The press have found a white-on-black assault they don’t care about, and all it took was for the victim to be a conservative.
On Wednesday, a white woman wearing a gorilla mask attacked Republican California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, hurling an egg at the conservative and later punching a member of his security detail.
Elder is black. If elected, he will become the first non-white governor of the most populous state in the union. So, you don’t have to think too hard about the optics of a white woman dressed in a gorilla mask hurling food at a black gubernatorial candidate seeking to break boundaries in the Golden State.
Amazingly, the national press, which have jumped at the chance these past few years to highlight every allegation of racism and outright discrimination, regardless of whether it’s true or not, are largely uninterested in the attack on Elder.
As of this writing, neither the Washington Post nor CNN nor the Associated Press has published any stand-alone pieces about the incident.
CNN did, however, mention the altercation very briefly on-air at 5:40 a.m. ET. Just in passing. That’s it. Oh, also, the Washington Post published a fact-check on Elder after the assault without mentioning the assault itself. Instead, it flunked Elder for saying “only half the jobs have been recovered as opposed to two-thirds the national average.” Elder is clearly on the Washington Post’s radar — just not the part where a white woman attacked him.
The New York Times, for its part, mentioned the incident, only in passing, in the 14th paragraph of a broader story about Vice President Kamala Harris’s efforts to support California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. NBC News similarly buried the story Thursday in a Meet the Press news roundup. Details of the attack aren’t mentioned until the 28th paragraph. Like in the New York Times piece, the race of Elder’s assailant is conspicuously absent from NBC’s reporting — an interesting choice amid our supposed national conversation on race and racism in America.
The almost uniform apathy is a shocking about-face for a media that have gone hard in the paint elevating even the most absurd allegations of race-based bigotry.
The Washington Post was quick to report, for example, that a fan at a Colorado Rockies game yelled the n-word “multiple times.” CNN and the Associated Press reported likewise.
The fan actually yelled the name of the baseball team’s mascot (“Dinger!”).
The New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, and many others were also eager to report that a teenager from Covington, Kentucky, had mocked and abused an elderly Native American protester at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The teenager did no such thing. In fact, footage shows that the Native American man instigated the altercation. Both the Washington Post and CNN settled defamation lawsuits brought against them by the Kentucky teenager.
These same outlets likewise rushed to report that actor Jussie Smollett had been assaulted by “Make America Great Again” hat-wearing white supremacists in the dead of night in Chicago. They also wasted no time reporting that a deviant had left a noose in driver Bubba Wallace’s garage.
Neither of these stories ended up being true. They were not just hoaxes but obviously false from the get-go. Yet, this didn’t seem to bother the same newsrooms that are curiously incurious today about the very real attack on Larry Elder.
The media are clearly excited to cover stories alleging bigotry and racism. But apparently not when the target is a conservative politician.
