Canadian Cincinnatus

How the mainstream media misleads people

In my previous article, I asserted that the mainstream media rarely lies even though it misleads people all the time. Here I will explain how it does this.

A revealing example was their coverage of the shall-issue concealed carry law issue. The movement started in 1987 in Florida by NRA activist Marion P Hammer. While Florida was debating this law, the media went into full-panic mode. Here in Toronto, it was all over our media. An honest American media would have confined the debate over a proposed change in the criminal statutes of Florida to Florida.

In curious contrast, when the shall-issue movement spread to other states, the media response was silence. If the Florida debate was important enough to air across the world, why wouldn’t the same debate being repeated across the country not rate the same coverage? Of course, the answer is tactical. Initially, the journalists wanted to nip this development in the bud. When the movement spread to other states, the journalists wanted to downplay an issue that had become an albatross. What is important to notice is that the MSM’s underhanded tactics did not involve lying at any stage. They simply emphasized certain things and deemphasized others, based on an agenda they never openly acknowledged.

Another common technique is the follow-up story. In 1990, America was transfixed by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. While they were going on, the MSM pretty much did straight-up reporting. The story was too big and moving too fast for much real-time editing. But after the hearings were over, the media endeavored to redefine the memory of the event via their follow-up stories. For instance, they could have run stories about a black man overcoming the odds in his rise to the top. Or they could have published stories about black conservatives. Instead, every follow-up story was about sexual harassment in the workplace (ignoring the fact that Anita Hill’s accusations had fallen apart). They lost the battle, but we nevertheless ended up with onerous sexual harassment laws. That is how media bias works. Again, no lying.

A further technique involves the dog that doesn’t bark. For a good example, consider the current implosion in Venezuela. When Hugo Chavez was thumbing his nose at the US, the media couldn’t get enough of him. But now that oil prices have collapsed and Chavez’s Bolivarian Republic is in ruins, there still are stories about Venezuela, but they are mostly soberly written fact-filled accounts, with no histrionics or sensationalism, and located on page A7 instead of the front page.

Occasionally they do lie. But when they do, it often blows up in their face, which is why they don’t do it often. Take for instance the University of Virginia rape hoax. A Rolling Stone journalist purposely made up this false story, which is the very definition of lying. But look how well that went for her. The fraud was exposed, she was discredited, and Rolling Stone ended up with egg on its face.

Another example of what happens to media liars was the fate of CBS anchor Dan Rather. In 2004, he pedaled false documents about George W Bush’s service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. These were immediately exposed on the internet as obvious forgeries and Dan Rather was forced out of his lucrative sinecure. Lying convincingly is hard.

For conservatives who still remain unconvinced that the MSM doesn’t lie that often, here’s an epistemological question for you: If it were really the case that they lie all the time, how would you know it? Wouldn’t you be like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show, a film is about a fictional reality TV show (called the Truman Show), where Carrey’s character is living in a false reality stage-managed for him by a megalomaniacal TV producer played by Ed Harris?

The reason you, unlike Jim Carrey, are able to be aware of MSM bias in the first place is because of all the truths the MSM tells you. That’s right, all their truths. It is the facts they relay to you that expose their inconsistencies and hidden agendas. Think about it. Among the first people to break through the media bubble were Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge. How could they have done it if all they had were lies to work with? Neither had a research staff. All they did was to change the emphasis. They took the stories on page A9 and placed them on the front page. That’s all. That’s how one guy with a web site and another with a microphone did it.

At this point, you might want to ask, if breaking through the media bias is so easy thanks to the truths the MSM tells, why wouldn’t they just lie all the time? That way, upstarts like Limbaugh and Drudge would be cut off at the root. The answer is that creating a comprehensive false reality is extremely difficult. Totalitarian states like the Soviet Union tried to do that and failed. And they had the kind of all-encompassing, coercive power that the MSM can’t even dream of. In spite of this, every person living in the USSR knew the government was lying to them. They didn’t know the exact truth, but they could guess close enough.

