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Political Correctness vs. The Need to Know

Posted by POLIMOM in At TMV.
Apr 1st, 2008 | Comments

On the north side of Houston yesterday, an 11-year-old boy was almost snatched. After being approached, slapped, and thrown to the ground, he somehow managed to escape and run home.

Scary stuff.

Luckily, the boy was able to give a description of both his attacker and his vehicle, and Houston police are trying to find the very dangerous would-be abductor.

Here’s the online description from the local ABC affiliate:

The suspect is described as an African American male wearing a black t-shirt and blue jeans. The student said the man who attacked him is 5′11″ to 6′ feet tall, between 35 and 40 years old, weighs 160 to 175 pounds and has black hair. The student said he saw the man driving a black four-door Cadillac from the model years 1991 to 1995.

And here (as of this posting at 11:50 am) is the description from the Houston Chronicle:

The alleged abductor is described as 5 feet 11 inches to about 6 feet tall. He is between 35 and 40 years old and weights 160 to 175 pounds. He has black hair. The student told police he saw the man driving a black four-door Cadillac from the model years 1991 to 1995.

Obviously, the Chronicle’s version is missing a couple of potentially helpful identifying items: specifically, his clothes and his ethnicity.

Does anybody but me see a problem here?

In a metro area of more than 5 million people, how many black-haired men might there be driving black Cadillacs? Would it not narrow the search for a clearly dangerous individual if all possible identifying traits were public?

The community has long been critical of Houston’s only newspaper, and often, it’s for reasons like this one. In its efforts to be respectful of its vibrant, multi-ethnic readership, the Chronicle almost never includes an ethnic or racial description in news stories.

More often than not, I agree with this. However dangerous a person is, if they’ve been arrested or are otherwise no longer at-large in the community, then race or ethnicity is generally irrelevant.

But sometimes, “PC”-ness goes too far, and I think this is one of those times.

  • PaulSilver
    How does the Chronicle justify leaving out these important details?

    I agree with political correctness when the discrimination is gratuitous but not when it is reasonably relevant, such as in identifying a predator.
  • Back in my Journalism school days we discussed this issue in media ethics. There was a general consensus that you can't leave out a detail that could potentially rule out half of the population. Providing the public with information they *need* to know is the highest calling of a news organization.
  • Marlowecan
    Polimom...a great and provocative post!

    This is a debate that has been ongoing since the PC years of the 1990s.

    In my city, I remember arguments about this in re. the city's major newspaper's policy of never reporting alleged perps race in crime stories. The argument the newspaper made was that these descriptions usually never helped capture criminals. (Of course, the was the strange contradiction that clothing could be described, and facial marks, but never the race.)

    This policy ended several years ago after...interestingly enough...complaints from the city's African American community leaders. They pointed out the fact that most crimes involving African Americans were Black on Black. They argued that the media only publicized crimes with African Americans when Whites were the victims.

    My girlfriend at the time was Black, and she was particularly vehement on this subject. She believed, correctly I think, that White media has little interest in the Black community except as sources of crime.

    Why, for example, was the epidemic of Black on Black shootings at the time relegated to the back pages...or not reported at all. However, when a rare Black on White shooting occurred in the suburbs -- despite the ban on race reporting -- word would get out and eventually it would become front page stories about rap/hiphop music inspiring a young gangsta generation or some crap.

    I disagree with the ban on race publication. But there are complexities to liberal media PCness. Why can't the media see African Americans as people instead of symbols of this or that social problem?
  • Marlowecan
    Hmmm...maybe not as clear as I could have been above. (Personal association with this story, hence sorta vehement.)

    The Black community felt banning reporting race in crime stories was hiding a problem that the community knew was there...but that they felt Whites in the burbs preferred to pretend didn't exist (so no need to fund social programs, education etc.). Despite the ban, when there were Black on White crimes...eventually the stories hit the front pages.

    We aren't a post-racial society by a long-shot I am afraid.
  • superdestroyer
    A different way to look at this is that the newspapers refuse to acknowledge that the internet exist. It takes almost no time to determine the race/ethnicity of any perpetrator using the internet. In Maryland, two sikh men were assulted by a group of black teenagers. The Washington Post refused to mention the race of the perpetrators in the news while the Montgomery County police website had a full description.

    The PC newspaper usually use the excuse that race is not pertinent. A better way to deal with the problem is to always mention the race instead of selectively doing it.
  • Paul,

    The question has come up before, many times. This link is to the Reader Rep page, where the Chronicle basically defends the policy. You'll see from the comments thread that there's a lot of disagreement. (And the comments on the story I linked in the post, though, are very heated.) (h/t for the RR link to Marc)

    I've written, actually, to both the Chronicle reporter and the Metro editor, about this story. No response as yet.
  • pacatrue
    As Paul and ChrisWWW say, the main question would be relevance. In this case, the race of the alleged perpetrator would appear to be useful in catching him and thus should be mentioned in the story.

