When a white person is suspected of committing a murder, The Washington Free Beacon reports that more than 60% of the reports identify the person's race in the first third of the story. But if the suspect is black, then the offender's race is not mentioned until at least 60% of the way through, if it is mentioned at all. More than 20% of media outlets save the information until the last fifth of the article.
Curtis Houck of the Media Research Center calls it journalistic malpractice.
"In basic newsgathering and news judgment about how you write a news story, you learn to answer the who, what, where, when, why, and how," he explains. "Part of that, especially where crime is involved, is describing the person involved."
In looking at the coverage of white-on-white murders versus black-on-black killings, The Free Beacon discovered that the white suspects' race was mentioned in about one in four articles, while only one in 17 articles noted the race of black suspects. According to Houck, that poses a danger to the community.
"It is the media, the liberal media, who has made recent issue here, and we should all be under the assumption and agree that having the most amount of information at our disposal helps make us safer," he contends. "The news media is about making the public safer and smarter. When you're not doing either of those things in favor of not wanting to offend Joy Reid and her friends, then you have a problem."
