Questions raised over Virginia newspaper's delay in report of attack on reporters (by 30 teens)

[alp227]

Last edited Sat Jun 2, 2012, 02:08 AM - Edit history (2)

The Virginian-Pilot newspaper of Norfolk, Va., waited two weeks before reporting that two white reporters were beaten by a group of young black men. And since the story came out, the city’s police department has defended its handling of the case.

Columnist Michelle Washington broke the news of the April 14 attack on reporters Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami in the May 1 edition of the newspaper.

“Wave after wave of young men surged forward to take turns punching and kicking their victim,” Washington wrote.

Washington and a police report obtained by NBC station WAVY indicate the reporters were driving away after attending a rock concert at the Attucks Theater. When they stopped at a red light among a crowd of about 100 people, Rostami locked her car door. Someone threw a rock at her window.

full: http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/02/11507850-questions-raised-over-virginia-newspapers-delay-in-report-of-attack-on-reporters?lite

At least MSNBC.com picked up this story as a counterweight to the many right wing blogs that are hyping up this as a "scary black people" story.

Excerpt from Washington's column "A beating at Church and Brambleton":

Two weeks have passed since reporters Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami - friends to me and many others at the newspaper - were attacked on a Saturday night as they drove home from a show at the Attucks Theatre. They had stopped at a red light, in a crowd of at least 100 young people walking on the sidewalk. Rostami locked her car door. Someone threw a rock at her window. Forster got out to confront the rock-thrower, and that's when the beating began.

Neither suffered grave injuries, but both were out of work for a week. Forster's torso ached from blows to his ribs, and he retained a thumb-sized bump on his head. Rostami fears to be alone in her home. Forster wishes he'd stayed in the car.

Forster and Rostami's story has not, until today, appeared in this paper. The responding officer coded the incident as a simple assault, despite their assertions that at least 30 people had participated in the attack. A reporter making routine checks of police reports would see "simple assault" and, if the names were unfamiliar, would be unlikely to write about it. 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?

The editor's memo as revealed by WAVY TV:

We did not cover up anything. We bend over backwards to treat ourselves the same way we would treat any other member of the community. In fact, we go overboard at times to make sure there is no perception that we have treated ourselves favorably because of our position.

Did we go too far here in holding to this standard? I don't know, I will always ask myself that question. But we made our decision based on the facts we had. That's all we can do. As journalists, we report facts, not assumptions.

We have done our due diligence with the story. We have checked the police report. I have read it. On its face, it would not merit a story. We have checked that neighborhood to see if there is an inordinate amount of crime there. There is not.

The Pilot has now reported that a 16-year-old boy has been charged in the attack on the journalists. Since he lacks any "stand your ground" defense and thus has been duly charged in his crime, why the need for media to hype up this story besides the sensational value? The Norfolk police chief expressed in a press conference that there's no evidence the attack constituted a hate crime. You know what's ironic of those who were complaining about the rush to judgement about the Trayvon Martin murder? Many of them will be quick to judge any attack like that reported here as a hate crime.

[Blue_Tires]

1. LOL RW blogs accusing the Pilot of liberal apologia

[RZM]

2. I actually think that's true

And I don't give a shit who else is saying it.

Two things here:

1) The Pilot delayed the coverage for over two weeks
2) When they did report the story, it was in an opinion piece

The first piece of info tells me they deliberately held back the story. Obviously they thought it was newsworthy, or it would have stayed down the memory hole. Since the victims were pilot employees, they knew about it right away. Thus it's obvious they chose to bury it.

The second piece of info tells me it's about liberal apologia. The Pilot felt it had to 'hold everybody's hand' in the reportage by making it this 'teachable moment' about race and violence. Rather than just report the facts as they happened, they chose to do so in the form of a ham-fisted tearjerker on the opinion page. That's not reporting. The Pilot had an obligation to report what happened when it happened and they chose not to do so.

The real story here is less the beating (though that is a story) and more the Pilot's ridiculous behavior. I believe what happened was that the Pilot editors got spooked. Publishing right away would offend them no matter what course they took. Ignoring the racial angle would make them look like bad journalists, but paying attention to it would make them look like right wingers. So they made a very bad call to hold it back. In the intervening two weeks, common sense prevailed, but by then it was too late to produce a hard news story that would have any real credibility. So they shunted it off onto the opinion page as a form of damage control.

I've written here many times about the mental gymnastics that white liberals perform when it comes to race. They want so desperately to be 'one of the good ones' but encounter a lot of problems when doing so conflicts with real life. Thus they tend to short-circuit, which is what happened here. The world is a harsh place and race relations aren't usually fun and games. White liberals like to think it's all sunshine and MLK. But the world doesn't work that way.

[Blue_Tires]

3. The Pilot is my local paper

I've even freelanced for them in the past, and trust me, that paper is far right from top to bottom, save 3 or 4 people...Try finding a single reader comment on any story that isn't in teabagger moronese..

While slashing the staff a few years back, the publisher was writing multiple six-figure checks to Focus on the Family and other nefarious organizations...

The publisher also hired some wannabe hotshot crony exec editor to "fix" the paper's "problems"...His solution? Slash even more workers and cut salaries, give himself a six-figure bonus, declare victory and split -- Do I even need to mention he was an attorney by trade, who had never worked a single day in media??

There was absolutely zero liberalism in their motivations...What really probably happened was they didn't think the story was worth covering in the first place for whatever reason (the Pilot has no qualms whatsoever about painting the black community as a bunch of criminals), the RW blogs picked it up and it started to snowball, pilot management was keen to defend their honor after being called a politically correct trotskyist rag controlled by the Black Panthers, BUT even they knew they couldn't stretch their 'professional' boundaries to cover an old story, so the op-ed was the only way...

[RZM]

4. Well, that's an interesting and valuable perspective

The problem there is that if it's a RW rag, they would have even less reason to not report the story.

Maybe what we're seeing here is the disconnect between the RW establishment and actual people. Though DU would never admit it, the RW establishment is almost as PC as the LW establishment is (witness the recent drama over at NRO).

Having also worked as a journalist, I can definitely say that one type of story journalists never avoid is a story about other journalists. So everything here seems to be working for reporting on this incident as it happened. It was newsworthy from the start (random beating with attackers vastly outnumbering victims), and it involved Pilot personnel. As RWers they should (theoretically) be less constrained by racial sensitivities and be inclined to report the story.

Yet they still waited for almost three weeks. I can't account for that without bringing up PC. I guess my argument, given your insight, is that the right isn't much less constrained than the left here. Both sides pay homage to our public culture, which is very touchy about race.

I could be wrong, but I don't know. This whole thing is rather odd.

[Blue_Tires]

5. speaking for the south in general and VA in specifics:

The RW has never, ever been about PC, especially when it comes to race...

"Politically Correct" for conservatives in the south just means not saying "nigger/spic/fag" in polite company -- Of course they have a bunch of codewords to convey their meaning anyway...

As for the pilot flubbing the story? Don't rule out simple brain-dead idiocy as a reason -- Having been in media, you've seen firsthand just how low the professional standards have sunk in reporting, editing, and news judgement...There are a lot of low-cost minnows from other fields making the decisions that were once made by hardened, old-school news vets...And upper management there has been a revolving door for the past 6-7 years now...

[Generic Other]

6. Another group of very angry kids

Like the ones who harass and kill gay men. Or the ones who beat homeless men to death as they sleep on park benches. Kids from the inner city. Kids from the suburbs. Black, white, Asian--every ethnicity. Every economic background. The one common characteristics seems to be the fury of the attacks.