A Tale Of Two Medias

Media double standards are tearing the West apart.

Some weeks, we really do just live in different worlds. In one, your media ecosystem was flooded with the image on the left. In the other, you got the image on the right. The blackout treatment. You got static and crickets. And which world you call home depends entirely on your information consumption habits.

If you’re on Twitter or any other conservative-friendly platform, you know that the picture on the left depicts the grisly murder of Ukrainian-born Iryna Zarutska at the hands of career criminal, Decarlos Brown on Charlotte’s light rail network. If you rely on legacy media, it’s likely that you know nothing of the kind.

(Update: Higher profile outlets are waking up to the story now that Donald Trump has commented on it).

In the aftermath of the North Carolina attack, Elon Musk helped the following tweet go viral:

Again, readers should note: this tweet is no longer accurate. A number of these outlets have, since it was originally posted, run articles on Zarutska’s brutal slaying. But so far as I can tell, it was on point when Musk shared it, and what followed was mostly ‘reporting on the controversy.’

It all belies a set of intensely corrosive conditions that legacy media simply must acknowledge and react to if it wants to hang onto what few morsels of credibility it still possesses.

For those who missed it, Zarutska’s killing was captured on horrifyingly clear CCTV. In the video, Zarutska enters the train car, looks for a seat, and selects one in the row in front of Decarlos Brown, who is resting his head against the window. He notices her but doesn’t immediately react. Moments later though, he calmly removes a folding knife from his pocket, opens it, and scoots over to the aisle seat. With no provocation whatsoever from Zarutska, who gazes obliviously at her phone, Brown stands up, raises an arm, and at this point, the most widely circulated videos cut out.

In the uncut footage, so we’re told, Brown stabs Zarutska repeatedly in the neck while she looks back at him in fear and desperate confusion. She ultimately collapses and begins to bleed out. Brown then walks through the train car, unmolested by the other, terrified, passengers. He was shortly thereafter arrested.

The reactions to this from both left and right have been predictable. The right regarded it as a cautionary tale about rampant crime coming from the black community, poor safety standards on public transit, and a criminal justice system falling tragically short of its responsibility to protect law-abiding Americans (Brown had more than a dozen prior arrests). The left went into damage control mode.

“This was an isolated incident.”

“Brown was failed by the system.”

“It’s wrong to blame black people for this.”

“Most mass shooters are white.”

There are valid points here. None of these are direct quotes, but they are quite reflective of the online sentiments expressed by the left. They’re also all correct.

This was isolated - it was one murder among roughly 16,000 that will take place in the United States this year. Brown clearly was failed by the system - he was obviously not safe to have on the streets and could not manage his life without endangering fellow citizens. It is wrong to blame people for things they haven’t done, and while it has nothing really to do with anything, most mass shooters (excepting those from gangland…) are white.

But if this sad shrugging is to be our standard - if this is how decent people are expected to react in the face of shocking, deadly crime - then that standard needs to be universal. It needs to be adhered to evenly, and it needs to apply in both directions. At present, none of this is the case.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the story of a Scottish girl, allegedly accosted by a migrant, who was forced to brandish an axe and a knife to ward him off. Since the weapons she carried were illegal, the girl had been arrested at the time, which seemed to onliners a monstrous example of victim-blaming. Why was the girl defending herself held responsible but not the man harassing her?

I wrote the following:

“I hope people will keep their heads until we can find out what actually happened. There are a lot of inconsistencies with the version of events being spread online. But that isn’t stopping the racial flames from being fanned by a subset of malcontents who think this is just the right spark for the powder keg.”

I stand by this. The migrant filming the girl, along with his sister, have now also been charged with assault (though the case’s true details were slightly less explosive than the fevered online reactions imagined). It was also another case in which legacy media was gun shy about reporting anything before the facts were clear, so as to avoid inciting a possible race panic.

