Don’t miss the Howard Witt-Chi Trib “special report” on black-on-white crime with focus on the Tennessee case of kidnapping, rape, and murder:
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — What happened to Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, a young Knoxville couple out on an ordinary Saturday night date, was undeniably brutal. The two were carjacked, kidnapped, raped and finally murdered during an ordeal of unimaginable terror in January.
But whether the attack was a racial hate crime worthy of national media attention is another question, one that has now ignited a fierce dispute over the definition of hate crimes and how the mainstream media choose to cover America’s most discomfiting interracial attacks.
Witt, who is based in Austin TX for the Trib, touches all bases in his account, including conservative bloggers who have made this a cause celebre — though not my Queens NY friend Nicholas Stix, who has covered the matter exhaustively. Witt writes with admirable control and keeps the wordage down.
He also resists the urge to pontificate and draw conclusions, as if he were producing a dissertation in which he had to prove something. Instead, he delivers a bona fide report, in which Stix and others may find gaps but I don’t.
Yes, he buries this:
[W]hen overall cross-racial violent crimes are tabulated—including incidents not formally classified as racially motivated hate crimes—Justice Department statistics show that blacks attack whites far more often than whites attack blacks.
But not jarringly so, in view of his adequate base-touching in fewer than 1,400 words. This is a newspaper. You don’t expect it to do opinion-journal things, or shouldn’t. You very much do not want it to.
It’s also a mainstream newspaper, which I admit may temper my criticism. Page one on Sunday splash is not bad for a story that’s been underplayed for dubious reasons at best.
Witt does not question the whole hate-crime category, which is the product of our era of compulsive classification according to academe’s top trio of things that make the world go ‘round — race, class, and gender, as a journal (or blog) might do.
Less significant than the hate-crime description is the neutral designation black-on-white crime, as used by U. Tenn. law professor Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. Instapundit, and cited by Witt. There’s far more of that than white-on-black crime, Witt reports, which leaves us wondering if it’s adequately reported, legal requirements or not.
Blithe Spirit 