If this case had been white-on-black crime, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their ilk would have descended on Knoxville like a swarm of angry bees.
Like Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, like Laci Peterson and JonBenet Ramsey and so many others, Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian fall into that tragic category of people who became public figures only after they were murdered.
Nobody outside of their friends and family heard of them before they were murdered. Few outside the Knoxville, Tennessee, area knew about them even after they were murdered.
But in the weeks and months that followed the brutal killings, Newsom and Christian became a cause celebre—the poster couple for those who believe the mainstream media conspire to shy away from stories involving white victims and black criminals because they don’t fit into our “game plan” for how race should be covered in the United States.
This theory, folks, is pure bullshit. We’ll examine why it makes no sense in a bit, but first we’ll take a look at the Newsom/Christian story.
Be warned in advance, some of these details are beyond grisly.
In late spring 2007, I began receiving e-mails about a “mainstream media cover-up” of an alleged hate crime in Knoxville, Tennessee.
“Dear Mr. Roeper,” the reader would say, “You’re supposed to be a straight shooter and you’re supposed to be someone who tells it like it is, but I’ll bet you won’t tell THIS story! Please read the email below that was forwarded to me by a friend.”
The e-mail in question:
Bet you $20 you didn’t hear about this one on the national news.
The animals pictured below raped Christopher Newsom, cut off his penis, set him on fire and shot him several times. They forced his girlfriend, Channon Christian, to watch. Channon was then beaten and gang-raped ... for four days ... they cut off her breasts ... and murdered her.
Why hasn’t this case received national coverage by the news media like the Duke ‘rape’ case?
Oh, that’s right—the victims were white.
Why hasn’t the NAACP,ACLU,New York Times, etc., called for an investigation?
Must be ‘cause the victims were white.
Why hasn’t the FBI been called in to investigate this as a hate crime?
Oh, that’s right—the victims were white.
Nearly every e-mail I received about the case mentioned the Duke case, in which three white lacrosse players were thrust into the national spotlight when a black exotic dancer accused them of raping her (all charges were later dropped). Most e-mails referenced Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson and wondered why they were silent about the Knoxville story.
All indicted the mainstream media for “ignoring” the story.
Country music star and flag-waving patriot Charlie Daniels wrote about the case in the “Soapbox” section of his Web site. He repeated the details about the victims being mutilated and implied that mainstream news organizations such as the television networks, the New York Times, and the (Nashville) Tennessean weren’t reporting on the case because “the five perpetrators who have all been arrested were black.”
Writes Daniels: “A free press is one of our most precious rights and a selective press is one of our most dangerous realities. To suppress or ignore one of the most hideous murders of the decade is asinine and reeks of political correctness and agenda-driven formats.”
Then again, it’s also important to get the facts straight and to have some evidence of a cover-up before claiming one exists.
A few corrections here. While no sane person could even begin to argue that the murders of Newsom and Christian were anything but horrific, the truth is that neither victim was mutilated—nor was Christian dismembered or her body stuffed into five different trash bags, as many Internet accounts claimed.
The known details of the case are grotesque as it is; embellishing them to serve the cause of an argument is unconscionable. Repeating those embellishments as facts is just lazy.
Here’s what we know, based on police accounts and sound reportage by reputable sources.
On January 6, 2007, Newsom, 23, and Christian, 21, were leaving an apartment complex in Knoxville when they were accosted by carjackers who took their vehicle and abducted them at gunpoint. They were taken to a rental house, where both were repeatedly raped.
After several hours, Newsom was shot and his body set afire and dumped near some railroad tracks. Christian remained alive for several more hours before she was killed, her body dumped in a trash can.
These were two innocent, decent, terrific young people just starting their lives. It’s almost incomprehensible that human beings—go ahead and call them animals if you want—would do such things to them. I’m considered a liberal, but if the five people charged with these crimes are guilty and you told me tonight that all five had just been crushed to death by a meteor that fell from the sky, I’d say they got off easy and I wouldn’t lose a second of sleep.
When the murders occurred, local media in Tennessee covered the case responsibly and with appropriate weight.
“Bodies of missing couple found” was the state Associated Press wire story on January 10, 2007.
“3 men in custody after Tennessee couple found dead” was the headline two days later.
“2 ex-cons, 2 other men in custody in carjacking, rape, slaying of Tennessee couple” was the next headline.
And so it went, with the local media covering each arrest and providing the grisly details without sensationalizing the case.
But somewhere between winter and spring, the story took on a life of its own, with right-wing journalists, conservative bloggers, anonymous e-mailers, and (most regrettably) white supremacists all claiming the story had been ignored or buried by the mainstream media because the victims were white and the alleged criminals were black.
In May 2007 ultraconservative columnist Michelle Malkin repeated the “unconfirmed reports” about sexual mutilation on her video blog and said police found Christian’s body in “five separate trash bags.” Malkin trotted out references to the Duke case and to the well-publicized murders of James Byrd Jr. (a black man killed by white supremacists) and Matthew Shepard (a gay student killed in an apparent hate crime), then noted the mainstream media “hasn’t asked any questions” about the Knoxville case.
An attractive white couple murdered by five thugs doesn’t seem to fit any political agenda. It’s not a “useful crime.” Reverse the races and just imagine how the national press would cover the story of a young black couple brutally murdered by five white assailants. The details of the crime make it a national story ... but somehow, it ain’t fit to print or air.
A white supremacist who organized a rally in Knoxville to protest black-on-white crime told the Knoxville News Sentinel the murders were “covered up” by a media that supports “white genocide.”
