What kind of people made up the mob? You don't want to know.

Chicago has been beset by several incidents of “flash mobs” that were of not the terpsichorean variety, but rather cell phone-organized marauders who struck suddenly, beating bystanders and robbing them. The Chicago media has adopted an odd policy in reporting the incidents: it has not reported the fact that the mobs were made up of African-American youths.

There is no excuse for this. It is manipulative, dishonest, and incompetent journalism, political correctness expanding into news censorship. It constitutes dishonest reporting, and a lack of respect for the public.  It is the ultimate in arrogance and abuse of their professional duties by people who have neither the credentials nor the right to decide what facts we are fit to know.

A Chicago Tribune writer named Mary Schmick attempted to justify her paper’s conduct, and was spectacularly unconvincing, writing in part…

“As an editor pointed out when I asked about it, the crimes don’t appear to be racially motivated. There’s no sign the criminals picked victims because they were of a certain race. They picked them because they had certain stuff….Here’s the quandary, for editors, for cops, for all of us: Race alone doesn’t predict or explain behavior. Just because this mob was young and black hardly means that all young, black people in groups are a violent mob. Knowing the race of these attackers is no form of protection…It’s a piece of the story simply because we notice. Young men from poor black neighborhoods create mayhem in a wealthy, predominantly white, touristed neighborhood? In the image capital of this historically segregated city? Of course we notice. By “we,” I mean everybody.

“A friend recounts talking about the attacks with two of her friends. All three are black. One of their first thoughts was: “Oh my God, are they black kids?” My friend wondered about their race because she worried about how their acts will reflect on all the good black kids. The mother of one of the accused attackers noticed the racial aspect too. The Sun-Times quoted her as saying bails would have been lower if the crimes were on the South or West sides. “If it’s black-on-black crime,” she said, “nobody cares.”

“So, yes, the attackers were black. We notice. But how to measure the relevance of the fact?”

Well, gee, Mary, I have an  idea: How about leaving that part to the reader?

Now journalists, in Chicago and elsewhere, have decided to leave out information when they suspect their undoubtedly bigoted readers won’t come to the correct conclusions—“correct” meaning the conclusions the Uncomfortable Fact Gatekeepers deem appropriate and reasonable—if that information is reported. As Chicago blogger Dennis Byrne wrote,

“Chicago media must identify the race of the aggressors and victims in “flash mob” attacks.
“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Apparently it is. Would a mob of Hispanics running amuck in Chicago be reported as such? How about an Asian mob? That would be interesting. An all female mob! How about marauding seniors—Monty Python’s Hell’s Grannies. Newsworthy? Paraplegics! Little people! Lesbians! Zombies! I should would want to know if there were mobs of zombies.

My assumption if a mob has no descriptors is that it is a random, heterogeneous group. If it isn’t a random group, but instead all computer animators, or all Down Syndrome teens, ADD sufferers, or Young Republicans, and the press knows it, I expect to know it too, and not have the story redacted by some Jack Nicholson-like reporter who has decided that I can’t handle the truth, or that he won’t like what I do with it.

Mary Schmick and her politically correct colleagues would have fit right in to Pravda in the Sixties. The question is, what other facts are being withheld from us because American journalists don’t trust us to “measure their relevance”?