Red Star Crime Reporting Bias; Ex-reporter Speaks

I've spent a considerable amount of time on this blog documenting how the MSM in general, and the Red Star in particular, are loathe to tell the truth when it comes to what they consider to be protected groups: blacks, homosexuals, the poor, urban liberals, and so on. You know something is amiss when I can find an obscure news account that provides a description of crime suspects, where the same description was omitted in every other local Twin Cities news organization story.

In other words, you don't have to believe me, or the folks at Anti-Strib, or any other blogger who covers these stories. The facts are there once the pieces are put together.

And if you don't believe the bloggers, how about an ex-news reporter? Dave Matheny opines on his past experience reporting Twin Cities crime for the Red Star in the twincitiescarry.com Forum (requires registration):

Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 8:30 pm Post subject:

Starting in the 1980s, groups of black youths -- kids, really -- began roaming downtown and on occasion beating up people. The fact that they were (and are) black has no particular significance, other than the simple reality that most white folks feel a degree of fear when approached by a group of black gangbangers, a feeling that is intensified if the thugs call them racial epithets and beat them badly enough to put them in the hospital.

I worked as a reporter for the Horrible Old Strib at the time, and it was kind of strange to have this going on while the staff, very much aware of it, was basically not allowed to write about it. Reporters are fairly normal people but there was this elephant in the room, you know, like nobody talks about how Mom gets falling-down drunk every night.

So nothing was said. There was just no way to write it without the story being at least somewhat specific about who was doing what and to whom. That would have amounted to saying that blacks were committing crimes against whites, and the Strib does not write that story.

The situation, as far as I know, has remained that way, without benefit of being remarked on by the press, for all these years. TV, however, is different. It operates under no such restrictions -- not the black-white thing, but the making-sense thing. WCCO-TV took a whack at it by reporting that "downtown businesses" were complaining that their customers were being frightened off by the "downtown crime problem."

They illustrated it with file footage of (drumroll, please) cops rousting a sleeping wino out of an alley. Never any mention of the exact nature of the problem, nor of who was doing what to whom.

If you didn't happen to know, you'd assume that people were not shopping downtown because of drunks sleeping in alleys.

A couple of reporter friends of mine tried to find ways to report it, but the editors kept bouncing the stories back because they were too negative. There was no way to put a positive spin on it, unless "The Percentage of Whites Who Had their Teeth Kicked in by Black Gangs Rose by a Smaller Than Predicted Percentage This Year" is a positive story.
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--Dave Matheny