Now there is undoubtedly a small subset of people reading this who might assert that the US today is no different from the Soviet Union of 1968, telling just as many lies. If you are one of these people, you really tick me off. My parents lived through both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. A lot of my relatives couldn’t get to the West and were forced to live out the rest of their lives in the Soviet Union. My grandfather spent 11 years after the war in hiding because he was a pre-war policeman in the Estonian Republic. For that he would have been shot or sent to the Gulag. He didn’t tell my grandmother where he lived for fear that she might fold under questioning. My cousins told me that after her second questioning, she was a changed woman. She never said what they did to her, but it affected her permanently. So, if you can criticize the government to whomever you want, write letters to the editor, or comment on the internet, and you have not yet suffered the fate of my grandmother, then you do not live in anything like the Soviet Union, and how dare you compare your spoiled pampered life to the lives of people who have really suffered.

In my next article, I will discuss techniques for spotting media bias.

What Paul Ryan’s primary win says about the Trump media

A month ago I read in Breitbart that Paul Ryan’s approval rating had dropped to 43% in his primary fight against challenger Paul Nehlen – whose popularity had improved to 32%, according to the poll cited in the article. I thought, wow! Paul Ryan is about to go the way of Eric Cantor. This was followed up with articles announcing that Ryan is “running scared” ahead of his primary.

To my great surprise, I also came across articles in the non-Trump media (basically everything but Breitbart and Drudge) stating that Paul Ryan is cruising to an easy victory, and that his challenger Paul Nehlen is a nut who nobody takes seriously. They also referenced polls, but these polls had Ryan’s support among likely primary voters pegged at upward of 80%, with Nehlen polling in the single-digits or low teens. I thought, wow! Talk about dueling narratives.

My second thought was that the nice thing about this storyline clash is that we don’t have to guess which is right. We will know soon enough. Since the stories are so divergent, one will have to turn out to be completely false. My third thought was that this is an interesting test of the Trump media’s reliability. Are they telling a story that everybody else is ignoring and lying about, or are they are just pushing agitprop?

On Tuesday, Paul Ryan beat Paul Nehlen 85% to 15%. All the mainstream polls had predicted this result. The only outlier was the poll that Breitbart touted. It was so singularly divergent from all the other polls - as well as the final result - that its methodology and purpose can be legitimately called into question.

With regard to Paul Ryan’s victory, when you win 85% of the vote, your support is as universal as it is ever going to get in a free election. All politicians naturally accumulate enemies, people who hate you for purely personal reasons or because they are under the sway of some eccentric ideology. That Paul Nehlen only received 15% means his level of support was little more than white noise.

You know, Andrew Breitbart is a hero of mine. He was a bully who liked to bully bullies. He loved to fight for the little guy. The last thing he would ever do would be to shackle himself to some politician – even a politician he more or less agreed with. I cry when I think about what a Goldman Sachs alumni has done with his organization.

Donald Trump and the decline of Fox News

For the first time in 14 years, CNN is beating Fox News, whose ratings have nosedived in the last 8 months, ever since the appearance of Donald Trump. Radio host Mark Levin, who has taken to calling Fox, “the Donald Trump superPAC”, blames the decline on its blatant Donald Trump cheerleading.

The most egregious example occurred the day of the Indiana primary. Donald Trump opined about how he thought Ted Cruz’s father was conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald. The talking heads at Fox nodded politely as if they were hearing something serious, instead of the career-ending ravings of a lunatic. They didn’t even challenge Trump on the fact that this story came from the National Inquirer, a scandal rag run by his friend, David Pecker. This episode was embarrassing - for Trump but even more for Fox. But I think pro-Trump bias is only part of the explanation; it doesn’t explain that part of the decline that predated their Trump infatuation.

Looking back, I think Fox News’ descent began at that disastrous first Republican debate when the objective of the moderators seemed to be to get the candidates fighting with one another - and when Megyn Kelly attacked Trump using Hillary Clinton’s ‘war on women’ playbook. The purpose of an all-candidate debate is to educate the voter on what the candidates stand for. Instead, Fox played games. Go after the candidates hard on substantive issues important to conservative voters, but don’t have favourites. At the time, the debate’s sky-high TV ratings made it seem like a triumph, but in retrospect it was the first sign of trouble.

And let’s be frank, Fox did a deplorable job covering the Republican nomination race. First they went all-in for Jeb!. Then, after Bush bombed, they went in the tank for Marco Rubio, and when he dropped out, they picked their pom-poms up for Donald Trump. Who wants to watch propaganda? Hey Fox, did you ever consider covering the Republican race honestly and dispassionately? I don’t have a problem with individual commentators openly taking sides. That’s just natural. Anything less would be dishonest. But that sort of partisanship can’t be scaled up to an entire news network. The whole premise of Fox News is to be fair and balanced coverage of the news from a conservative perspective.

