By Bob Cesca: Last week, my friend and podcast partner Chez Pazienza wrote a piece for The Daily Banter about a case involving several African American youths in Norfolk, Virginia who allegedly beat up a pair of reporters from The Virginian-Pilot newspaper, Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami. Forster happens to be white and Rostami is Iranian. I hastened to mention the races of everyone involved because it applies to the rest of the story. The incident went largely unnoticed in the press, mainly because The Virginian-Pilot only published news of the incident in the form of a opinion piece, written by Michelle Washington two weeks later. There’s another reason it wasn’t covered by the Pilot, and I’ll get to that shortly.

Washington’s opinion piece reached Matt Drudge’s yellow-journalism desk and BOOM! Drudge posted a link to the op/ed with the predictably misleading headline: “100 Black Teens Beat White Couple in Norfolk… Media Bury Attack.” Every angry right-winger looking for an excuse for their ridiculous false equivalences about white racism versus “black racism” had a brand new hobby horse to ride. On Fox News Channel, Bill O’Reilly issued one of his personal jihads against The Virginian-Pilot, sending his creepy stalking danger-boy, Jesse Watters to Virginia to accost the editor of the paper, Denis Finley, and find out why he was obviously helping to oppress the white majority. Why would the newspaper wait for so long before publishing the story? Why won’t this newspaper get its boot off the neck of white people?! Why does the news media hate white people?! I’m paraphrasing, of course. But that was the subtext of O’Reilly’s segments.

During one segment, O’Reilly and contributor Bernard Goldberg, in a fantastically propagandized illustration of the wealthy white majority playing the oppressed victim, lamented what they considered to be a journalistic “double-standard.” The Trayvon Martin case, a white-on-black crime, received and continues to receive ample media attention while the reportedly black-on-white Forster/Rostami case was only given an initial opinion page write-up two weeks later (there have since been numerous stories about the assault).

Chez, in his column here, defended Bill O’Reilly and Fox News Channel for saying that there’s a double-standard at play: on one hand the press and, specifically, cable news continues to be outraged by the Trayvon Martin case, while, on the other hand, the The Virginian-Pilot case didn’t receive any attention at all, thus ignoring a black-on-white crime and illustrating some sort of double-standard epidemic. (I should note here that this column isn’t necessarily a refutation of Chez’s piece. Consider this another point of view on double-standards.)

In a way, both O’Reilly and Chez are correct. In a way. There’s absolutely a double-standard because the crimes — the Trayvon Martin case and the Forster/Rostami case — are vastly different in almost every way and should, therefore, be treated with vastly different coverage. They’re different in terms of outcome, they’re different in terms of details and each have very different historical and contemporaneous contexts.

The truth is, not every white-on-black crime is given Trayvon Martin-level coverage. Not by a long shot. So why was there so much outrage swirling around Trayvon?

Let’s do the list.

First, Trayvon was a kid walking through a white neighborhood armed with nothing but snacks. Second, Trayvon was shot and killed — possibly hit in the back, indicating that he was running away rather than confronting Zimmerman. Third, and most suspiciously, law enforcement released George Zimmerman without charging him with any crimes, and Zimmerman was allowed to keep his firearm. Fourth, there’s a sinister gun violence meets gun control meets NRA component here. Fifth, there appeared to be details that the Sanford police were withholding from the public, making it seem like yet another example of whites covering-up a white-on-black crime. Sixth, there’s evidence of racial profiling by Zimmerman. And finally, and most importantly, the historical context is far more complicated when it comes to white-on-black crime, as well as the white presumption of African American guilt when the racial roles are reversed. More on that presently.

Meanwhile in Virginia, even though the attack was clearly traumatic for Foster and Rostami, they weren’t hospitalized nor did they receive medical treatment for their minor injuries. There’s no evidence of racial profiling — in other words, there’s no evidence that the attack was racially motivated and it probably wouldn’t have happened at all if Forster hadn’t jumped out of his car to confront the youths. Even though a rock hit Forster’s car window, the window doesn’t appear to have been shattered. And the police have already arrested a kid for throwing the rock, while there are warrants out for another assailant. Again, while traumatic, it’s a far cry from the ugliness and inexplicable mysteries of the Trayvon case. No potential cover-ups. No fatalities. No serious injuries. The initial characterization by Michelle Washington and Drudge that “hundreds” of black teens wantonly beat a white couple (only “a handful” were involved), hospitalizing them, while their car was “trashed” appears to be highly exaggerated because, if true, the injuries wouldn’t be nearly as minor and, as it turns out, the reporters drove their own vehicle home that night and voluntarily declined to be named in a news story. Police chief Sharon Chamberlin said, “This is a situation where you had a whole bunch of [movie theater] events let out all at once, you had a lot of people on the street, you had an assault occur and that was isolated with a small number of people.” So another major question here: is this even newsworthy? Perhaps it would be in a small town police-scanner rag, but Norfolk is not a small town.

