Special Victim Status, The Era Of Woke Journalism

By Gregory E. Mantell

"The most amazing book of the year...The best book I've ever read... Mantell's carefully researched book provides hundreds of new facts about the press's fanatical propaganda on race."

--Ann Coulter

This book exposes how the media racializes and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Via Appia Books
• Release date: Apr 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798990460621

Book preview

Foreword

Acknowledgment

The biggest sources of inspiration for me in writing this book were Alexis de Tocqueville, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Bertrand Russell. The wisdom of these great minds speaks across the century or two that separate us. More than perhaps anyone else I am aware of, they understood the problems of press bias and factionalism, and the detriment these pose to democracy. That I am willing to speak so boldly on these subjects is due in large part to the fact that this illustrious group has already so well addressed the topics.

This book draws on a great many sources. But all of the blame for the assimilation of ideas rests entirely with me. In addition to those mentioned above, I quote Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Weber, Noam Chomsky, David Spiegelhalter, and Nadine Strossen, among others. I do not claim that any of them would endorse or even agree with me, but nonetheless I found some of their work helpful in formulating my own. Strangely, even those who perhaps would most disagree have proved to be some of the most helpful, acting as a foil of sorts.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The characteristic of the American journalist consists in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace. And he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters’ of individuals. To track them into private life and to disclose all their weaknesses and errors. Nothing can be more deplorable than this abuse of the powers of thought.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

It is often easier to see the faults of the past than the present. Certainly, this is true in the case of journalism for most.

At its best, the media is indispensable to democracy, and this importance has been recognized since the founding of the nation. In 1780, for instance, A Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts proclaimed: "The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state: it ought not, therefore, to be restrained in this Commonwealth."¹

But at its worst, reporting, when tainted with partisanship, leads to polarization and is a detriment to democracy. So, the state of journalism matters in important ways for the health of the country.

It is generally acknowledged that the American media has gone through several notable periods of problematic reporting. Factionalism was rampant in newspapers in the nation’s early years, with even our august Founding Fathers stooping to get into the fray. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton waged war on each other by bribing reporters to attack the other and his party. Jefferson’s attempt backfired when he had a falling out with James T. Callender, the journalist he had previously employed; Callender retaliated by publishing an editorial accusing Jefferson of an affair with his slave, Sally Hemings.²

The media’s role in the lead-up to the Civil War is explored by Yale historian Joanne Freeman in her book The Field of Blood—about violence in Congress before the War Between the States. The party press played an active part in fanning the flames of discord; journalists played up friends and played down foes.³ And even the independent press was partisan, publishing:

narratives of Congress that were part fact, part fiction, and part aspiration; journalistic objectivity was in its infancy in the 1850s. The press in this period was in the business of projection in every sense of the word: projecting motives and intentions onto foes; projecting the future of the nation; and projecting all of this and more throughout the nation in newsprint.⁴

By the end of the 1800s, yellow journalism had become the name of the game, during the battles for publishing supremacy fought between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. With banner headlines supported by less impressive facts, the papers took sensationalism to a new level to play to the crowd.

But the slanted reporting continued well into the twentieth century. The media played a disturbing role in the McCarthy Era, during which reporters saw it as their duty to decry and expose suspected communists. And they weren’t just echoing McCarthy’s accusations, as is sometimes claimed; reporters also hyped their own investigations. The witch hunt by journalists was widespread and reached startling levels. Few opportunities to expose communists were lost. A good example of this was an August 1, 1954 Chicago Tribune article  I came across when doing research, which mentioned my alma mater, the University of Chicago. The story was ostensibly about the decline of the university’s neighborhood and the subsequent drop in student enrollment (U. of Chicago Opens Critical Fight for Life.⁵) The news story began quite favorably, describing UChicago as one of the world’s greatest centers of learning. But in the second half of the story, things took a U-turn and the rest of the article mostly consisted of the Tribune discussing how many suspected communists were on campus. The paper noted with great concern that: The problem of communist infiltration and influence at the university has been a subject of much controversy.⁶ The Tribune was naming names.

Figure 1.1: In 1954, the Chicago Tribune was concerned about suspected commies at the University of Chicago.

