The sudden force that the liberal press brought to bear on the falsely accused Duke lacrosse team has been curiously absent on a much more grisly crime committed against a white couple by a group of black youths.

Personally, I don't think that local crime issues should ever be covered in the national press but if the media are going to cover them, they need to be consistent. My friend La Shawn Barber has a must-read post on the matter:

Early this year, a white couple was carjacked, tortured, raped, and murdered by a group of black thugs. Christopher Newsom (23) was gang-raped, shot and set on fire. There are unconfirmed reports that the killers cut off his penis while he was still alive. The going-to-straight-to-hell murderers made Channon Christian (21) watch, and then they gang-raped her over four days and left her to die. There are unconfirmed reports that her breasts were cut off while she was still alive. (Also see this story and the Wikipedia entry)

I’ve been getting e-mail about this case since it happened, but I’ve been hesitant to blog about it. Flopping Aces published a big post about the case last night, which probably accounts for why I received a few more Christian-Newsom e-mails this morning. Here goes!

I’ve noticed that mainstream media are reluctant to report this story, especially when it first happened. In light of the blanket coverage the Duke “rape” case received, the paucity of coverage in this case seems a bit unbalanced. I mean, isn’t the brutal, black-on-white gang-rape, mutilation, and murder of two people more than or at least as newsworthy as a white-on-black gang-rape (which obviously was phony)? Even if the stripper’s allegations had been true, why was the Duke case burning up the airwaves while the Christian-Newsom case barely emits a spark?

What’s up with the lack of blanket media coverage? I’m not talking about a story here or there with case updates. The media should be swarming around this story. What happened to Christian and Newsom should be all over the airwaves and printing presses.

Read the rest.

Update 10:10. La Shawn's theory is interesting and seems true to me to a certain extent. However the media's coverage of crime by race is tough to characterize because the same national press that is refusing to cover this story is also the same media that obssesses over missing white women to the exclusion of women of any other race. It also seems true that the press is more likely to show pictures of criminals if they are black than if they're white.

What to make of all this? My preliminary theory is that the media at both the local and national levels is more interested in the white audience than the black one. That makes sense from an economics point of view considering there are more whites than blacks in America. Accordingly, the media are more likely to tailor news coverage to white viewers. This explains why you continue to see "news" stories about cold cases such as Natalee Holloway or JonBenet Ramsey and are more likely to see pictorial coverage of black criminals than white ones.

Things change at the national level, however, because there is an added component--political correctness. The national press is more liberal than most local media outlets. In the guilty liberal worldview, it's wrong to promote stories about minority criminality. This explains why the Duke "rape" case was so extensively covered and the lacrosse team not afforded any presumption of innocence and why stories of black hate crimes are underreported. The same thing happens often in coverage of crimes committed by Islamic young people being blamed on "youths" that Charles Johnson is so adept at pointing out.

Update 11:25. Some interesting comments from Freepers:

LWalk18: I think that comparing this case to the Duke case is a faulty analogy- with Duke, you had attactive students at top university accused of a crime. There was also an element of mystery- did the crime occur or not? Once it was obvious that no rape had occurred, you have the issue of judicial conduct.

Here, there is absolutely no question that this brutal attack, rape and murder occurred. To me this case compares to what happened in Jasper, TX or the Matthew Shepard case, both of which got plenty of national media while this case has not.

CaesersGhost: Whatever stories tend to rip the fabric of society apart the most, (pitting whites against blacks, women against men and homosexual perverts against normal people are their favorites), are the ones that the media wallow in. The leftist media love to stir the racial pot, but must also cover up many black crimes to prevent blacks from claiming that they cover black crime unevenly, thereby showing the media are not PC. Glossing over islamic terrorist acts in America, (by largely ignoring references to the perpetrator's religious beliefs), simply indicates political correctness and cowardice. (The most recent such terror act was the slaughter at Virginia Tech, where the killer found it necessary to display "Ismail ax" on his arm and elsewhere). The coverage of missing white women seems to hold the female population rapt and sells lots of commercial time.

To sum up, the media will saturate the public with whatever disturbs the collective soul, but will temper relevent facts that would tend to make them appear 'intolerant' and un-pc. Keep in mind that 'tolerance' and 'political correctness' are two things that help destroy society, so the leftists must march to their own drumbeat like the promenading pimps they are.

—Matthew Sheffield is the creator of NewsBusters and its Executive Editor.