BrianGarst.com

You’ve probably heard by now about the 65 mostly minority children turned away from a private swim club in Philadelphia despite their camp having purchased access. Although the motivations of the club are unclear (the kids are now being allowed to return), there is at least a reasonable case to be made that race was involved.

The controversy has been extensively covered by the media.  GoogleNews returns 1,523 articles in the past month with the words “Creative Steps,” the name of the day camp hosting the kids.

Two days prior to the eviction of the Creative Steps children, a family in Ohio faced a seemingly racially motivated incident of their own.  The white family, and a couple friends, were assaulted by a large group of black teenagers.  The father, Marty Marshall, spent 5 days in the hospital.  While beating the man, the teenagers were said to have yelled, “this is a black world now.”

A GoogleNews search of Marty Marshall returns 18 stories.

Two seemingly racial incidents occur at the same time, yet the ratio of stories in the press is almost 85:1.  What could possibly justify this disparity? The answer is quite simple, one fits the popular narrative that whites are racist against blacks, while the other indicates that there is no racist monopoly.  The latter fact, if it were widely acknowledged in media coverage of allegedly racist incidents, would put not a few race hustlers out of business and deprive certain politicians of their favorite playing card.  The media, by deciding which stories to bury and which to amplify, has long served as a source of distortion regarding social and political issues.

I had originally intended this post to highlight the difference between new media and old on this issue because I recalled that, as of a couple days ago, a search of blogs on Google produced nearly identical results for the two stories. Yet doing that search again today, I was a bit surprised to see that a large gap exists and the Creative Steps story outnumbers the Marshall family beating almost 10:1.  So while the blogosphere has not completely overcome the media filter on race, its strength has been severely reduced.

race issues