There is typically assumed to be a happy ending to the story of journalistic roguery. Roughly speaking, the common narrative about the history of American journalism goes something like this: After going through several periods of biased reporting, the press emerged unscathed and at last achieved enlightenment and an age of nearly scientific objectivity at some point in the past century, continuing to the present. Whether or not this objectivity was ever fully attained is a valid point of discussion—though there was at least a period during which it was an aspiration—but, more disconcertingly, whether it even remains the goal is a more timely and urgent matter of concern.

American journalism has significantly regressed in recent decades, backsliding into the shallow partisan sniping and sensationalism that marked the early decades of reporting in the US, a process of devolution that appears to be accelerating.  We could be tempted to say it’s the 1800s all over again. But it appears things are actually worse than that, for the press has not only embraced some of the low points of behavior of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but has adopted some of the most outrageous exploits of the past century as well. We’ve entered a new McCarthy Era with today’s zealot reporters taking upon themselves an additional Orwellian role as the thought police, decrying any who dare to espouse unpopular beliefs that defy the current orthodoxy. The media has come to exude a fanatical emphasis on race and racial purity theories reminiscent of Nazi Germany. In short, we have entered a new Era of Woke Journalism; this transformation began to take root in the 1980s, became increasingly entrenched in the 1990s, and exploded exponentially afterward. But yellow journalism meets Joe McCarthy meets Hitler is not an inspiring combination.

The state of journalism is intimately linked to the state of American higher education. The winds of political correctness sweeping academia in the 1980s have been discussed by others, but the way that this politicization also infected the media is less widely known. Student activists reveled in the far-left indoctrination and anti-intellectual relativism and reductive oppressionism of their professors, as first postmodernism, neo-Marxism, and more recently wokeism infiltrated nearly every nook and cranny of American universities.

There were no official warning bells, but I was there during an important moment in the attack on higher education. In the mid-1980s, as a first-year student at UChicago, I was hired as a stringer by Newsweek on Campus to report on the university’s Western Civilization program. Jesse Jackson had been leading student protesters at Stanford University in chants of Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go. Newsweek wanted to know whether Western Civ was also under fire at UChicago. Alas for my story, but fortunately for academic integrity, Western Civ was alive and well at the University of Chicago. I interviewed some stalwarts of the university’s Western Civ course, a remnant of its famed Great Books program, historians William McNeil and Karl Weintraub; they told me UChicago students were still reading their Homer, Plato, and Thucydides (as I soon discovered myself firsthand when I took the course the following year).

The lack of a blatant controversy at UChicago misled Newsweek; it canceled the story. But this was a mistake, since the magazine had been on to something. What Newsweek didn’t realize was that the Western Civ program at UChicago was an outlier. There was a real change in the air on college campuses. Truth was being brushed aside as the highest goal of academia, being replaced by a highly politicized notion of social justice. There was a misguided push to relativize and dumb down education; diversity and multiculturalism meant there couldn’t be standards. Excellence was derided as elitist and most likely racist and sexist. The commendable quest for equal rights and the notion that women and all races should be given a first-rate education became warped into a call for demographics over quality of thought across all fields; the trivial rants of every simpleton on the faculty or among the student body was equal, or better, than Plato and Shakespeare.

The racism of anti-racism was beginning to rear its ugly head at universities. Black nationalism took root throughout the academy, morphing from Critical Legal Studies into Critical Race Theory in law schools and spreading thence to the humanities and social sciences, where it was eagerly embraced.  Literature, for instance, was no longer celebrated for revealing insights by great artists about human nature. Classes were regarded instead by activist professors primarily as an opportunity to preach their own personal political diatribes about what was wrong with America or the West and to elevate minor thinkers over the greatest writers of the past 2,500 years. (If you can’t beat them or join them, why not knock them?) Only a year or two later, Allan Bloom of UChicago would publish his famous indictment of American higher education, The Closing of the American Mind.⁷ (While I could say much more, I will stop there for now on the education debate, since I am writing another book dealing with the question of liberation versus indoctrination in education.)

But the student activists protesting on college campuses didn’t ride off quietly into the sunset. They have graduated and taken over the American media, from which pulpit they now preach the gospel to the general public. Once ensconced in the newsroom, left-wing journalists began their attack on journalistic standards rather stealthily, with the damage appearing at first as one-sided reporting. But eventually even the pretense of objectivity came under attack; it was seen as an inconvenient obstacle to political advocacy and the all-out racialization and genderization of the news, as will be explored in later chapters.

