The Media Class, reflecting its Leftist roots, never misses an opportunity to muddy the waters when reporting on the subject of crime. The first problem the Media’s news reporters face when misrepresenting the crime news is that there is also a Media Class agenda on race and the two have to be dove-tailed. Since Leftist dogma is that there are no fundamental differences between the races (except that White males are intrinsically evil), the fact that in the US and the UK the great bulk of violent crime is committed by only a few minority groups means that reporters have to omit important facts from a story and misuse words to avoid giving the game away.
First, the descriptive word ‘minorities’ has been purloined. In US Leftist Orwell-speak it is employed to avoid the word ‘Black’ and sometimes Latino too. In the UK’s Orwell-speak it is employed to avoid not just Black, but African, Jamaican, Muslim, Pakistani and Gypsy. It is now almost universally understood in the UK that when the color/race of a suspect of a violent crime is omitted in the MSM it is because the suspect is Black or Pakistani. If the suspect is White (an increasingly rare occurrence), skin color is rarely omitted in the reporting. The word ‘Asian’ has also been purloined in both the US and UK in order to obscure the fact that some minorities are almost completely law-abiding—Indians, Chinese, and Filipinos for example. Lumping all Eastern peoples together is a camouflage tactic used by the Media to cover the embarrassing truth that some racial minorities overcome all social, cultural and economic handicaps and prosper whilst others burden society with crime and fecklessness. The Leftist/ Media templet is that all minorities are grossly handicapped and therefore have to resort to crime, and when the facts do not fit the templet then language has to be substituted by Newspeak.
There was a classic example of this in today’s Wall Street Journal, the nominally conservative newspaper that is stuffed with Leftists reporters from cover to cover. It was headlined “Communities Pay Price Of High Prison Rate”, subtitled “Phoenix Neighborhood’s Missing Men”, and written by one Gary Fields.
The first question I always ask myself about any feature article is why and how it surfaces, for nothing appears in a newspaper or magazine (with the exception of genuine burning news items and they are always distorted) unless it serves the Media Class agenda. That agenda includes portraying certain selected minorities as victims, undermining effective law and order measures and advancing the general demoralization of the traditional law-abiding family-based majority. Consequently, on days when real news is thin on the ground, articles appear that the editor has commissioned to further the MC agenda.
This explains Field’s article, for it is not news, nor is it in any way intellectually stimulating It is however quite dishonest. It starts by telling readers that Sarah Coleman thought she was done raising children when she ‘hit sixty’. A picture above this prominent page one (and greatly continued on page A12) article shows a Black great grandmother with three young Black children posing with her on a sofa. She is wearing an Afro hat. We are told that Coleman’s grand-daughters’ (the mother of the three children) whereabouts are unknown and the children’s fathers (plural) have both been in trouble with the law. One is in prison serving a sentence of 10 years for second degree murder and the other has been in and out of jail for drug offences.
Fields then tell readers that in South Mountain (a district of South Phoenix) more than 3,800 residents are displaced, serving time in prison or the County jail. Here is a good example of newspeak and Fields will surely go far in the Media world for his inventiveness with language. ‘Displaced’? I always thought that this word referred to refugees who lost their homes and countries as a result of war and persecution. Now it can join ‘Gay’, ‘Diversity’, ‘Partner’ and ’Disadvantaged’ in the Newspeak Media pantheon. It is a new euphemism for ‘imprisoned for crimes’.
In South Mountain 6.1 adults of every 100 are behind bars- more than five times the national average. Fields is here quoting figures from a Pew Center report. With breathtaking chutzpah, Field describes the Pew Center as a non-partisan research group. Pull the other one, Mr. Fields! Arizona (and in case you do not know this, Arizona is considered to be a conservative State, only a little less odious than Texas and the state that has spawned John McCain), has the fastest-growing prison population of the Western States.
Now Fields gets to the main propaganda message of this article. ‘Behind those figures are many hidden, related costs-financial burdens that communities are often left to manage. For every person who goes to jail, businesses lose either a potential employee or customer. Inmates’ children often depend on extended families, rather than a parent, to raise them….in one nine-block stretch of central South Mountain, nearly 500 out of 16,000 residents are in the state system as prisoners or as probationers who return regularly to jail. Prison costs associated with this nine-block area amount to roughly $11 million annually, this according to an estimate from the Justice Mapping Center, a New York organization that examines crime patterns.” Fields tells readers that an additional $6.5m goes on social programs for the residents who remain. 2000 people receive cash payments under the federal government’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program and nearly 5000 are on food stamps so that the total cost of prison and social services for the nine-bloc is $18m.
