In late September, FedEx driver Timothy Warren was driving through a neighborhood in Portland, Ore., when Joseph Magnuson shouted at him that he was going too fast. When Warren, who is black, got out of the truck, Magnuson berated him with numerous insults, including, according to witnesses, a series of racial insults. When Magnuson took a swing at Warren, Warren hit back, whereupon Magnuson lost consciousness and died a few hours later. Prosecutors declined to charge Warren, saying he was acting in self-defense. (And from our reading of the story, the prosecutors got it right).
We mention the story because we read about it in the Washington Post, and there would seem to be little reason for the Post to cover what is in every sense a local crime story. Not even that, since there were no criminal charges. Readers of the Post, however, or at least of the new Jeff Bezos-owned Post, will have noticed how frequently the paper covers local stories about rumpuses and altercations when those stories have anything to do with somebody’s being a racist. If some idiot in Topeka or Syracuse or Lubbock shouts a racial insult and somebody else catches it on a smartphone video, you can be pretty sure that a young reporter from the Post will dutifully explain all the details. Indeed, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Post’s editors and reporters are deeply invested in the proposition that America is still a racist nation.
The savvy reader may have suspected our use of the phrase “local crime story” is just a little mischievous. In April 2013, when the trial of serial killer and abortionist Kermit Gosnell drew to a close with multiple guilty verdicts, Sarah Kliff, then the Post’s health policy reporter, explained to Mollie Hemingway on Twitter that she had not covered the Gosnell trial because she did not cover “local crime.” The revelation of Gosnell’s murder and abuse factory was, for Kliff, of a piece with a news item about a robbery at the Circle K in Waco.
To her credit, Kliff later said she was wrong to characterize the case as local crime. She has since moved to the left-wing news site Vox.com. Still, the glaringly selective partiality of the Post’s coverage rankles. Maybe if someone had been caught on video calling Gosnell a racially insensitive name, then the paper would have given him some attention.