Chez wrote: “O’Reilly may be a pompous buffoon, but I dare anyone to challenge his assertion that were the races reversed in the case in Virginia — had it been a group of white people who attacked an African-American man and woman in their car — it would’ve been the lead on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show every night since the day it happened.”

Given the details and the minor “simple assault” nature of the fracas, and contrary to what Chez wrote in support of O’Reilly, it’s questionable whether Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would care about it at all. It’s a relatively nothing case, especially contrasted against the gory details of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

So to compare the Forster/Rostami case with the Trayvon Martin case is a glaringly false equivalence and two different standards of judgment have to be applied.

But let’s say, yes, if the incident in Norfolk had been more serious, maybe with a fatality, and let’s say the races had been reversed — a group of whites fatally attacking an African American couple — the coverage would probably have been appropriately huge. And here’s why. In addition to the hypothetically fatal crime itself, there’s a considerably wicked history in America of white racism, oppression and violence against black people, which, to an extent, continues today. It’s the historical and contemporaneous context that ultimately changes how these stories are, and should be, covered.

Blacks are thirteen percent of the American population — therefore members of the minority race beating up two members of the majority race is quite different in a societal sense than a member of the majority race shooting the minority race in apparent cold blood. White-on-black crime comes from a position of power. The opposite — the minority oppressing the majority — is impossible.

Beyond the demographics, and beyond the oppression, or even the stripping of cultural identity and the enslavement of African Americans prior to the Civil War, the last 150 years have witnessed countless examples of blacks being villainized, oppressed, lynched, tortured and segregated by white people. Even after the slaves were freed, the effort to reconstruct the nation led to the North and South agreeing upon a common enemy to blame for the war and the subsequent hardships it caused: blacks became a national scapegoat as society embraced the Lost Cause Mythology and the absolution of the South for seceding. Blacks, they said, were responsible for 600,000 dead Americans; blacks nearly destroyed the nation; blacks began to seek power over white people, so they had to be held down and persecuted. They were portrayed in pop culture — silent films, minstrel shows and cartoons — as lazy, shiftless rapists. Soon, neo-slavery cropped up in the south whereby blacks could be arrested for nonsense crimes like “vagrancy” — being unemployed, basically — then disappeared and sold into secret chain gangs dotting the countryside where they would live out their lives without trial or connection to their families. Jim Crow laws, prevalent into the 1960s, and even modern purges of voter registration lists in Florida and elsewhere have disenfranchised blacks and relegated them to second class citizens. Harassment, lynchings and beatings from mobs of white people in white hoods forced blacks to live in fear and inferiority. Law enforcement and the judicial system was stacked against blacks, and when this system wasn’t selling blacks into neo-slavery, it was sending large numbers of blacks to prison and the electric chair. Even today, the Republican Party engages in Southern Strategy politics — demonizing blacks in order to motivate angry white voters, not unlike what Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and others often do to pump up their ratings.

Additionally, when corporations, industry and jobs bugged out of the cities for the suburbs, and, eventually, for cheap labor overseas, corporate abandonment left our urban centers stranded and without anywhere to turn for legitimate work. City housing and education crumbled, money was scarce and, regardless of the ethnic group, drugs and gangs began to spring up out of a sense of despair and desperation. And, once again, urban blacks were immediately blamed for the crime and the blight indicative of joblessness and desperation, even though it was the loss of jobs and industry that poisoned American cities. Now, with the exception of some efforts at gentrification, cities remain in constant turmoil which has only been exacerbated by the financial crisis. By the way, white conservatives have tried to blame black people for the recession, too — all of those easy mortgages handed out like candy and squandered by blacks who couldn’t afford the payments.

These injustices are the context for the activist-perception and reporting of crimes like the Trayvon Martin killing and it only just begins to explain why there was such outrage generated around those proceedings. The Trayvon shooting and the handling of the case by law enforcement smelled all too familiar, and the past must not be repeated here. And so a line was drawn in the sand by activists and media personalities. Not again. Not now.

To be clear, none of these historical realities exculpates the crimes committed in Norfolk or Sanford or wherever. A crime is a crime and the people responsible for attacking Forster and Rostami should be arrested and charged (one person is already in custody). But this exhaustively lengthy context begins to explain why the crimes occur and how/why they’re covered. If the press is a little tentative about covering black-on-white crime, especially when it’s a minor non-fatal assault like the Forster/Rostami case, we can begin to understand why with the proper background. We can also understand, given all of these reasons, why a white-on-black crime might harken back to any of the countless atrocities committed against blacks by the white-dominated American power structure and, subsequently, we can also understand why African American activists like Al Sharpton and others are outraged when it happens. It makes complete sense given the prologue of the past.