Britain has been rocked recently by a scandal involving “grooming gangs” of mostly Pakistani men exploiting and sexually abusing mostly underage, mostly white girls from mostly working class backgrounds. It was a situation where the racial dynamics were so hideous, the whole thing felt like an urban fantasy novel the KKK might pen.

It was understandable to me - if frustrating, for a politics writer - that the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, and the other usual suspects were holding off on their reporting.

What if they got a detail wrong and somebody’s shop got smashed, or somebody’s head got caved in? Media preoccupations have real consequences, sometimes lethal ones. So the media is, and should be, held to a high standard for accuracy and caution in its reporting.

The trouble is, they do not always meet this standard. And it’s becoming infuriatingly easy to predict when they will and when they won’t.

During the summer of 2020, it was largely impossible to access a media source anywhere without seeing the killing of George Floyd mentioned. More than that, Floyd’s death was considered evidence of wider, “systemic” problems with police violence, racism, and poverty.

The Floyd story was considered important enough to warrant wall-to-wall coverage, for months, even amid a deadly pandemic, and even though the reporting was directly fueling social unrest on a broad scale. Not to mention defiance of Covid lockdown orders with which all non-protesters and non-rioters were expected to comply, even at the expense of their social lives, educations, and businesses.

Again for emphasis: obsessive reporting of the Floyd case led directly to violence, destruction, and civic chaos. It happened. It was warned about, and the warnings came true. There was an egg, then there was a chicken.

The media took a similar approach with its reporting on the case of Daniel Penny, the white man who (accidentally, by the look of it) killed Jordan Neely, a black man, and regular public menace on the New York City subway. Thankfully, no serious violence or unrest followed that reporting, but the case was again regarded as emblematic of a deeper rot.

If we want to talk about deeper rots, and how comparatively serious they are, we absolutely should. For reference though - and these are estimates - between 500-600 white Americans are killed by black Americans annually, whereas only about half that number of blacks are killed by whites, and just 20-30 unarmed black people are killed by police in a given year.

I’m not a trained journalist and I’m not a media ethicist. I don’t know what responsibility news outlets are assumed to have at times when their reporting of the truth could break the peace or threaten public safety. But there can’t really be an ethical framework that condones journalism that both misleads and inflames public tensions?

I mean, right?

Ultimately, if the rule is: in racially sensitive cases, where destabilizing turmoil could result from sensationalist reporting, the media holds off, I can get behind that.

Similarly, if the standard is: the media reports what’s true, regardless of what the public reaction might be, and damn the torpedoes, I could get on board with that also.

But if the standard is more like: media will unflinchingly report facts that could put white people at risk, but smother and downplay facts that could put anyone else at risk, then no. Hard pass. Here, I alight the train.

We have become far too attached to the notion that American race relations froze in 1968 and that we can never hope to move past those conditions. Times, in fact, change. White Americans are less dominant and more vulnerable than they used to be, and black Americans are less vulnerable and more dominant than they used to be. Wasn’t that kind of the point of everything that came after 1968?

I don’t know which is a better media standard - blackout vs. no holds barred - but it’s really time we picked one and stuck to it. We can’t have them pass-blocking every time a black person misbehaves, then super-soaking white America in gasoline every time something racist happens. That’s not sustainable.

It actually was sustainable before Elon bought Twitter - which is kind of fucked up, but true. In those days, sharing content of non-white people misbehaving was risky, and you definitely couldn’t comment on it with any force. That would get you perma-banned. Whereas sharing race-bait that made whites look bad was how you got famous. The standard for black-on-white crime then was to memory-hole it. Which actually succeeded, as far as it kept white mobs from reaching for their pitchforks. That doesn’t work anymore though.

And pretending it still does is turning the country into a pressure cooker. Both by convincing black Americans that they are in much more danger from white people than they actually are, and also by convincing white Americans that none of their institutions care about them.

Whether your inclination is to be cynical or charitable about their motives, legacy media is now creating the exact conditions of disquiet it [ostensibly] wants to avoid.