It is one issue to discuss racially motivated violence, and the many relevant questions raised thereby. That is not the purpose of this blog post, even though elsewhere I have been heavily covering a similar incident in Mobile. Instead, this is to express absolute bumfuzzlement at the atrocious journalistic ethics at the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, which buried for two weeks the story of two of their own reporters getting beaten up by a huge mob in what appears to have been a random, racially motivated attack.
This defies belief. Forget, for a moment, that these are its own reporters. No matter who the victims were, this was news. Here was the question the columnist wrote, rhetorically, in explaining her paper’s lack of coverage: “In this case, editors hesitated to assign a story about their own employees. Would it seem like the paper treated its employees differently from other crime victims?”
Huh? Would editors really not cover such a story if they knew about it, if the victims were anybody other than their own employees? That’s even a worse admission, or claim, than to say they didn’t want to over-cover their own employees. How can any editor worth a bleeping bleepity bleep possibly fail to cover a story of a beating like this one? By any measure, any standard, and all common sense, this is news.
Once again, “journalistic ethics” in this country appears to be a massive oxymoron.
News should not be spiked. This was an example of spiked news. For shame.
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