"It is inconceivable that had a white mob set upon two black Americans the media would sit it out."
So said Fox News's Bill O'Reilly Monday about the media's almost total silence about a white couple that was attacked by a crowd of young African-Americans three weeks ago in Norfolk, Virginia (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
As the program began, O’Reilly said, “Shortly after 11PM on April 14, 26-year-old Marjon Rostami and 31-year-old David Forster were coming home from the theater when someone threw a rock at their vehicle.”
The pair worked for the local paper the Virginian-Pilot.
Forster got out to confront the rock-thrower only to be set upon by approximately five African-Americans who beat him.
Rostami got out of the car to help her boyfriend leading her to be attacked as the car was surrounded by a crowd of about 30 people.
She ended up calling 911, and the police filed a report describing the assault as a suspected hate/bias crime arresting a sixteen-year-old. That has since been changed; police are no longer claiming it was a hate/bias crime.
However, Fox News’s Jesse Waters interviewed a witness to the event who verified Rostami and Forster's account claiming that he felt this was a racial episode tied to the Trayvon Martin incident in Florida.
O’Reilly claimed, “Unlike the Trayvon Martin situation which the national media aggressively covered, The Factor is the only national news program reporting the story. Yes, Trayvon was killed, and these two reporters are alive, but it is inconceivable that had a white mob set upon two black Americans the media would sit it out. But that’s what’s happening in the Virginia case.”
Indeed it is.
According to a LexisNexis search of the names Rostami and Forster, apart from O’Reilly, only CNN has covered this story, and that coincidentally was Howard Kurtz on Sunday’s Reliable Sources addressing why the Virginian-Pilot didn’t report the incident sooner. There was absolutely no mention of the national media’s lack of coverage or the fact that up until that point, his own network hadn’t said a word about the matter.
Not one single word.
That’s also true of his former paper the Washington Post which hasn’t run one story about this attack. Nor has any newspaper in America except the Virginian-Pilot.
MSNBC has also been silent.
As O’Reilly told guest Bernie Goldberg in a later segment, “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.”
Goldberg replied, “So would the New York Times – it would be a big story.”
But when it’s a crowd of blacks attacking a white couple – crickets.
Making matters worse, the victims in this attack were part of the media. As such, their own colleagues turned their backs on the couple because they apparently weren't the right color to evoke concern.
That's pretty pathetic.
Unfortunately, this is what we’ve seen since the Trayvon Martin shooting, for there have been other cases nationally when a white person or couple have been set upon by blacks allegedly in retaliation for Martin, and America’s media have ignored it.
It apparently doesn’t fit the media’s racial agenda before Election Day.
Is this REALLY America?
