with killing eight people — including six Asian women — at three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area. The shooting capped off weeks of media outlets reporting that hate crimes against Asian-Americans were skyrocketing, spurring the hashtag #StopAAPIHate. The media blamed this trend on President Trump because he had called COVID-19 the ‘China virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus’ and white supremacy. Most journalists ignored the fact that the majority of suspects in hate crimes against Asian Americans are other minorities. Also brushed aside was the fact that the Atlanta shooter claimed his motivation was not about race, but anger stemming from his own sex and pornography addiction. When a law enforcement official tried to relay the shooter’s alleged motivation to the public, Vox reporter Aaron Rupar selectively edited a video to spark outrage at the officer. How dare he suggest this was anything but a race-based crime?

Just a few days later, another mass shooting occurred in Boulder, Colorado. Initial videos from the incident showed a light-skinned individual being detained by police, so writers and activists rushed to blame ‘white men’ and insisted that the suspect would’ve never been taken alive if he were a minority. The shooter was later identified as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a Syrian immigrant, who friends and family say was bullied for his Middle Eastern name and was often paranoid about being attacked because of his race. Still, some found a way to double down and blame whiteness, including Kamala Harris’s niece, who wrote, ‘I made an assumption based on his being taken into custody alive and the fact that the majority of mass shootings in the US are carried out by white men.’ In any other context, her remarks would have been roundly condemned as prejudice. Even when white men are not the suspects, they are still somehow the culprits.

Both of these shootings received wall-to-wall coverage. Meanwhile, a shooting that saw eight people injured and two dead in Virginia Beach was hardly touched on cable news. The suspects are black, so the liberal outrage machine did not kick into gear.

Finally, this week in Washington DC, an Uber Eats driver was murdered after two teenage girls tried to hijack his car. The girls allegedly tased Mohammad Anwar, a 66-year-old Pakistani immigrant, before trying to drive away as Anwar was still hanging out of the driver’s side of the car. He was killed when the vehicle crashed. The video is horrifying, particularly as one of the suspects expresses more concern for her phone being left in the car than she does the man she just killed. This story, which caps off a year of skyrocketing carjackings in the DC area, should be top news. However, the two teenage girls are black. So instead, we got CNN referring to Anwar’s death as an ‘accident’ in which he was ‘fatally injured’. DC mayor Muriel Bowser sent out a scheduled tweet telling residents they can prevent auto theft by locking their cars and avoiding parking in unsafe areas.

Yahoo News! reporter Hunter Walker accused conservatives of highlighting Anwar’s death because the girls were black. It is sad that terrible crimes are now merely pretexts for ugly media posturing. But it is right to point out the glaring double standard that so many in the media deploy to advance anti-whiteness. The events of the past few weeks have only cemented this vile tendency toward desperate and divisive race-baiting.