Yes, there’s a double-standard. And until there’s full equality and the long slow process of racial healing is completed, the double-standard has to remain.

As for the media allegedly ignoring what appear to be black-on-white crimes, ask anyone associated with the coverage of the O.J. Simpson case if that’s true.

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Was the loathsome Bernie Goldberg right?

By Chez Pazienza: Every once in a while I apparently like to see to it that my progressive street cred takes a huge hit and, well, I guess it’s that time again. The line to angrily show me the error of my ways forms to the left — just, please, not the face, eh?

In case you haven’t been watching Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox recently — and I can’t in good conscience suggest that you do — his latest indignant crusade involves the search for answers in the beating of a pair of Virginia newspaper reporters by an angry mob a few weeks back. The two reporters were white; the people who attacked them, throwing rocks at their car and eventually sending both of them to the hospital, were reportedly all black. What got O’Reilly’s dander up was the fact that the paper the victims work for — the Virginian-Pilot — ran the story not as a news item but as an opinion piece two weeks after the attack. It never bothered to report the initial story; it only chose to comment on it well after the fact and when it did, it stated only that the reporters were beaten by a mob, with no mention of what seemed to be a glaringly obvious racial component. O’Reilly even sent his own little Renfield, intrepid professional asshole producer Jesse Watters, down to the Pilot’s offices to confront the paper’s management about what he sees as an intentional oversight and ran an interview with at least one man in the neighborhood where the attack happened who claimed that anger over the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida might have played a role in the beating.

To top it all off, a couple of nights ago O’Reilly brought on Bernard Goldberg — who by the way is probably the most impressive surrogate for Fox’s audience of embittered old white people from among its stable of regular guests — to discuss how liberal media bias contributed to the unwillingness to broach the subject of race in the story. From Mediaite, here’s what Goldberg had to say:

“Here is what it is really about. It goes beyond journalism, it’s a much bigger issue. It’s about white, usually white liberal paternalism where they say, ‘Well, we really can’t hold black people up to the same standards as we hold white people up to. That’s why we are not putting it in the paper. They are different.’ So two things happen after that. One, the newspaper, the media, they don’t want to air that kind of dirty laundry because it’s kind of embarrassing for the black community. And two, they don’t want to give ammunition to the bigots who probably would say, you see, that’s how they all behave. Now look, we hate, we detest the bigots. But a newspaper has a responsibility to cover legitimate news.”

O’Reilly himself then went on to bring up what he calls an undeniable double standard when it comes to the coverage of the Virginia attack: “You can’t tell me that MSNBC, if it were reversed, wouldn’t be every show, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, on and on and on,” he said.

Now make no mistake: Bill O’Reilly isn’t the least bit concerned with justice, fairness or, most assuredly, journalistic integrity — he’s just throwing red meat to his viewers to feed their white resentment, persecution complexes and the overall delusion that they’re the victims of “reverse racism.” Here’s the thing, though: He’s right about this. And so is Bernie Goldberg. Intentions be damned, almost across the board they’re both right.

Was flat-out racism really a factor in the decision by a large group of black people to attack the Virginian-Pilot’s two white reporters as they sat in their car at a red light? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else at the moment. But to not acknowledge at all the racial component of a story like this requires powers of self-deception — or at the very least the ability to twist yourself into a pretzel of rationalization — that border on superhuman. Again, no one should be claiming that race played a role in the attack, but it’s entirely fair to ask the question why so few in the media are willing to question whether it did — and to do it seemingly as part of a general rule about bringing up race when it’s a black-on-white crime. O’Reilly may be a pompous buffoon, but I dare anyone to challenge his assertion that were the races reversed in the case in Virginia — had it been a group of white people who attacked an African-American man and woman in their car — it would’ve been the lead on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show every night since the day it happened.

I want to stress one more time, because it’s that important: I have no idea whether race played a role in this recent attack and I won’t immediately jump to the conclusion that it did. But it’s a news outlet’s job to dispassionately report the facts, even if it’s to impress upon the public that not enough is known about a news item to make a judgment call. But the press generally doesn’t do that when it comes to issues of race and violence, not when the victim is white and the assailant is black. As Goldberg says, they’re holding the two groups to different standards when it comes to what they’re willing to say about them without unequivocal evidence. When a power-drunk white guy in Florida shoots an unarmed black teen, it’s asked whether the attack was racially motivated. And it should be. When an angry mob of young black men and women attack a couple of white reporters, trashing their car and sending them to the hospital, the possibility that the attack was racially motivated isn’t even discussed, out of fear of offending anyone or fueling an ugly stereotype. And, again, it should be.