Journalists are no longer content with telling us what happened—they want to tell us what to think about what happened. This slant is accomplished in two main ways: first, through the media’s role as gatekeeper—deciding what stories we read or see, given the limited amount of space or airtime to report the news; and secondly, through bias in the way those stories are framed or presented.

The public knows something is wrong. An August 4, 2020 report from Gallup and the Knight Foundation found 83% of Americans currently see either a great deal (46%) or a fair amount (37%) of political bias in news coverage."⁸ But for many, slanted news coverage is almost a sort of subliminal persuasion. People may know something is happening but they would be hard pressed to explain exactly how it works. The goal of this book is to bring the problem of press bias out into the open and expose it for what it is—propaganda about social and political issues—and to reveal the specific techniques the media uses to skew reporting.

Of course, given the rather checkered history we have discussed, American journalism has been under scrutiny for some time. Media criticism began in earnest in the US in the early 1800s. The Founding Fathers, despite their belief in the freedom of the press, condemned the media’s vices when they began to get their own taste of newspaper abuses. And academic studies of media bias proliferated during the past century; this book seeks to expand on that body of work.

One critique, in particular, deserves mention—Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. Chomsky and I have vastly different views of press bias—I would argue in large part because my book was written thirty years later than his, and there have been enormous changes in American journalism since then. Nonetheless, surprisingly, we do find the media uses many of the same propaganda principles to spin the news. While Chomsky saw the media as using certain misinformation techniques to promote corporate and government interests, I show how the media in recent decades has adopted quite similar misinformation techniques to promote reporters’ own left-wing political views (which may well coincide with the views of the owners, or at least are certainly tolerated by them.)

Perceptive observers, such as insiders like former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg, realize that media slant is especially evident in coverage of social issues. As he wrote in 2001 in his book Bias:

The problem of bias is not that the big network news divisions are reliably pro- Democratic … or even predictably anti-Republican. It’s about how they frame the big issues of the day—feminism, abortion, race, affirmative action, even taxes. On these issues they are reliably and predictably left of center.⁹

There are strong reasons to believe this bias has expanded well beyond the narrower sphere Goldberg discussed—into flagrant pro-Democratic political partisanship. But it is still true that slanted coverage of social issues is of special concern and has had dire consequences, with politicized reporting helping fuel racial discord and violence in America; the slant is, therefore, well worth examining.

Perhaps no topics these days are more explosive than policing and criminal justice. In this book I will undertake a comprehensive analysis of news coverage of police shootings of white, black, and Hispanic civilians. This coverage will be contrasted with reporting on civilian murders of police officers. The differences in the amount and framing of such stories are shocking and scandalous. We will see the media relies on the well-defined propaganda principles of Special Victim Status to skew reporting on shootings of civilians and police, assigning greatly different worth to the lives of people based on race and gender—and by their status as suspect or police officer. This analysis reveals the media’s pro-criminal, anti-police agenda.

Concerns about media bias, understandably, are becoming more common these days. But what sets this book apart is that it goes beyond mere rhetoric and provides empirical evidence to disclose how the media indoctrinates readers. In particular, I will focus on a detailed analysis of news coverage of the New York Times and the Washington Post, arguably the two most respected newspapers in the country. The examination may shed light on how well the papers actually live up to these accolades.

By examining a variety of evidence—quantity and quality of news coverage, journalists’ own words and explanations, case studies, anecdotes, statistics, press style books, corporate policies, and more—we will unmask how the media spins the news to play down criminal behavior and play up police misconduct. (These insights could be applied more widely to examine news coverage of any number of controversial issues, since it turns out the press uses the same propaganda techniques to promote a far-left agenda across many contentious social and political issues.) At a more abstract level, this book is about how the presentation or framing of information can be used to manipulate people, almost unconsciously.

Finally, while this book does see plenty to critique, I will end on a positive note, by proposing several ways to improve news coverage for the better.

I wish that it were possible to give a more optimistic assessment of the current state of American journalism. Philosophically, I am a staunch supporter of the media’s essential role in a democracy and the importance of unflinching investigative journalism. Strangely enough, I find myself in the unusual position of having written both a work vigorously celebrating the press (a movie script, based on a disturbing true story—about intrepid European journalists who exposed a mass killing) and a work strongly critiquing the media (this book, also based on a disturbing true story). But we must not be blind to reality. Credit where credit is due, but we must not be afraid to call a spade a spade.

