Questions raised over Virginia newspaper's delay in report of attack on reporters (by 30 teens)

[RZM]

2. I actually think that's true

And I don't give a shit who else is saying it.

Two things here:

1) The Pilot delayed the coverage for over two weeks
2) When they did report the story, it was in an opinion piece

The first piece of info tells me they deliberately held back the story. Obviously they thought it was newsworthy, or it would have stayed down the memory hole. Since the victims were pilot employees, they knew about it right away. Thus it's obvious they chose to bury it.

The second piece of info tells me it's about liberal apologia. The Pilot felt it had to 'hold everybody's hand' in the reportage by making it this 'teachable moment' about race and violence. Rather than just report the facts as they happened, they chose to do so in the form of a ham-fisted tearjerker on the opinion page. That's not reporting. The Pilot had an obligation to report what happened when it happened and they chose not to do so.

The real story here is less the beating (though that is a story) and more the Pilot's ridiculous behavior. I believe what happened was that the Pilot editors got spooked. Publishing right away would offend them no matter what course they took. Ignoring the racial angle would make them look like bad journalists, but paying attention to it would make them look like right wingers. So they made a very bad call to hold it back. In the intervening two weeks, common sense prevailed, but by then it was too late to produce a hard news story that would have any real credibility. So they shunted it off onto the opinion page as a form of damage control.

I've written here many times about the mental gymnastics that white liberals perform when it comes to race. They want so desperately to be 'one of the good ones' but encounter a lot of problems when doing so conflicts with real life. Thus they tend to short-circuit, which is what happened here. The world is a harsh place and race relations aren't usually fun and games. White liberals like to think it's all sunshine and MLK. But the world doesn't work that way.