The Arbery story looks like a replay of the Trayvon Martin story - the mainstream media latching on to a local story to try and make a national social justice narrative only to discover that it was much more complex than they thought. The core of the story is that an unarmed black man was killed in a small town in south coastal Georgia by two white men. At this point the mainstream media story is that this must ipso facto be a race motivated killing. The alternative story is that Arbery was a known suspect who attacked the man who then shot him.
And there are a thousand permutations in-between. We don't know the truth yet. One of our challenges is that, as with the Trayvon Martin story, as with the Michael Brown story, the mainstream media seems primarily focused on supporting a narrative and not nearly so interested in investigating the reality. A reality which is probably going to be far more nuanced and discomforting than they wish.
Brunswick seldom makes national news, but that changed last month when the New York Times devoted a 1,700-word article to the February shooting death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. Why would this homicide be worthy of national attention? Because Arbery was black and the man who shot him is white and, until the case became the subject of round-the-clock coverage on CNN, no charges had been filed in the case. Now that 34-year-old Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael, have been charged with murder and aggravated assault, one might hope that journalists would be content to leave the matter to the justice system, but that’s not how the media operate in such cases. Instead, Americans are still being bombarded with updates and commentary on the alleged “lynching” of Arbery, who is described as a “black jogger” who was the victim of racism.McCain is right, the mainstream media, when in Attrocity Narrative mode, is far more interested in ginning up readership than in investigating and reporting the truth. It has been part of, as both cause and consequence, the collapse of mainstream media readership and viewership.
Turning a crime into a cause célèbre requires a certain selectivity on the part of the national media. About 14,000 Americans are murdered in an average year, and very few of these homicides ever get more coverage than a two-minute report on the local TV news and a story in the local newspaper. Unless the victim or perpetrator is a celebrity (e.g., O.J. Simpson), or it involves mass casualties (e.g., a school shooting), crimes in America almost never become national news. What is usually involved in those crimes that do attract 24/7 cable-TV coverage and endless editorial commentary is some sort of “social justice” angle. In such cases, what matters is not so much the facts of the crime, but how it highlights an element of the story that can be exploited as a political issue.
For example, if a college student gets murdered by a couple of dopehead hoodlums, such a story would normally be strictly “local news.” However, if the murder victim happens to be homosexual and the national media decide that his death was a “hate crime,” the case can become a cause célèbre, which is what happened in the 1999 murder of Matthew Shepard. There was no actual evidence that Shepard’s sexuality was the motive for his murder, but this apparently did not matter to the activists and journalists who portrayed him a martyr to the cause of LGBT rights. Similarly, a desire to highlight “social justice” issues drove national media coverage of rape accusations against the Duke University lacrosse team in 2006 (which eventually proved false) and an alleged 2012 gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house (which was also disproven).
What happens with stories like this is that the media employ a mode of journalism that I’ve called the Atrocity Narrative. This involves an effort to incite an emotional reaction, conveying to the public a message that they should be angry about some terrible thing that happened, an event which allegedly calls attention to a widespread social problem. When CNN and other national news organizations go into Atrocity Narrative mode, their audience is in effect summoned to join an ad-hoc coalition, echoing a demand to Do Something about whatever issue the story is intended to highlight. This kind of coverage offers limitless opportunities for op-ed columns and cable-news panel discussions, as well as moralistic sloganeering by politicians and Hollywood celebrities in hashtag crusades on social media. In the Ahmaud Arbery case, the Do Something message was amplified by such big names as Taylor Swift (a “senseless, cold blooded, racially motivated killing”), Justin Timberlake (“If you’re not outraged, you should be”), as well as comedian Ellen DeGeneres, who posted to her Instagram account an “action alert” from the Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): “Ahmaud Arbery was running in his neighborhood and was chased and murdered by two white supremacists.” To this, DeGeneres added her own message: “This young man was jogging and was hunted down and killed for no reason other than the color of his skin.”
Aside from the parallel to Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, this strikes close to home.
In Atlanta, we have a dramatically understaffed police force led by ineffective senior officers who owe their roles to diversity check lists rather than to competence.