Indeed, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Statement says it is the duty of journalists to call out abusive practices in the profession.¹⁰ It is a part of ensuring professional standards. It is my sincerest hope that this work will result in some soul searching and reflection by reporters and a raising of standards and aspirations in the field. Journalists can and must do better to regain the public trust and perform their essential role in strengthening, rather than undermining, democracy. The truth dies in darkness.

Chapter 2

Special Victim Status: Worthy and Unworthy Victims

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy.

—Thomas Jefferson

In recent decades, social activist reporters at the Times, the Post, and most major news outlets in the US have racialized and genderized news coverage to an unprecedented degree. In keeping with their far-left progressive political views, their worldview is founded on identity politics and the accompanying racial and gender purity theories, dividing all of the world into two simplistic, reductive groups—the oppressors and the oppressed. (This is one of the key tenets of Critical Race Theory.)¹¹ Left-wing journalists denigrate the notion of a fundamental shared humanity and refuse to acknowledge the basic human truth that all people—certainly all groups—can be oppressors and oppressed in various situations. ¹²

One of the most powerful ways journalists promote their social and political agenda of inherent victimhood for women and minorities is through the use of the propaganda principles of Special Victim Status. Special Victim Status means that the press plays up the worth of some victims and plays down others for political reasons—even though the downplayed, unworthy victims suffer equal harm or injury under identical or highly similar circumstances as the played up, worthy victims. These propaganda techniques are used across a wide range of social issues, but in this book, I will focus on how Special Victim Status is used to slant news coverage of police shootings of civilians and civilian murders of police, in particular, but also First Amendment issues and violent crime in general (from mass shootings to extremist groups to terrorism).

To paraphrase Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent, the U.S. mass media’s practical definitions of [Special Victim Status ] are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model.¹³

Although we are bombarded with slanted reporting on a daily basis, the principles that the press uses to skew reporting are not widely known to the general public. But the misinformation techniques of Special Victim Status can be plainly stated. My examination of the quantity and quality of news reporting on shootings of civilians by police and shootings of police by civilians reveals the following about how media misinformation works:

1) The number of news articles about worthy victims with Special Victim Status is much greater than for unworthy victims lacking such priority status. Often all sections of the paper (news, opinion, letters to the editor, and others) are enlisted to heighten and sensationalize the reporting. Those without Special Victim Status receive limited media coverage, almost exclusively in the news section—rarely in the opinion pages or other parts of the paper.

2) Those with Special Victim Status receive more prominent coverage—they are more likely to be put on the front page—rather than being relegated to the inside or back pages as unworthy victims are.

3) The press dwells on the horrific details of the killings of worthy victims but downplays gruesome details of those not assigned Special Victim Status.

4) The media expresses more outrage, indignation, and calls for justice for the harming or killing of those with Special Victim Status but is conspicuously mute about demands for retribution for unworthy victims.

5) Reporters stress nefarious motives of the killers of worthy victims, such as racism. But  journalists downplay abhorrent motives of the killers of those without Special Victim Status, instead emphasizing gun violence, mental health issues, a bad childhood—or even, as we shall see, boredom. In some cases, the media will not merely downplay nefarious motives in the killing of those without Special Victim Status but will even go so far as to defend or normalize the killing, claiming it was payback or otherwise justified.

6) A favorite propaganda technique in the journalist’s toolkit to bolster Special Victim Status is to quote a left-wing academic or activist who agrees with the reporter—treating him or her as a superior, neutral observer—with no opposing commentary from any other point of view; this allows reporters to present their own opinions and political agenda in an article but give it a more respectable veneer by quoting an expert instead of the journalist quoting himself or herself. (A growing number of people are catching on to this trick of slanted sources. Former CBS reporter Goldberg, even Chomsky, and academic studies have all noted the use of one-sided experts. One study found liberal sources were favored three-to-one in reporting.¹⁴

7)  The press does not let facts stand in the way of who it assigns Special Victim Status. To play up harms to worthy victims and play down harms to unworthy victims, reporters routinely spin statistics and selectively present facts to make it appear as though they are simply reporting the unvarnished truth.

The media’s use of Special Victim Status is a shock and awe propaganda campaign designed to arouse hate, fear, and rage in the reader. It is a shameless crusade to push the press’ social and political agenda.

As noted, two of the primary criteria for assigning Special Victim Status are the race and gender of the victim. (There is even a hierarchy among the worthy victims, as we shall see later.) Another important consideration in the granting, or denial, of Special Victim Status is whether the victim is an offender or police officer.

