Missing From the News

Yesterday while we were waiting for word about who the Virginia Tech shooter was, my wife mentioned that he was Asian. "What?" I asked. I had just read an updated wire service account and it said nothing nothing about his ethnicity.

It turns out that this was suppressed. The Asian American Journalists Association issued this advisory:

As coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting continues to unfold, AAJA urges all media to avoid using racial identifiers unless there is a compelling or germane reason. There is no evidence at this early point that the race or ethnicity of the suspected gunman has anything to do with the incident, and to include such mention serves only to unfairly portray an entire people.

They are wrong about the race and ethnicity not having anything to do with the story. I'm sure that many people's first thought was that this was the work of a terrorists. The fact that the authorities withheld any information for so long gave the impression that something was being covered up. It's happened before. At least three Moslems have either attempted or succeeded in mass murder in the last few years. In these cases, the authorities have downplayed the attacker's religion until it was determined that he was "not a terrorist" (defined as not being affiliated with terrorist groups).

Those people who didn't assume that the shooter was a terrorist probably assumed that he was a white guy. By suppressing the actual ethnicity of the shooter, the AAJA temporarily reinforced the stereotype that he was white. Thanks AAJA.

Of course the truth came out this morning. The shooter was Korean.

A different bit of news that has been dropped is so subtle that you probably didn't even notice it. Which party does New Jersey Governor Jon S. Corzine belong to? This is normally given any time a politician is in the news with one exception - it is dropped when a Democrat does something that might reflect poorly on the party. Just try to find a reference to Corzine's party in a news account. Now, do you think that this would be dropped if it had been a Republican governor?

So, yes, it was relevant.