It is difficult to know where to start and where to end in dealing with this sort of Media propaganda but let us just take issue with what we have so far. In sending the criminals of South Mountain to jail, businesses and their employees are spared burglary, robbery, murder, rape, shop-lifting, arson, higher insurance premiums, fear and much that is unquantifiable. Fields asks us to believe that the incarcerated would be available for gainful employment. Who is he kidding? And is the Justice Mapping Center of New York another of these ‘non-partisan’ organizations like the Pew Center? How did he come across this activist organization, or did it come across him and his colleagues at the WSJ. How is it funded and is George Soros connected? Is it just ‘mapping’ in a non-partisan way or is it an organization that seeks to find arguments to undermine justice? Who checks its statistics and how did a New York activist group get to be interested in South Mountain, Phoenix? Is it possible that the Justice Mapping Center is a hotbed of Leftists who are getting paid for political propaganda and activity? And if extended families are burdened, what about the burden on taxpayers whose offspring do not end up committing crimes. Perhaps the extended families should be expected to deal with the consequences of the poor parenting they gave.
Fields continues by telling readers that the most notable thing about South Mountain is the absence of men between 17 and 35. Surely the most notable thing is the criminality of its population. He continues by writing that the residents are mainly Hispanic and African-American. It certainly took him a long time to report the racial composition (whilst being coy about the proportions of Blacks to Hispanics) of this crime-infested area (I won’t mis-use the term ‘neighborhood’). Now comes one of the cunning little insertions that give the game away about the agenda that is behind this article. “According to various studies, those two groups are the most over-represented in the criminal-justice system. The Pew study released earlier this year showed the overall incarceration rate for all Whites was one person per 245 adults, compared with one in 41 for Blacks and one in 96 for Hispanics”.
‘Incarceration’ is a favorite word for those opposed to prison for offenders. Imprisonment/punishment implies cause and effect, but ‘incarceration’ suggests something more cruel and unwarranted. ‘Various studies’ is a phrase that all readers of the MSM should be alarmed by for it always means studies embarked on by Leftist agit-prop groups to support a foregone conclusion. Note that the two groups referred to by Fields are over-represented not in crimes but in the criminal justice system. And what does ‘over-represented’ mean? Just maybe they are properly represented in relation to crimes committed! One would also have expected some comments about the wide difference between Hispanic and Black offending. How come Hispanics, despite poverty, language difficulties and distance from roots, offend much less?
“Many convicts” writes Fields, “can’t read”. Since most are Black and US born we might wonder why taxpayers employ teachers and bother to fund public schools, but this topic does not get examined since Leftist MSM reporters worship public education and teacher failing is an odious conservative scapegoating tactic. Fields next quotes David Kennedy, director of crime prevention and control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, who says that “whether poverty creates crime or crime creates poverty is an impossible question to answer simply”. Kennedy mentions drugs and White suburban flight as contributors to the rise in prison populations and concludes “Its not arguable any longer that some of these things we’re doing to fight crime are promoting crime and exacerbating poverty”.
The ‘things’ referred to are obviously the practice of sending criminals to prison, though the use of the plural might mean he is including the practice of sending Black kids to public schools. I am being facetious, of course. How did Mr. Kennedy get into this piece, for he is pontificating about crime in Phoenix from his sinecure in New York? Could it be that he is another of those Leftist activists whose work, on the public payroll, consists of providing quotations to attack imprisoning criminals. These people, like fleas, are always in bed with reporters. If Mr. Kennedy and all who ‘work’ with him at John Jay College of Criminal Justice cannot find answers, as he says, perhaps they should take up other work, preferably in the private sector. I would suggest work as security guards for businesses in areas like South Mountain, where hands-on experience of criminals might guide them to solutions.
Many years have now been spent pumping taxpayer-funded welfare and social services into areas like South Mountain. Academic experts like Mr. Kennedy have held sway over public policy and those policies have been totally unsuccessful. At the end of his article, Gary Fields quotes some small-business people struggling to make a living in South Mountain and they say in essence that local young Black people are unemployable. I expect they know what they are talking about, for they are at the sharp end and not closeted in New York colleges. I doubt that any of them would like to see the prison inmates released in order to meet racial quotas. One thing you can be absolutely certain about is that there is not one single member of the Media Class living within miles of South Mountain. There are solutions to the problems of Black crime but the Media Class and its Leftist allies have made sure that they are never discussed. The Media Class prefers to have minorities that are permanently dependent, crime-ridden and easily manipulated. Beware! What you see, read and hear in the Media is all propaganda!