These findings, and the evidence for them, will be presented in detail in the coming chapters. But in short, in the case of police shootings of civilians, the Times and the Post play up the deaths of black men as well as women of any race and downplay killings of white and Hispanic males. However, in the case of civilian murders of police officers, the papers play down the deaths of law enforcement regardless of race.

Overall, the media uses the propaganda principles of Special Victim Status to present criminals in the best possible light while portraying police in the worst possible way. Reporters play up police violence while downplaying criminal violence. In addition, in the case of protesters, the media also stresses the First Amendment rights of worthy victims or groups and downplays the free speech rights of unworthy groups.

As I was finishing the first draft of this book, I made the striking discovery that I was not the only one who had come to these conclusions about the media’s use of the propaganda techniques of Special Victim Status. Noam Chomsky and I independently came to similar conclusions (although we used different language to express things). I was familiar with some of Chomsky’s general comments about media bias having watched interviews with him, but it wasn’t until I recently read his book Manufacturing Consent for the first time that I learned the more interesting details of his claims about how media propaganda works. I immediately realized that what I call Special Victim Status was virtually synonymous with Chomsky’s notion of worthy and unworthy victims.

To be clear, Chomsky and I have utterly different views about the nature of media bias—and criminal justice. Chomsky argued the media had an establishment or right-wing slant. I have no doubt that much of the discrepancy in our views of media bias is due to the different eras in which we were writing. Journalism has changed enormously since Chomsky wrote his book in the 1980s, when the Era of Woke Journalism was just beginning. The subsequent years have entirely swept away his main conclusions, as the journalism industry has been taken over by left-wing social activists, as we shall see throughout this book. But what’s remarkable is that, despite all of these differences, we both found the media still uses similar propaganda techniques to spin the news and elevate some victims over others.

These similarities held even though we were examining reporting on entirely different topics. While I analyzed news coverage of police shootings of unarmed civilians and civilian murders of police in the US, Chomsky focused mostly on foreign affairs reporting. Specifically, he compared reporting on the killings of priests and nuns from the 1960s to 1980s in certain foreign countries. All of the religious workers who were murdered were political activists in opposition to the governments of the countries they died in. According to Chomsky, the respective foreign governments were highly suspected of, if not outright proved to be guilty of, playing a role in all of the religious workers’ deaths.

Chomsky found that there was a hypocritical double standard in media coverage based on whether the nation thought to have played a role in the deaths was an ally or enemy of the U.S. Worthy victims—those murdered by unfriendly countries—received massively greater news coverage than unworthy victims—murdered by friendly countries—because of the political points to be had from such coverage.

Chomsky noted that Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest who was murdered by Polish police in 1984, received far more media coverage than a hundred religious workers killed in Central American nations over several decades from the 1960s to 1980s. Poland at the time was communist and an enemy of the U.S. The American media played up the killing of Popieluszko, insinuating high-level government or Soviet involvement not just blaming a few rogue officers for his death. However, in the case of the religious workers killed in Central American nations—which were friendly, client states of the US—the media downplayed the killings and made vague or inconclusive comments about the killers, suggesting rebel involvement and distancing the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala from accusations of murder.

Chomsky concluded:

The evidence of worth [of victims] may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation… While this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone. This is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system.¹⁵

In particular Chomsky noted (almost exactly mirroring my findings):

1) Worthy victims received far more coverage than unworthy victims. Popieluszko’s murder was covered in seventy-eight New York Times articles, whereas one hundred murdered Central American religious workers altogether only merited fifty-seven stories in the Times.

2) Worthy victims received more prominent coverage—they were much more likely to be placed on the front page—rather than receive inside or back page coverage.

3) In addition, Chomsky also observed that overall articles about worthy victims were longer—more total column inches—than those about unworthy victims. I also found this during my research, though I did not specifically measure this aspect; however, I do give some examples in later chapters.

4) The media focused on gruesome details of the killings of worthy victims but glossed over gory details in the case of unworthy victims.

5) The press expressed much more outrage and calls for justice for worthy victims but was generally silent about redress for unworthy victims.

6) The media stressed conspiracy theories or high-level government involvement in the killings of worthy victims. In contrast, the press portrayed unworthy victims as simply being caught in the middle of unfortunate conflicts with no clear or easy blame. (What I call playing up or down nefarious motives.)

