Some News is More Important

To quote Eric Alterman in The Nation, "we live in media world driven by cable idiots and Murdoch minions." And these "idiots" have been in an orgiastic frenzy regarding Henry Louis Gates' arrest. While some months earlier in Paris,Texas, a hate crime that killed another black man has been virtually ignored. I know the media are in thrall to anything that happens on the east coast, let alone something to do with Harvard University, but does that render everything else (and everyone else) meaningless and not worthy of coverage? Is the brutal killing of Brandon McClelland, a black man without credentials not worth mentioning?

At the same time that the media was frothing at the mouth about whether or not a Cambridge policeman was guilty of racial profiling, the two white men, for whom forensic evidence indicated guilt in the murder of McClelland, were set free. This did not set well with blacks in Paris, Texas. Members of the Nation of Islam and the new Black Panthers protested this miscarriage of justice and were opposed by the local KKK and Nazis. However, this was not newsworthy in the mainstream media.

I predict that more such hate crimes will occur as unemployment continues to rise and prices continue to inflate. Angry, disappointed whites, who are already pissed off because we have a black president, and encouraged by the "Murdoch minions," will vent their frustrations on blacks as has been their custom in this country. I hope the mainstream media will bring attention to these signs of unrest before they become a national conflagration.