    As for the general policy, it's not clearly an issue of being PC or not. If race is witheld so that people aren't made to feel bad, then it can be labeled PC. However, I suspect that race has historically been provided as relevant information in a large number of cases in which it wasn't. To take marlowecan's example, I can imagine race being supplied in black on white crime, but perhaps not in white on black or black on black. And so editors come up with a blanket rule to not mention it.
  • Lynx
    "To take marlowecan's example, I can imagine race being supplied in black on white crime, but perhaps not in white on black or black on black. And so editors come up with a blanket rule to not mention it."

    Then I think that it would be more useful to use SDs suggestion of ALWAYS mentioning the race of a perp, be it black, white, asian, latino or Tom Cruise.
  • pacatrue
    Sure, lynx, that is another alternative. But of course it has its own silly drawbacks, because it then mandates race issues in matters of crime, while not mandating it in other circumstances. Can you imagine a financial section of the paper that read: "African-American CEO Hank Jones argued that the move was necessary to improve stockholder value" and "Caucasian Union President Betsy Smith said in reply that..." when the race of the two people was completely irrelevant?

    My point is that blanket rules of "always mention race or never mention race" are always going to be in error. What's instead needed is judgment about the relevance of race to the matter being reported. I would hazard the guess that the reason rules like the Chronicle's come about is because people have often had a tendency to perceive race as relevant when it is not.
  • superdestroyer
    pacatrue,

    When someone is arrested, the race of the person arrested in automatically entered into the system (but surprisingly, the ethnicity is not). why should the newspaper not report something that will be part of a government record.
  • runasim
    I agree with all those who based their opinions on the relevance of racial or ethnic traits in identifying a suspect.
    For example, if a suspect speaks with a Spanish accent, that's as relevant as his race.
    Editors who timidly avoid making case specific jusgments aren't qualified for their jobs, IMO.


    A bit o/t but (to me) related is the practice of demonstrating lack of bias in the media by having two people spout off opposing, but equally biased views. A litle judgment is needed there, as well.
  • NitrogenNick
    The fact that the Chronicle article left out the clothing as well as the race is significant... it suggests that, rather than the dreaded PC motivation, this reporter might have just been lazy and/or sloppy by just leaving out the entire first sentence of the police bulletin description.

    I'm not saying that the issue in general isn't worth raising, and clearly, if the Chronicle has a policy on it, there's something to discuss. But I just thought I'd suggest the possibility that there isn't some underlying nefarious purpose here.
  • runasim
    Nitro-
    It would be hilarious if this daily outrage session had been sparked by sloth instead of ideology!

    Still, thinking about the issue cleared out a few cobwebbs, I think.
  • pacatrue
    I'm outraged about the lack of outrage about this outrage.
  • It would indeed be hilarious if they drew so much fire because of sloppiness. However, the comment below, copied from their (moderated) comments on the article, suggests otherwise:
    -----
    "Adding to the record:

    The student described the attacker this way: An African American male wearing a black tee-shirt and blue jeans. The student said the man who attacked him is 5'11 to 6'0 feet tall, between 35 and 40 years old, weighs 160 to 175 pounds and has black hair. The student said he saw the man driving a black four-door Cadillac from the model years 1991 to 1995.

    We provided this information to all of the media last night.

    Thanks to everyone for your help, and hopefully we can catch this guy.

    Terry Abbott
    Press Secretary
    Houston Independent School District

    -----

    Somewhere between all those comments and emails, and contact from HISD's Press Secretary, one might think they'd have corrected that dropped sentence. But nope.
  • StockBoySF
    To echo many on here, judgement needs to be used when reporting on the race of the subject in newspaper articles.

    If a potential kidnapper (and many kidnappings end up with the murder of the victim) then I want to know whether that person is black, white, latino, wearing an orange clown wig, or whatever. And I think if the paper (or whoever is reporting) wants to keep their community safe and informed then such identifying features should always be reported, when known. It's criminal to willfully keep important details from the public when reporting on such stories. :)

    And I agree with pacatrue- if the race of an individual in a story is irrelevant, then I don't want to here about it.

    If a paper (in a business article) said the CEO was black, then I'd wonder why race was even brought it. I'd also probably stop reading that paper since it's an irrelevant detail within the context of that story. Not only would I wonder if there was a racist slant in the story, but since there was a question on judgement on the part of the reporter, I'd also wonder what pertinent business details were left out of the story.

    I agree with SD- always mention race in these cases.
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