7) Chomsky also noted a tendency to rely on the use of one-sided experts (though he found a difference in the direction of slant back then).

There were a few notable differences in our findings and methodology. Chomsky did not point out, as I do, how the press abuses statistics to skew stories. Plus, I relied on a larger population—of about 600 shootings of civilians and police officers of various races and genders over a five-year period. Chomsky mostly based his conclusions on the coverage of a single worthy victim (the Polish priest Popieluszko) and compared his death to about one hundred unworthy victims (priests and nuns killed in Central American nations).¹⁶ And, of course, we found entirely different criteria for the media’s granting or denial of Special Victim Status—in his case, whether a priest was murdered by a country friendly to the US or not; in my case, the race, gender, and status of whether the person killed was a police officer or crime suspect. I examined news coverage of two press organizations; Chomsky, four.

In addition, Chomsky proposed that there are five filters at work in society to ensure …elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents… and …allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public…: a) corporate ownership; b) advertiser influence; c) the use of establishment, official sources; d) flak to keep the media in line; and e) anticommunism or fear of the enemy or dissidents.¹⁷ In my own opinion, every point I make in this book disputes one of Chomsky’s filters. For instance, my points 1) through 7) above challenge his claims about the marginalization of dissidents filter e), and my 3) challenges his official sources filter c). Or, at the very least, the evidence shows that the direction of slant imposed by these filters has changed, and a new enemy—the non-far-left—has been targeted. The examples are so numerous it would be tedious to mention every one. It was my primary purpose in writing this book to espouse my own theory not dispute his, though I do find a comparison useful. So I will only point out a few disagreements in passing throughout the book, but I go into a bit more detail in chapter 8 about some of the other differences in Chomsky’s and my conclusions.

Attempts to Justify Special Victim Status Aren’t Convincing

No one came forward after Chomsky published his book to argue that some priests deserved more coverage than others depending on whether they were killed by countries friendly to the US or not. But no doubt some on the far left, especially Black Lives Matter supporters or reporters at the Times and the Post, will claim that minorities and women should necessarily receive more news coverage just because of their race or gender—regardless of the facts or prevalence of the actual shooting incidents that led to injury or death, as part of a general campaign to elevate black or female voices or victims.But the claim that women and minorities deserve extra coverage simply for their race or gender is a political claim that simply serves to confirm the assertion of left-wing media bias that I am making in this book.

To the contrary, there are multiple reasons to deny the assertion that the press is justified in playing up some deaths and playing down others based on political considerations alone:

1) A racial and gender bias playing up women and minorities is just as repugnant as the reverse claim would be that white people or men should receive elevated coverage just because of their race or gender.

Importantly, we will see in a later chapter that the media can strike a balance in news coverage—without elevating certain races or genders—when it is not pushing outrage to fit its social and political agenda—when those shot don’t merit Special Victim Status. Furthermore, an examination of media coverage also reveals the falseness of the claims by left-wing activists that women and minority voices aren’t heard. Indeed, we will discover quite the opposite is true; they are heard more than those of anyone.

The hypocrisy of those who claim the deaths of women and minorities should be played up is perfectly exemplified by a May 2022 Times article condemning former Fox cable host Tucker Carlson.¹⁸ The Times analyzed Carlson’s programs and claimed it played up white male grievances and downplayed concerns of people of color and women; the Times also accused Carlson of pushing a white nationalist agenda. For one thing, it is worth noting that Carlson is a pundit, not a news organization, as the Times claims to be. Secondly, there is a complete lack of awareness by the Times in the irony of its statements. One could easily and accurately make the politically opposite or reverse claims about the Times and the Post. Both papers have completely given up any pretense of objectivity and balanced journalism. An analysis of coverage by the Times and the Post in the coming chapters shows that their news reporting basically amounts to pushing left-wing grievances, playing down crime, especially by minorities, and playing up the victimhood of women and minorities. To use the politically charged language of the Times, the papers push a misandrist feminist and black nationalist agenda.

The claim that black men should receive extra coverage because of racist treatment by police begs the question of the whole debate. This is undoubtedly the position the media advocates. But whether or not there is widespread bias in police shootings is also very much disputed, as we shall see when we come to an examination of statistics and studies on the subject in chapter 5. Regardless, few women are shot by police; there is no credible historical record of poor treatment of women by police—yet nonetheless women also receive Special Victim Status.

