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Notes -
I don’t know if @Pasha is just being coy or if I’m more of a culture warrior than he is, but it seems to me that the real story is that the politically correct media, as usual, dishonestly presented a black man’s evil deed as a collective failure (in this case, apathy). This innovative lie immediately made it into textbooks.
Was the media that politically correct in 1964? The Times that did the Genovese story also published this in 1965:
An investigative article by The New York Times claimed a connection between the Fruit Stand Riot and militant bands of anti-white youth gangs "trained to maim and kill" and "roam the streets of Harlem attacking white people"
Which doesn't exactly seem like they were shying away from reporting on black on white violence at the time.
40 people being unwilling to intervene seems like on it's own is a more eyeball catching story than a stabbing and rape regardless of racial dynamics. Which is basically what the journalist said, when asked about it privately. It made for a more interesting story.
Remember clickbait journalism is not new.
This is the article you reference, in case anyone’s interested.
They are not the same thing. Kitty Genovese was ordinary black crime, out of lust and greed. The NYT article murders by contrast, like the zebra murders (in that same decade), were targeted killing of whites for ideological reasons by black muslims.
It’s actually eerie, because the NYT article presents a theory which can come across as a far-fetched conspiracy, but it was proven right by Zebra. How many of those murderous black muslim groups were there? If there were more, they probably disappeared into the statistic of ordinary black crime, which was then further transmogrified by the media into white society’s problems of ‘apathy’, ‘racism’, and ‘poverty ie insufficient welfare for blacks’ .
And so, by leftist alchemy, or scott's paranoid rant's multiple layers of lies, the murder of whites for racist reasons became white racism.
Sure, i am not saying they are the same crime, I am saying the newspaper in the 60's was very different than today and given other headline and stories they wrote it's unlikely they decided to hide a black mans involvement by digging up an angle about bystander apathy 2 weeks later. They could just not have gone back to the story again if that were their goal.
I disagree that they were not PC at the time. Look at what the SF mayor said about the zebra murders:
What has that got to do with the New York Times? I think I showed that the specific paper at the time is unlikely to have been trying to cover up a black man committing murder by making the story a sensation all over again 2 weeks after it happened by writing a story about bystanders not acting, which is what this whole discussion is about. Not only would it have been counter-productive (they could just not have talked about it any more!), it doesn't fit with the other types of stories they were running. This appears to be more likely to be yellow journalism than trying to distract from a black man murdering Genovese.
You can do sensationalism and flatten NYT reader’s PC sensibilities at the same time.
'Woman raped! How horrible! And all those people did nothing while she screamed for help! We really live in a society! Imagine being there while he ripped her clothes off! We have failed collectively! Here's a movie of the event so you can vicariously live it, just as it was! But of course we need to interrogate what we as a people have done that it came to this horrible, yet fascinating experience, that requires solutions only the left can provide !'
While your racist uncle’s yellow journalism would go for the trope of the beastly black man towering over the virginal white woman etc.
It seems to me you tried to use that article as evidence of racist reporting from a racist time, but it backfired.
You said:
as if this was an obviously ridiculous theory, that could only be a racist figment of NYT journos imagination. But something similar to this actually happened.
To go on another tangent, you lifted this whole sentence from this wiki article. This sentence is sourced by wiki by the NYT article I provided – in the article however, those quotes ("trained to maim and kill" and "roam the streets of Harlem attacking white people" ) do not appear. They were possibly paraphrased from “trained in karate and judo fighting techniques” and “connection with two other murders of whites in the Harlem area” by a wiki editor to make the NYT article’s reporting about anti-white groups seem more ridiculous and racist.
What? No. My referencing that article was meant to illustrate that the newspaper would report on other actual black on white crimes. It may well have been sensationalized I am sure. But that's the whole point. That it is unlikely they sensationalized Genovese in order to cover up the involvement of a black man, because they were willing to report on (in possibly sensationalist ways) other black crimes.
To be clear I used that example to demonstrate not racism but that they did in fact report on such crimes while mentioning black criminals. I think you have entirely misunderstood my position. I don't think that story was ridiculous and racist particularly. You seem to have imputed that yourself. I didn't say anything like that at all. My post should be read at face value.
Maybe. It’s fair to say there is some inferential distance between us. Anyway, my contention was not that the NYT will outright refuse to report on every black crime or report a black perp as a white perp, but that they are desperate for any mitigating circumstances and alternative narratives they can spin concerning black crime. To the point of concocting a story about 38 people doing nothing when a rape-murder was in progress.
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