Media Reports Racist Brick Attack on Hispanic Man, Buries Race of Attacker
Is it any wonder the public doesn’t trust the establishment media nowadays?
Newspapers and big-network TV stations frequently complain about having fewer viewers, and seem puzzled as to why people are choosing alternative sources in droves.
If they bothered to actually listen to the public, they might have a clue: Pushing political narratives seems to have replaced honest reporting in many outlets, and people are simply fed up with it.
Take a look at how two recent news stories were covered by The Washington Post, and you can see the problem.
Both were just a few days apart and both involved altercations between people of different races … but the way The Post decided to use race in the headlines is a prime example of narratives coming before straight-laced reporting.
That’s what The Daily Caller just pointed out in a tweet showing the two headlines side-by-side.
“Woman beats a 91-year-old Mexican man with a brick, tells him to ‘go back to your country,'” declared the headline of one Post article on Tuesday.
Note that it was apparently important for the left-leaning newspaper to report the race of the victim in that case, but not the perpetrator. Don’t worry — we’ll get back to that in a minute.
But first, take a look at a different headline run by The Washington Post just four days earlier.
“#IDAdam, the white man who called police on a woman at their neighborhood pool, loses job,” that headline stated. See the difference? This time, the race of the antagonist was kept prominent while the second person’s background was buried. Can you guess why?
Conspicuously missing from the first headline is the fact that the woman who assaulted a Mexican man and acted racist toward him was black.
“Commit a hate crime while black — race is buried in the fourth paragraph,” The Daily Caller pointed out on Twitter. “Call police while white — race is in the headline.”
There’s also a major difference in the seriousness of these incidents. In one, a man was almost beaten to death. Yet the apparent black-on-Hispanic racism behind that attack didn’t seem important for The Post to include in its headline.
In the second incident, which didn’t involve a physical assault and was many degrees less serious, The Post apparently decided that the race of the person who made a phone call is not just relevant, but one of the most important pieces of the headline.
It’s almost as if The Post is purposely pushing a narrative and doesn’t want inconvenient facts that might get in their way of an agenda. When a white person clashes with someone of a different race, that’s prominently pointed out in the headline … yet when a black woman attacks a Hispanic, her race is left out of the headline completely.
Look at the media anywhere and you’ll notice that liberals have been pushing hard to paint white Trump supporters as out-of-control racists. For someone glancing at the first headline without reading further into the article, the article seems intended to lead them to that conclusion.
It isn’t until four paragraphs down that a reader discovers the attacker was not white — and there’s a strong chance she was no Trump supporter, either.
“(Erik) Mendoza said his grandfather, Rodolfo Rodriguez, a permanent resident of the United States, had been attacked with a brick and taken to the hospital with a broken cheekbone and two broken ribs,” The Post reported.
“An eyewitness later told The Washington Post that Rodriguez had accidentally bumped into a young girl while walking on the sidewalk,” the article continued. “The child’s mother — a black woman — then pushed the elderly man to the ground and repeatedly bashed him in the face with a concrete brick while yelling, ‘Go back to your country,’ the eyewitness said.”
It didn’t stop there. Other people, identified by The Post as “a group of young men,” joined in the assault and allegedly tried to stomp on the elderly Mexican man’s head, even after he fell to the ground. Conveniently, the race of this gang of attackers was left unreported by the newspaper.
Let’s be clear: This attack, if it played out as it was reported, was heinous and despicable. Attacks on the elderly — whether native born or immigrant, in the country legally or not — are the complete opposite of everything conservatives stand for, and the perpetrator needs to be brought to justice.
The way that incidents are reported by a major newspaper may not get as much attention as the actual crimes, but this is part of a trend. It matters.
It is the job of newspapers like The Post to report facts as soberly and even-handedly as possible. The media’s job is not to push narratives to sway opinions. There’s a place for commentary, but this wasn’t it.
Selective reporting of details and the manipulation of headlines is a real problem … and until establishment outlets realize it, they will keep losing readers who are fed up with being told what to think.
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