2) Another disturbing claim often made by those on the left is that police violence deserves more coverage than criminal violence. This is the typical pro-criminal, anti-police view that is de rigueur for social activists. It is proclaimed even by as astute a critic of media bias as Batya Ungar; in her recent book Bad News, she claimed shootings by police are worse than shootings by criminals:

There is no comparing an agent of the state committing a crime, or killing or harming a person they have been charged with protecting, with a private citizen committing a crime.¹⁹

But this rationale lacks philosophical rigor and can be challenged for several reasons:

a) Criminal violence is much more common in the US and therefore causes much more damage to society than police shootings. In 2021, police fatally shot about 1,000 people in the line of duty;²⁰ criminals murdered 22,000.²¹ Without discussing assaults and other types of crimes.

b) Moreover, use of force to compel submission by criminals or state violence, as activists like to call it, is necessary for an orderly society, as Bertrand Russell observed:

…The ultimate power of the Law is the coercive power of the State. It is the characteristic of civilised communities that direct physical coercion is (with some limitations) the prerogative of the State, and the Law is a set of rules according to which the State exercises this prerogative in dealing with its own citizens.…²²

The existence of civilised communities … is impossible without some element of force, since there are criminals and men of anti-social ambitions who, if unchecked, would soon cause a reversion to anarchy and barbarism. Where force is unavoidable, it should be exerted by the constituted authority in accordance with the will of the community as expressed in the criminal law.²³

c) While the vast majority of police shootings are justified, criminal violence is never justified.

d) By downplaying the moral repugnance of murders by civilians, the left is also downplaying the worth of the murder victims. That is, the left is saying that the lives of the 22,000 people murdered by civilians are worth less than the lives of the 1,000 people killed by police. The heinousness of this claim speaks for itself.

e) In addition, patrol officers, though employed by the government, are not high-ranking government officials. I agree that a killing by a high-level official, such as a mayor, a governor, a member of Congress, or a president would merit extra coverage.

f) Even if shootings by law enforcement did deserve higher scrutiny than those by the public, then ALL police shootings should be emphasized not just those of minorities or women. The media’s skewed reporting based on race or gender would still not be justified.

g) Moreover, we might also ask those on the left who are worried about state-sponsored violence in police shootings of civilians, where is their concern about the state-sanctioned violence of abortion? I wholeheartedly admit abortion is a highly controversial social issue. But this one-sided concern about certain types of state-sanctioned violence also reveals a political slant in the press.

3) Finally, regardless of the merits of, or motivation for, the skewed reporting, it is important for the public to know how media coverage is being spun so people can better understand the disconnect between what is really happening in the world versus what is being reported by the press.

Chapter 3

Why Do Shootings of Black People Get More Coverage Than Shootings of White People? What Journalists Say

[The] press is a powerful agent. It takes men when their information is incomplete, when their reasoning has not yet been worked out, when their opinions are not yet fixed, and it suggests and intimates and insinuates an opinion and a judgment which oftentimes the man, unless he is a man of great intelligence and force of character, adopts as something established and concluded… It is a power and influence which is exercised over the minds of people, often without any knowledge or any criticism on the part of the person who is subject to it.

—Charles Dana, The Power of the Press

Two Case Studies in Media Bias

Reporters today tend to make ever shriller claims that they are out to protect the world from disinformation, so it is enlightening to investigate some of the disinformation campaigns that journalists themselves engage in. In this chapter, we will examine two case studies giving specific examples in which reporters for the Times and the Post relied on the principles of Special Victim Status to justify claims that shootings of unarmed black people deserved more coverage than shootings of unarmed white people .

We will evaluate reporting on three killings covered by both papers. In the first case study, we will analyze the papers’ coverage of a police shooting of a white man; in the second, we’ll compare news coverage of two civilian shootings of other civilians—one of a black man shot by a white man, the other of a white man shot by a black man. In all three incidents, we’ll consider journalists’ comments about the role that race played in the coverage of each shooting. We’ll examine how reporters used the propaganda principles of Special Victim Status throughout their coverage to play up black men as worthy victims and to play down white men as unworthy victims.

As we will see, when confronted with accusations or evidence of slanted reporting based on race, journalists tend to dig in and claim they are simply telling the unvarnished truth—that the facts warrant the coverage. They deny they are engaging in unethical or deceptive distortion. Interestingly, reporters do not get as defensive about elevated coverage of women (as discussed in chapter 6), perhaps because the public simply isn’t aware of what is happening.

