News Media and a Shooting

A reasonable person’s opinions on the set of subjects usually called race relations would be the same this morning as they were a few days ago before a white man shot nine black people in South Carolina, because there has been no meaningful new evidence to cause him to change them.  The actions and attitudes of one criminal  demonstrate nothing about the general situations. Yet the media are full of people claiming they do and finding spurious meaning in  the  event. The whole journalistic business of improperly attaching broad significance to  single acts and playing to people’s emotions suggests that those doing it are themselves  foolish and driven by emotion or  are cynical manipulators who assume those in their audience are or are some of each.  It is dishonest on more than one level and cheapens discourse. 

One could also wish those in government and the traditional media, including black people in government and the traditional media,  would start treating  black people as adults.  A terrible crime was committed by a bad and probably insane  young man.  He was captured by the police and is now in jail.  Except for some  predictable gleefully ghoulish opportunism  from the gun control lobby, that would have been the end of the story as big news if the victims had been white, Asian, Hispanic, or just about anything else except black. Instead we saw  hand wringing and posturing and talk of “healing”  all around to comfort and reassure and make political points with  the poor black people  - not  the ones whose friends and relatives had been killed and who probably needed comforting, but rather  black people in general.  The whole business was sloppy and  suggested  more than a little condescension about the ability of black Americans to cope with life.  Black people should have found it insulting.