To have done that, they would have had to cover every GOP candidate fairly. By all means ask them tough questions – addressing the concerns of conservatives and libertarians that the Main Stream Media systematically ignores. They should have also provided a little bit of airtime to marginal candidates like Rick Santorum and Jim Gilmour. This would have helped provide a complete picture of the race to their viewers. For instance, Gilmour was dismissed out of hand for his low poll numbers, but weren’t these numbers at least partly due to the fact that he never got any air time? What were his actual positions on issues and what solutions did he offer? I can’t say - because the media ignored him.

And then there is Megyn Kelly. I commented at the time of the infamous first Fox debate that I thought that the underlying message of her attack on Trump was, I may be the star of a successful conservative news network but I am also ‘flexible’. I think she is angling for a job on broadcast news, whose ratings are still much higher than any cable station. Her subsequent Vanity Fair cover only confirmed my suspicions. Later, she openly mused in an interview about the possibility of moving on from Fox a year or so from now. I hope her collapsing rating have brought her back down to earth.

If I were Roger Ailes, my response to the bad ratings would be to can the pom-poms and return Fox to the ‘fair and balanced’ – but from a conservative perspective – formula that made it such a success in the first place. Fox is going down - not because their formula failed - but because it was abandoned. If there is some kind of secret arrangement with the Trump campaign, I would end it immediately. Next, I would replace than preening narcissist Geraldo Riviera with Sharyl Attkisson - a top-notch investigative journalist. She may not be a doctrinaire conservative, but she is relentless in the pursuit of the truth and doesn’t let politics – hers or anybody else’s - get in the way. That’s exactly the quality that is needed and one that is all too rare in the media. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Fox didn’t immediately snap her up after CBS canned her for investigating Obama. They picked up Juan Williams after NPR fired him and Williams is a second-rate liberal hack who says nothing original. I’d also frog march Kelly into my office and give her an ultimatum: get your ego in check – right now - or go get another job.

But if Fox News insists on remaining the propaganda organ of the Trump Empire, expect Fox’s ratings to slide further. They have had their wake-up call.

Why has the Real Clear Politics not updated its GOP presidential polling graphics since Nov 19?

Specifically, I am speaking of their “2016 Republican Presidential Nomination” graph, where results of all the national polls concerning the Republican Presidential contest are tabulated and turned into a running average, which is graphed. As I write this, this page has not been updated since Nov 19, almost a week ago. Here is a screencap, I took today (Nov 25):

And yet, polls on the Republican race have emerged since that time. For instance, Reuters runs a 5-day rolling poll on this race. Each day the average of the preceding 5 days are released.

Perhaps there is a reason for the exclusion of the Reuters poll, but the methodology of the RCP poll charts seems to be to take every poll – even if the comparison is no longer strictly apples-to-apples (for example, in the past they have averaged together polls of voters, registered voters, and likely voters) – and average them out. The method is not perfect, but the method is transparently objective. So why exclude the Reuter’s poll?

One possibility is that since the 19^th, the political fortunes of Donald Trump have taken off and those of Ben Carson and Marco Rubio have fallen. For instance, on Nov 24, they have Trump at 38%, Cruz now tied with Carson at 12%, and Rubio at 8%. Could this be the reason?

This worries me because up until now, I have judged the Real Clear Politics to be one of the most transparently objective news aggregators around. Their policy seems to be to link to the conservative articles that conservatives feel best represent their views, and liberal articles that liberals feel best represent their views. Often they put articles that favour opposite conclusions against each other.

If it is true that they are withholding news simply because they don’t like the result then it would be profoundly disappointing. I hope that isn’t the case. We need more aggressive neutrality and less MSM whitewashing.

Is Megyn Kelly auditioning for broadcast news?

What prompted me to ask this question is the recent exchange between Megyn Kelly and Ted Cruz, when Cruz accused Kelly of asking “the question every mainstream media liberal journalist wants to ask” and “the question Barack Obama wants to focus on”, after she criticized him on his immigration policy. This got me thinking. The questions she asked Donald Trump during the infamous Fox News debate came straight out of Hillary Clinton’s War on Woman playbook. Going back a year, she told Dick Cheney during an interview that “you got it wrong on Iraq”.  Now just because Fox News is ‘our news station’ doesn’t mean that I think Fox should refrain from criticizing conservative politicians. Quite the contrary, Cheney, Trump and Cruz should be fair game. Nevertheless, I do find it curious that, in each case, she deliberately criticized Republican politicians from a left-wing perspective. Which begs the question, why?