The analysis of how Special Victim Status works in these specific instances will provide useful insights before we move on to a larger statistical analysis of news coverage in the next few chapters. There we will scrutinize the evidence for systemic bias (based on race and gender) in the media’s coverage of hundreds of police and civilian shootings. We’ll also begin to explore some of the reasons for the dramatic shift in reporting in recent decades.

Case Study #1: Zachary Hammond

In August 2015, Washington Post staff experienced a rare moment of self-reflection.

Zachary Hammond, an unarmed 26-year-old white male, was shot by police on July 26, 2015, in Seneca, South Carolina, but his killing hadn’t generated the same intense media outrage as when an unarmed black person is shot. To be sure, Hammond’s death had been mentioned by the Post—but only once in the first week since the shooting. On August 3, 2015, columnist Radley Balko, a frequent police critic, called Hammond’s killing another senseless drug war death.²⁴ Since Hammond was white, he did not qualify for Special Victim Status, so the columnist had to make do with this alternate way of criticizing the police. There had been no red alert at the Post, and the media at large had collectively yawned at Hammond’s death. The sparse reporting did not go unnoticed and uncriticized by some. On August 7, 2015, Abby Phillip, a Post reporter, made a perfunctory effort to confront the troubling reality about the lack of news coverage in an article entitled, "Family Questions Response to Shooting." The subheading read, Police killing of unarmed white teen in S.C. raised little outcry²⁵:

Amid heightened scrutiny of fatal police shootings across the country, Hammond’s death has prompted numerous questions, few answers — and almost no national outrage.

More than a week after Hammond’s death, his family’s attorney says race is almost certainly playing a role in the disconcerting silence. Unlike the victims in the highest-profile police shootings over the past year — in cities from Ferguson and Cleveland to North Charleston and Cincinnati — Hammond was white.

It’s sad, but I think the reason is, unfortunately, the media and our government officials have treated the death of an unarmed white teenager differently than they would have if this were a death of an unarmed black teen. The hypocrisy that has been shown toward this is really disconcerting.

He added: The issue should never be what is the color of the victim. The issue should be: Why was an unarmed teen gunned down in a situation where deadly force was not even justified?²⁶

The same day, another Post columnist, Lonnae O’Neal, expanded on Phillip’s concern about the lack of media scrutiny of Hammond’s death. Her opinion piece was aptly headlined, "Police Kill a White Teen, and the Silence Raises Questions."

The teenager, on a first date, was stopped in the parking lot of a Seneca, S.C., Hardee’s during a drug bust, and the officer contends he fired in self-defense as Hammond tried to run him over. His 23-year-old date was charged with possession of 10 grams (.35 ounces) of marijuana. And it feels like a life gone over so much nothing.

Yet Hammond’s killing, under cloudy circumstances — a police report never mentions the fatal gunshots — has not sparked national protests. It has not pricked us the way Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Brandon Jones, Eric Harris and Freddie Gray did. The way the killing of Samuel DuBose most recently and under the most similar circumstances did. (DuBose was also behind the wheel; the Cincinnati officer who shot him alleged that DuBose was dragging him as he was taking off.)²⁷

O’Neal went on to use part of the same quote from the family attorney Bland—the hypocrisy that has been shown toward this is really disconcerting. Bland was right—the media hypocrisy is disconcerting—and can be seen in the very Post article and column in which he was quoted.

The moment of self-reflection teased in the Post’s headlines didn’t last long. Within the first ten paragraphs of both Phillip’s news article and O’Neal’s column, the soul searching was over, though neither writer denied the reality of the racial disparity in media coverage of shootings of unarmed white and black men. When O’Neal said the shootings of white people just don’t prick us the same as the shootings of black men, she was subtly, indirectly acknowledging the reality that white people don’t qualify for Special Victim Status in the eyes of journalists. But a direct examination of race-baiting by the media was not exactly a subject either paper could condone. Soon, the Post staff went on the defensive, pivoting to explain why the disparity in coverage was justified.

Phillip and O’Neal relied on two of the tried-and-true propaganda techniques of Special Victim Status—specially chosen statistics and friendly experts—to nullify the objections to differences in the volume of media coverage. In the ninth paragraph of Phillip’s article, she explained away the media outrage in the case of black men and lack of interest in shootings of white men by quoting a simple, reductive fact: "Black people are 13% of the population but