Bucking the nationwide crime trends, the more affluent parts of Atlanta have seen crime rises of 10, 20, 30% every couple of years. The police cannot respond to anything other than an active shooting in anything like a reasonable time. Most criminals are never caught. When they are occasionally caught they are diverted or released. It is not uncommon to have an arrest made and then discover that the accused has been arrested several dozen times before and might even have several convictions.
We are fortunate that most of the crime is property theft - either theft of mail, Amazon deliveries, or from cars. We can go days with multiple thefts reported on NextDoor. People don't bother even reporting it to the police anymore because either nothing happens or they don't show up until hours later. You end up paying twice. First is the loss of property and frequently also damage (broken car windows aren't cheap). Then there is the cost of waiting around for a few hours for the officer.
It is an extremely liberal neighborhood and yet more and more thefts of guns are being reported. A neighborhood that is 95% Democrat is clearly arming itself. While the groundswell of fear and paranoia is small, though rising, it is matched by sheer outrage that residents are expected to 1) pay outrageous levels of taxes, 2) receive no services, and 3) suffer the hidden taxation of continuing property theft.
This is a nasty mix. I don't know when it will happen, but at some point there will be an incident when a white homeowner shoots a black thief. They mayor will then claim it is the fault of the president. The mainstream media will hold it up as an example of the inherent racism of America. And no one will point out that this was entirely predictable, indeed, predicted. That it is purely a consequence of City policy choices compounding the bad choices of criminals.
From McCain again.
Furthermore, there is an answer to the obvious question, “Why didn’t they just call 911?” They did — there were two calls immediately before the shooting. One of the 911 callers told the dispatcher that the suspected burglar had “been caught on camera a bunch before at night. It’s kind of an ongoing thing out here.”A neighborhood arming itself, a neighborhood no longer reporting crime due to police force unresponsiveness, and a neighborhood experiencing enduring predation - all a recipe for disaster, whether in affluent neighborhoods of Atlanta or middle-class neighborhoods of Brunswick.
When I first became aware of this story, it sounded so simplistically outrageous that the conditioning of the past couple of decades of failed journalism ensured the knee-jerk reaction "There must be more to the story than what they are reporting." The truth will seep out. It will be different than initially reported. Arbery will turn out to be a bad actor, the McMichaels will turn out to be bad actors, or both, or neither, or incompetent governance, or something else.
The rabid insistence that this is solely a story of unalloyed racial hatred is almost certainly not going to be true. But it could be. We won't know, though, for as long as the mainstream media simply use this as a tool to advance an ideological narrative and insist on not investigating the actual events.
With all my jaundice of the bad quality of most reporting, the very first telling of this event sounded both one-sided and compelling. Particularly the lack of charges and the long delay. McCain has the first rationale for that that I have seen.
It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and Bryan William were following, in ‘hot pursuit,’ burglary suspect, with solid firsthand probable cause, in their neighborhood, and asking/telling him to stop. It appears their intent was to stop and hold this criminal suspect until law enforcement arrived. Under Georgia Law this is perfectly legal.…That we are two weeks into this reported outrage and this is the first time I have seen the reported legal logic for the absence of charges is striking. Since this is a month-old letter by the District Attorney, this was information available from the very beginning of media coverage. The explanation for why there was no crime to charge is as plausible as the argument that this was a racially motivated killing.
It clearly appears Travis McMichael and Greg McMichael had firearms being carried in an open fashion. The investigation shows neither of them to be convicted felons or under felony supervision, they were in a motor vehicle owned by Travis McMichael. Under Georgia Law this is legal open carry.…
Given the fact Arbery initiated the fight, at the point Arbery grabbed the shotgun, under Georgia Law, McMichael was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself….
Arbery’s mental health records & prior convictions help explain his apparent aggressive nature and his possible thought pattern to attack an armed man.
But plausible is not true. We don't know yet even though the mainstream media is treating this with the same degree of moral certitude as they erroneously brought to the Martin and Brown stories.
And the more they make this a stick figure morality play while ignoring the messy human realities and even the available facts, the more divisive and degenerative will they make the whole effort to arrive at some semblance of understanding as to what happened. And it doesn't have to be that way. They could show some humility in the face of the unknown. They could show some respect for due process. They could show some interest in empirical evidence to get at the truth. Regrettably, those are no longer characteristics of the last remaining news media.
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