I believe a hint can be found in the TV ratings. Currently Fox News is the highest-rated cable news show in the US and Megyn Kelly is its top star. For Thursday, August 20, Fox had a total of 2.3 million viewers in prime time (with 456, 000 in the 25-54 demographic group), trouncing second-place finisher MSNBC, who had 766,000 (with only 144,000 in the 25-54 demographic group). From Kelly’s perspective, these numbers don’t give her much upside potential in cable news. On the other hand, looking at the ratings of the big three broadcast networks, third place CBS pulled in 6.4 million viewers  (with 1.45 million viewer in the 25-54 demographic group) in the week of August 17. This is almost three times the viewers of Fox News.

Could it be that Kelly’s willingness to criticize Republican politicians from the left is a signal to network news shows, telling them that she is ideologically adaptable? If she were to be hired on as a network news anchor, I am sure that she could negotiate a hefty salary increase, proportionate to the increased number of viewers who will now see her. And for a tired old network news program, snagging Kelly would be a significant feather in their cap. They can point to her and say that they really do provide fair and balanced news because they have a prominent conservative working for them. And then watch Kelly slowly morph into a typical mainstream liberal over time (while touting her Fox News pedigree whenever she has to defend herself against charges of liberal bias).

Don’t kid yourself. You and I can afford to be conservative purists because politics is just a hobby for us. Our income isn’t riding on our political positions. This is not necessarily the case with the professionals we see on TV and hear on the radio. While we can rely on radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin to be faithful, this is only because their fame and fortune is inextricably tied to their political beliefs. And we can rely on people like Mark Steyn because they have been subject to serious career pressures and have never bent to accommodate them.

In the case of Megyn Kelly, she is known to be a capable host, a good interviewer, and an attractive woman. None of which depends on her political beliefs… whatever they may actually be.

Jian Ghomeshi, and the decline of the National Post

Yesterday was Election Day for Ontario’s municipalities. However the National Post’s front page headline was not about Toronto’s colourful Mayor’s race, or indeed about any of the other municipal elections going on across Canada’s biggest province. Rather, the Post’s lead story was about one Jian Ghomeshi, a ‘popular’ CBC radio host, who was fired over some kind of sordid sex scandal and who is now suing the CBC for an American-style settlement. All titillating I admit, but really, who cares?

Personally, I have never heard of this CBC ‘star’ before he was fired. Perhaps this is because I refuse to listen to government propaganda but I think many Canadians are in the same boat. He is part of the CBC/Canadian-content crowd who love to pretend that they are more Canadian than thou (and therefore more anti-American), but whose lives and ideas and output are completely alien to the average Canadian who buys his coffee at Tim Horton’s in the morning on his way to work, and whose idea of a CBC star is Don Cherry.

I think most Canadians understand that if a Canadian has real talent, he will end up going down to the States, like James Cameron, Bryan Adams, Shania Twain, Celine Dion, etc. It’s the smug wanna-be’s that stay here to eat lunch at the CBC cafeteria.

Now I know that there are people from elsewhere in Canada reading this who will say, Toronto election or scandal involving CBC elitist, who cares? Both stories are a bunch of Toronto crap that no red-blooded native of Saskatchewan will ever give a damn about. Perhaps, but as a red-blooded Torontonian, let me note that to most real people living in Toronto – i.e. the suburbanites in Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke, Jian Ghomeshi and the rest of the Canadian cultural establishment might as well be from the Moon (even though they also live in Toronto). We are just as alienated by the Yorkville in-crowd as a fur trapper from Yellowknife is (which is why Rob Ford retained his popularity in spite of his crack habit - he unabashedly championed us against the elites).

Which brings us back to the National Post. Conrad Black may be rich and haughty and arrogant – the epitome of a tuxedo-clad elitist, but he would have never made the mistake of conflating the CBC/Can-con crowd of Maude Barlow with genuine cultural leadership. Black’s genius when he started the National Post was that he didn’t simply want to build another populist megaphone but to do something much more ambitious. He wanted to foster an alternate Canadian elite, one that is not invested in self-loathing, anti-Americanism, multiculturalism, and socialism. His National Post represented an elitism that stood athwart our country’s existing intelligentsia and yelled Stop!

