At USA Today, there is an article about two teenaged girls robbing a bank. Down at the bottom of the article is the following note:
Readers: This post has generated a large number of comments about when it is appropriate to note the race of a crime suspect in a news story. We left the description out of our posting, but it was included in the Cincinnati Enquirer's original story. What do you think? Is it important?
My question is why was the race of the robbers left out? Doesn't the public need to know as full a description of the robbers as possible so as to be on the lookout for appropriate suspects to report to the police? Was the race of the robbers withheld for political correctness reasons?
Do you not think that this is another example of why so many Americans hold the MSM in such contempt?
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2 comments:
You say the public needs "as full a description as possible".
The entire description given in the story was an estimate of the girls' ages and heights, and that one girl was "heavyset" and the other was "thin", wearing a sweatshirt and a baseball cap, respectively. That's an essentially useless description. Adding race to those vague and ordinary characteristics would do nothing to help anyone identify them.
But you mention none of this. You don't seem to be upset about, or even notice, the complete lack of unique features that would be necessary to actually identify these girls - you just want a description of their race.
Note also that the story appeared in USA Today, which has a nation-wide circulation. It doesn't really seem a likely venue for detailed criminal-suspect descriptions used for the purpose of finding and capturing teenage robbers in a specific city. (Yes, if only USA Today had printed the girls' race, vigilant citizens with 5th-grade reading skills in Fairbanks, Alaska, would even now be on the lookout for "thin" and "heavyset" teenagers from Cincinnati. Oh, such an opportunity lost!) But it would certainly serve to whip up race-based controversy, wouldn't it?
In short, you can't mean what you claim, if what you claim was intended to be taken seriously. If a useful description is needed for capturing these robbers, it would require much more detailed information than is available, and it would be circulated in an intelligently-targeted fashion. That is not possible given the information apparently available and the venue you have chosen to criticize. But you demand that the girls' race be included anyway, notwithstanding that it will make no difference.
We can only imagine you are obsessed with commenting on race when it is not relevant, which seems much more dubious than what you object to - the paper's refusal to comment on race for the same reason.
@Kevin T. Keith: USA Today is distributed to guests in hotels, and can be commonly found throughout the country, including the city where this robbery took place. Is that not pertinent?
As for descriptions, broad categories such as race, gender and age reduces the pool of suspects in a marvelous fashion. Knowing that these two robbers were female reduced the possible number of suspects by approximately 50% right off the bat, did it not? Knowing their ages reduced it even further, as does knowing their race.
Maybe having a fuller description than provided in the article isn't that important for an adjunct lecturer in Philosophy who refers to himself in the plural, but in my job as a clerk at a hotel having a bit more information on a robber than two teen girls, one fat, one thin is helpful.
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