Why? Because that’s a news outlet’s job.

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Bill O'Reilly: An Enemy of Women's Rights

By Bob Cesca: Over the weekend, a homemade explosive device was ignited at a Planned Parenthood facility in Grand Chute, Wisconsin. No one was injured (this time) and the explosion was small. But it doesn’t matter. The attack was entirely the work of a terrorist who clearly intended to frighten employees and patients at the clinic — not just women in need of abortion services, but any woman who dares to enter a Planned Parenthood facility anywhere in America, irrespective of the treatment she’s seeking. (Planned Parenthood predominantly offers services ranging from family planning to cancer treatment and prevention.)

The message of the weekend attacker: enter here and risk death.

We talk a lot about the “Republican War Against Women” and how a series of state and federal level laws have been proposed as a means of stripping women of their reproductive rights and, in some cases, the laws propose to literally and unnecessarily violate women with a medical instrument during one of the most difficult times of their lives.

But this attack and many others that have preceded it are part of a fighting war — a hot war — against women. It’s a war in which terrorists have no regard for the law and even less regard for the lives of women irrespective of whether they’re actually seeking an abortion. Put another way, if this was an IED detonated by an Islamic extremist next to a synagogue or church, throngs of zealots would take to the streets and the internet demanding an escalation of what they consider to be a holy war against Islam.

It’s very likely Bill O’Reilly in particular would be leading the charge against the radical Islamic evildoers and, ironically, it’s Bill O’Reilly who

would be critical any effort by the Department of Justice and Homeland Security to weed out the right-wing extremists who engage in terror attacks against women. Just last year, O’Reilly said:

Are you kidding me? The radical right? The last terror act assigned to them was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. I mean, think about what the guy just said. Muslim terrorists have killed tens of thousands of people all over the world, correct?

How many people have the radical right killed?

Of course they don’t need to kill anyone to commit an act of terrorism. Attacking a clinic is meant to precipitate fear. That’s the point of terrorism. And just to set the record straight, there have been dozens of right-wing terror attacks inside the U.S. since Oklahoma City. In the decade following that deadly strike by Timothy McVeigh, there have been 60 incidents of right-wing terrorism, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Dave Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists, noted:

We’ve documented, to date, 22 cases of domestic terrorism since July 2008 involving right-wing extremists of various stripes, all inflicting (or attempting to inflict) violence on a variety of “liberal” and government targets. Compare this to the Bipartisan Policy Center’s report on homegrown Islamic-radical terrorism, which documented only seven incidents, all of which occurred in 2009.

One of those cases, the assassination of Dr. George Tiller, is obviously counted as an act of terrorism and, specifically, it was another belicose shot fired in the War Against Women. Not surprisingly, it was Bill O’Reilly who organized a nightly jihad against Tiller — popularizing the term “Tiller the Baby Killer.” Salon’s Gabriel Winant noted the following statements from O’Reilly prior to Tiller’s assassination:

On June 12, 2007, he said, “Yes, I think we all know what this is. And if the state of Kansas doesn’t stop this man, then anybody who prevents that from happening has blood on their hands as the governor does right now, Governor Sebelius.”

Three days later, he added, “No question Dr. Tiller has blood on his hands. But now so does Governor Sebelius. She is not fit to serve. Nor is any Kansas politician who supports Tiller’s business of destruction. I wouldn’t want to be these people if there is a Judgment Day. I just — you know … Kansas is a great state, but this is a disgrace upon everyone who lives in Kansas. Is it not?”

Just several remarks during a long history of attacks on Tiller. It’s impossible to know if the man who shot Dr. Tiller, Scott Roeder, was inspired by O’Reilly’s words. But that doesn’t matter, really. O’Reilly convicted Dr. Tiller in the media — and not just any media but on the most popular cable news television show.

So then we have to wonder why O’Reilly would demand that George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch captain who gunned down Trayvon Martin, shouldn’t be convicted in the media.

That’s what’s wrong with the media in this country: no longer to facts matter; accusations are enough to condemn folks. The press wants a story and doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process. [...] but you know it’s wrong to convict anybody on television.

What does this hypocrisy tell us? The far-right’s war against women operates outside the boundaries of sanity where fanatics and radicals have tossed aside whatever remains of the rules for decency, fairness, equality and morality in America. They operate well beyond the mainstream and their actions are unpredictable. Nothing is more important to them than the tongue-in-cheek maxim: life begins at conception and ends at birth, and once you’re born, watch out — the “guilty” will have to face Judgement Day and everyone else will have no choice but to live in fear of these sociopaths, misanthropes and nihilists. I can’t think of a better description of “terrorists” than that.

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