It’s a pity that the National Post’s current proprietors do not understand this.

Carol Costello, the vicious misogynist fronting CNN

Carol Costello is some kind of talking head at CNN. The open glee she exhibits to a tape of a women being beaten up that she plays for the audience has to be seen to be believed.

Watch the video embedded in this link to see what I mean.

Carol Costello thinks she is demonstrating moral superiority. She is really demonstrating her own moral depravity. I rarely use the term evil to describe political enemies (unless they are foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin or Pol Pot), but the use of that adjective here is entirely justified:

Carol Costello is evil. 

Chris Christie, Republican traffic cop

Before I begin, let me be clear: I do not approve of what Chris Christie’s aides did, and if Christie knew about the unnecessary lane restrictions on the George Washington Bridge, he is guilty of abusing his office; that is, using the public office, that the voters trusted him with, for personal gain. In adddition, I think that from the perspective of political strategy, ‘black ops’ capers such as this are too clever by a half: way too much downside (cratered presidential run) for only a limited upside (the punishment of an obscure mayor nobody outside his own town has even heard of).

Having got my disclaimers out of the way, I nevertheless think Christie is being given a bum deal by the media. Look at what the Mainstream Media does not consider a big deal: During the last US government shutdown, it was widely known that the Obama administration had unnecessarily shut down access to public monuments in order to make the government shutdown as painful as possible. Even though no money at all was saved by fencing off Mount Rushmore or the World War II Memorial in Washington, the MSM was silent. As this is an equivalent situation to Christie’s traffic woes, consistency demands that if Christie must suffer for his traffic jam, Obama should suffer exactly the same way.

An even worse abuse of public trust by the Obama administration was when it ordered the IRS to target its political opponents en mass. This behaviour not only calls into question the 2012 federal election results, but also calls into question the independence and impartiality of the IRS  (both critical qualities when the government requires widespread voluntary compliance to collect most of its taxes). 

Another example that dwarfs bridge-gate in terms of moral turpitude is Fast and Furious, where Eric Holder’s ATF forced gun dealers to sell weapons to Mexican drug cartels, guns that have been used to kill hundreds of Mexicans and at least two federal agents. If Christie were forced from office for bridge-gate, Holder should be thrown in jail for Fast and Furious. But to date, the MSM has been mostly silent.

A further example of the MSM’s double standard is its reticence in the Benghazi affair. There are credible rumours that the ambassador and the three other casualties at the Benghazi consulate were left to wither on the vine because a military rescue force was vetoed by either the State Department or the White House. If this is what in fact had happened, then Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions should be thrown onto the dung-heap of history, long before Chris Christie is similarly cast aside.

One of Ann Coulter’s best observations is that the left is so much more effective than the right because it fights for its champions when they get into trouble and we don’t. They circle the wagons while we throw our black sheep to the wolves. While it may be too much to defend Chris Christie (if he in fact did order those lane restrictions), it is nevertheless incumbent on conservatives to insist that public officials with a D behind their name be held up to the same standards – and to be meted out a punishment proportionate to their crimes.

David Harsanyi: “In Praise of a Partisan media”

Conservatives often decry the Main Stream Media for their left-wing bias. I have long contended that the problem is not bias, but dishonesy about their bias. Commentator David Harsanyi agrees: 

“As much as it pains me, let me take a few moments to defend MSNBC. Last week’s much-talked about testy exchange between anchor Thomas Roberts and Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus has been predictably negative. Media bias is a perpetual grievance of the Right — for obvious reasons. But  maybe the only way to improve on the situation is to champion more openly ideologically driven political journalism? By any measure, it’s a lot less destructive than what we had for decades: a media feigning impartiality.”

I have long contended that ‘America’s anchorman’ Walter Cronkite was a much more malignant influence than Kieth Olberman because Cronkite concealed his extreme left-wing views while Olberman was forthright about what he believed in. How many of you know that Cronkite was a one-world-government enthusiast?

“We all know where MSNBC or FOX News stand. It’s establishment media masquerading as impartial that has the real impact.” 

That’s right. MSNBC is not the problem. It’s the only honest news broker currently on American TV – besides Fox. CNN, with its (barely) concealed leftism is much more insidious. And the slickness of broadcast news is much worse.

