PressEthic

Take a gander at this link. Seriously, you wont regret it.

You would think that the news story would be about “White Supremacists Riot in Toledo, Ohio” since this is the title of the story. However you would be wrong.

Whoever concocted this title apparently didn’t read the story very well. In fact, he read it totally wrong. The story isn’t about white supremacists rioting, it’s about a crowd of over 600 people who were protesting a white supremacist march. These protesters set fire to a pub – not the 24 or so white supremacists who had gathered at a park to march under police protection.

It’s reported that Toledo mayor, Jack Ford, blamed the rioting on “gangs taking advantage of a volatile situation.” It’s not that the reporting was sketchy – the title of the article is just completely false.

In his blog Steven Yates comments on the media twist:

“Courtesy of Jeffrey Foxmore, more evidence of how the mainstream media twists the news. We are concerned here, I should point out emphatically, not to support or endorse the views of Neo-Nazis, but to note that contrary to what the mainstream media has insinuated they were not the instigators of violence. They are usually not the instigators of violence. Instigation of violence is typically a phenomenon of the hard left, not the hard right.”

Another blog post I found on “View From the Right” says:

“ABC turns black riot into white riot

Six hundred blacks rioted in Toledo, Ohio against a legal march by two dozen white supremacists who were under the protection of the police. The rioters threw rocks at the police, they vandalized vehicles and stores, they cursed the mayor for allowing the event, one of them threatened to shoot the mayor, and they set fire to a pub. Yet not once does the ABC news story use the word “black,” except deep into the story when it says the whites’ march was to demonstrate against black gangs that were harassing white residents. The story never says that the rioters themselves were black. Moreover, the lead sentence deliberately creates the impression that it was whites who were rioting:

TOLEDO, Ohio Oct 16, 2005 — Protesters at a white supremacists' march threw rocks at police, vandalized vehicles and stores and cursed the mayor for allowing the event.

Protesters “at” a white supremacists’ march sounds like people who were participating in the march, not people who were protesting against it. Thus the liberal mind, following a tropism too powerful to resist, keeps finding ways to shift nonwhite misdeeds onto whites, even though the pretense is transparent and the entire context of the story makes it clear that it was blacks, not whites, who were rioting.”

How could ABC have let this happen? Was it intentional or just plain laziness?

I haven’t found anything online that says that ABC News apologized or corrected the misleading title. Readers are being blatantly misled and confused. It irritates me that something as important as titling a story could be so flubbed up.

I sometimes feel quite gullible when it comes to the news – but even this stood out like a big red waving flag…or in this case a big BLACK waving flag.