In the National Review, Jack Dunphy made yet another comparison to the Duke case and stated, “The murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom are known to almost no one outside Tennessee. Why? It’s simple: the ... suspects accused of killing Christian and Newsom are blacks from the inner city of Knoxville.”
As someone who has worked in a newsroom for nearly two decades, including a stint as a news reporter before becoming a news columnist, I’ll try to explain why the Duke case received so much more play from the mainstream than the Knoxville murders.
First you have the fact that while the Duke lacrosse team isn’t exactly nationally known, Duke University is one of the most famous athletic and academic powerhouses in the world and is often held up as the embodiment of the privileged collegiate life. For everyone who admires Duke, there’s somebody who hates Duke for its very Dukeness.
So here you have a group of golden boys who hire exotic dancers to work a party in a private residence—and one of the strippers says she was raped, beaten, and sodomized. An ugly, misogynist e-mail authored by one Duke player surfaces. The local district attorney exploits the case as a star-making opportunity. (Instead, it becomes a career-shattering debacle.) We hear reports that racial epithets were hurled that night. There’s much talk about the simmering racial and social class tensions in Durham, North Carolina, between the local “townies” and the rich-kid students.
Of course it’s a national story. It’s a Tom Wolfe novel, for crying out loud. You’ve got race, class, sex, violence, ambition, power, greed—all the elements of a classic, albeit lurid, sensational tale.
The story in Knoxville is hellish and stomach churning—but the harsh reality is that maximum-security facilities around the country are jammed full with thugs and lowlifes who have committed equally terrible crimes. As awful as this story is, it would be difficult for one to make the case, based on the facts, that it “deserves” ongoing national coverage.
Malkin argues that because some of the suspects could receive the death penalty, this was a national story. Well, there are more than 3,300 inmates on death row in this country, yet only a tiny percentage of those death row convictions were national stories. If the networks, the New York Times, and CNN devoted all their time and resources to the coverage of particularly heinous murders across the United States, there wouldn’t be time to report on anything else in the world.
Critics want to know why the Knoxville case isn’t a “hate crime.” If those animals didn’t have hate in their hearts, who does?
Part of the problem, I believe, is the terminology. It would be more appropriate and accurate to categorize some acts as “crimes of bigotry” or, when accurate, “race crimes.” Most rational, decent “civilians” look at any violent crime and assume the perpetrator must have had hatred in his heart, when any veteran cop or crime reporter can tell you that the sad truth is, many criminals are utterly indifferent to their victims; they don’t care about them enough to hate them.
In a Chicago Sun-Times story from June 25, 2007, psychologist, crime profiler, and crime-book author John Philpin said that one type of psychopathic killer regards his victims as “less than people. They’re something to get rid of.”
Incidentally, that story ran after a man named Christopher Vaughn was charged with shooting his wife, Kimberly, and their three children in the family’s SUV. Vaughn claimed his wife had shot him and he had run away, only to return and find his wife and children all dead.
For two weeks, Kimberly’s family maintained she would never hurt her children. There were all kinds of stories about troubles in the marriage, about Christopher taking Kimberly to a gun range, about Christopher’s occasionally volatile behavior. Investigators patiently pieced their case together, waiting for key pieces of evidence (for example, tests determined there was no gun residue on Kimberly’s hands). Police arrested Vaughn at a funeral home in Missouri on the morning of his family’s burials.
Pretty dramatic stuff, right?
Yet it went almost unnoticed by the national media. The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times played the story heavily, and it was a fixture on the local Chicago news—but other than a feature on Nancy Grace’s crime-oriented show on CNN, it hardly made a blip on the national radar. There were no stories in the New York Times or the Washington Post, no national spotlight focused on these murders.
Why? Was there some sort of cover-up? Of course not. The Vaughn case simply wasn’t that unusual in the sense of being a national story.
In the legal sense of the term, there has been no indication the Knoxville murders were racially motivated. Thus, no “hate crime.” Authorities have repeatedly said there’s no evidence of a hate crime—no reason to believe Newsom and Christian were specifically targeted because they were white.
“There is absolutely no proof of a hate crime,” said a Knox County district attorney special counsel in an article in the Chicago Tribune.
It was a terrible crime, a horrendous crime, but race was not a motive. We know from our investigation that the people charged in this case were friends with white people, socialized with white people, dated white people. So not only is there no evidence of any racial animus, there’s evidence to the contrary.
Eventually the Knoxville case did become a national story—not because it was a hate crime, not because the country was mourning two fine young people, but because the story became a symbol of how the media supposedly cover race. Some people seem more outraged by the supposed liberal-media conspiracy than the fates of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.
One of the questions I never see addressed in any of the blogs or rants or e-mails is a simple one: Why?
Why would it be in the best interests of the mainstream media to ignore certain types of hate crime? You’re saying we’re that interested in pandering to a certain segment of the audience at the risk of alienating a larger percentage of readers/viewers?
For that matter, if there was no hate crime, what exactly were we supposed to dwell on for months and months? The horrible crimes were committed, the suspects were quickly rounded up, and they await trial. This was never like the Duke case, with so many layers of intrigue and drama, so many twists and turns. As a developing news story, there simply weren’t that many developments once the arrests were made.
I’m also a little confused about which side the mainstream media are supposedly on. First we’re told that we constantly favor stories involving missing white women such as Natalee Holloway and white children such as JonBenet Ramsey. Why don’t we cover the stories of missing black women and murdered Hispanic children with equal gusto? We must be racist.
Now we’re told we rush to cover white-on-black crime but we shy away from stories involving white victims and black criminals. We must be pandering to minorities.
So which is it? Are we talking about two separate conspiracies that would seem to cancel out each other?
Or maybe the secret cabals just meet in different rooms to hash these things out.