One of the ways Canada is superior to the US is that our news media never developed the tradition of ‘objective journalism’ that took hold south of the border. For instance, Toronto has four newspapers: the Sun (populist conservative), the National Post (high-brow conservative, at least under Conrad Black – it has been backsliding in recent years), the Star (lowbrow left) and the Globe and Mail (establishment liberal). When I was growing up there were two main TV networks: the CBC (government funded and very left-wing), and CTV (privately owned by the partisan conservative and Trudeau-hater John Bassett). With Bassett’s death CTV has also backslid, but we now have Sun News, which makes Fox look tame.

I believe (correct me if I’m wrong) but the US used to have a vigorous partisan news media as well, but in the 20’s and 30’s overt partisanship was submerged to increase sales with a less offensive product. This outward objectivity was subverted by the left in the 60’s so that by the 80’s, it was little more than a veneer for the left-wing views of the sixties generation that had begun dominating the news rooms. If this synopsis is correct, the rise of the alternate media (both on the left and right) can be viewed as a return to America’s journalistic roots.

But say, isn’t objectivity better than bias?

It would be – if it were possible for people reporting on current affairs to not hold opinions of their own. Personally, if such reporting were even possible, I don’t think it would be worth reading. And having a bias - that you are concealing - is the polar opposite of honesty.

No, honest journalism does not mean faux objectivity. It does mean treating facts honestly, separating reporting and opinion journalism (as much as possible), giving the other guy the opportunity to rebut your views and being honest with your readers about where you are coming from. So how can that be achieved?

“Having a point of view doesn’t preclude a political journalist from being honest or curious or a critical thinker …, but journalists believe, or act as if they believe, that their work is immune from ideology. With few noteworthy exceptions, of course, that’s impossible. And that’s fine. The key to making it work isn’t impartiality; it’s diversity.” 

Harsanyi is absolutely right. A diverse media, propagating diverse points of views keeps everybody in check. It isn’t the editor or publisher with the same point-of-view who does this best, it is the Other Guy who will take you to task – publically – who keeps everybody on the straight and narrow.

George Zimmerman was persecuted by racial demagogues precisely because he was innocent

How do I know this?

Simple. By juxtaposing another incident of white-on-black killing that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma about a month after the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin encounter, and the non-reaction that followed. On April 18 I reported:

“Over the weekend, two white men were charged in the shooting deaths of three black people and the wounding of two others in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The killers were both charged with murder and “hate crime charges”. They have both confessed to the killings but have pled not guilty to murder. The killings appear to be random in that there is no known connection between the victims and the killers. Given this and the fact that the only common denominator between the victims is that they are all black, it is reasonable to assume that racial hatred was the motive (in spite of protestations to the contrary by one of the accused).” 

If injustice done by whites on blacks were really at issue, rather than just a proxy for some other agenda, this would make for a much greater story than the Zimmerman case. But it wasn’t, and about the only commentator to note this apparent paradox was yours’ truly.

“So, if the media is so concerned about anti-black racism, where is the collective outrage over this slam-dunk case of racial hate-crime? Where is the sustained moral indignation?

Considering the fact that the circumstances of the Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman case are much more ambiguous, why is that case garnering so much more media oxygen? Why didn’t the New Black Panther Party issue a bounty on the heads of the two white killers? Why hasn’t Mike Tyson called for them to be shot? And why hasn’t Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson organized demonstrations and threatened riots? 

Could it be that the problem with the Tulsa case is that it is too uncontroversial? Not uncontroversial in that people aren’t morally outraged by it, but uncontroversial in that a vast majority of the people are outraged over it in the same way. In other words, if everybody – black and white - finds these killings utterly deplorable, there is no opportunity to sow racial discord. At best, you have a Dead Man Walking – style debate about capital punishment. These days, ho hum. 

In contrast, recent polls show the opinions of whites and blacks divergent on the Martin – Zimmerman case, with whites lining up behind the neighbourhood watch volunteer and blacks lining up behind the innocent victim. Lots of potential for controversy – and getting your name in the paper. Just like the O J Simpson trial!

Something to consider when pondering the motives of those sensationalizing the events in Sanford, Florida.”

I think subsequent events have born out my analysis. The race lobby went all-in on Zimmerman but not Tulsa because they realized that blacks and whites would be on the same side in the Tulsa case and that is something that can’t be exploited for political ends.

Anybody besides me remember Tulsa?