Credbility SUNsets: Dave Lucas, the New York Sun, and the Knoxville Horror

By Nicholas Stix

On May 22, the allegedly conservative New York Sun published a guest op-ed column by John Leo, “The Politics of News,” on the racial censorship imposed by the MSM on the Knoxville Horror story of the carjacking-robbery-kidnapping-torture-gang rape-murder-corpse desecrations of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. But in a move that may yet bite the Sun’s editors in the pants, they apparently forgot to take their irony supplements.

Blogger Dave Lucas tried twice to post comments to Leo’s column. Both times – once with links, once without – he was censored.

Leo’s column is much better than standard Republican MSM fare.

The mainstream press does not like to carry stories of black mayhem and white victims. First, there is the fear of stirring up more racism among Klansmen and neo-Nazis, as the Knoxville case has started to do. More importantly, the newsroom culture tends to view black-on-white crimes as responses to black oppression, and therefore not worth reporting. Whereas similar white-on-black crime is oppression itself, and thus crucially important to put before readers and viewers.

I think Leo’s first explanation is wrong in giving legitimacy to an MSM cover story. Media apologists may say they fear stirring up white racism by reporting on the Knoxville Horror, but first of all, Klansmen and neo-Nazis are politically impotent figures, as opposed to the black supremacists who have well-paying jobs at taxpayers’ expense, tenured professorships and school teacher sinecures, and positions running schools and even school systems, from which they spew lies and hatred and provoke violence (see the chapter on education in this report), and who have engaged in campaigns of mass murder against whites. Secondly, it was the suppression of the story that inspired the white supremacists and neo-Nazis to organize rallies in Knoxville, the first of which is scheduled to take place on May 26 at 3:00 p.m., on the steps of city’s old courthouse, and the second of which is scheduled to take place at the same location on June 16.

Neo-Nazi leader Alex Linder of the Vanguard News Network, who organized the May 26 rally, told me in April that he refuses to apply for a permit, and said in so many words that he is daring the authorities to stop him.

“Uh, we’re just going to, simply, uh, we’re going to use our rights.”

(Oh, so, in other words, you might do it without a permit.)

“[Chuckles] We’re going to do – yeah, we’re going to do it without a permit.”

Linder’s explanation for the media suppression? “Well, it’s the Jewish media control. And the fact that any kind of non-white crime doesn’t fit their agenda, so they suppress it….

“The Jews are the ones who produce the policies that ensure that this stuff happens.”

Among other things, Linder told me, “I was disappointed to find out you’re a Jew.” Typical for a neo-Nazi, he is more obsessed with Jews, with whom he sees “whites” in a defensive war of extermination, than he is with blacks or even “liberals.” (The scare quotes around whites are because Linder sees “whites” and “Jews” as two distinct races who cannot share the same planet.)

The brilliance and courage of John Leo’s second point, however, more than make up for the wrongheadedness of the first.

[T]he newsroom culture tends to view black-on-white crimes as responses to black oppression, and therefore not worth reporting. Whereas similar white-on-black crime is oppression itself, and thus crucially important to put before readers and viewers.

So that the reader does not water down Leo’s meaning, Leo is saying that newsrooms are dominated by people who privately cheer on blacks who commit violent, even gruesome crimes against whites, while censoring those stories, and correspondingly exaggerating stories of white-on-black crime.

On the May 22, 2007 O’Reilly Report, socialist columnist Ellis Henican from Long Island Newsday was the guest. Henican not only denied that the gang-rapes, tortures, murders, and corpse desecrations committed against Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom were racially motivated, he even went so far as to contradict guest host Michelle Malkin’s observation of her experience of the role race plays in newsrooms in suppressing stories. Henican acted as though Malkin were delusional. (See, I’ll give the Devil her due!)

Such anti-white newsroom prejudices have been exhaustively detailed by Ruth Shalit, in her groundbreaking, 13,000-word 1995 New Republic exposé, “Race in the Newsroom—The Washington Post in Black and White,” and in William McGowan’s 2001 book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism. More recently, in 2005 and 2006 (also here, on September 21), building on work by the bloggers “ziel” of Your Lying Eyes and Eric Scheie at Classical Values, I wrote exposés on the campaign of massive journalistic fraud engineered by the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

In early September 2005, the “Times-Pic” first reported on the savagery that pervaded post-Katrina New Orleans, and then, chagrined at having portrayed black folks behaving badly, its editors and reporters resolved to unreport the truth. The newspaper then assembled a team to discredit its own stories, but without admitting that it had published them. The newspaper acted as though someone else had published the stories. The irony of all this is that most or all of the original Times-Pic stories were true, while the story “discrediting” them was one of the biggest frauds in American journalism history. In one of the darkest moments in American journalism history (coming two years after the Jayson Blair scandal!), for the Times-Pic’s yeoman efforts at deceiving the public, it was awarded not one but two Pulitzer Prizes.

(Regarding Jayson Blair, see here, here, and here.)

More apropo, I bestowed on the newspaper a Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy.

But coming from the smirking Henican, such prevaricating was particularly shameless. Ellis Henican is a veteran staffer at Newsday, which has an over thirty-year tradition of anti-white racism, which until the New York Times caught up under Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., was by far the most radical leftwing daily newspaper in New York, and which during the mid-1970s, in the middle of a nationwide campaign by black supremacists to systematically assassinate white policemen (see also here), sought through fraudulent reporting to get heroic white policemen murdered.

As the friend who alerted me to the late-night re-run of Henican’s appearance quipped, “Of course not -- just some misguided, oppressed ‘yoots.’”

Now, Dave Lucas has a sense of fairness and of what will entertain readers. On May 18, when he posted about Michelle Malkin’s Knoxville video, he posted links both to her video and to my column attacking her for stealing credit for the story.

When Lucas emailed me Wednesday of his problems with the Sun, I tried posting a brief comment to Leo’s article – “Actually, Michelle Malkin is not leading the charge, though an awful lot of people feel the need to give her credit” — along with links to my original Knoxville story and my Malkin broadside, the paper’s blog censor permitted my comment – but censored the links, without which the comment was just so much unsupported blather.

This wasn’t the Sun’s first problem with censorship and reporting on race. (One would be shocked, if it were.)

Back in December 2002, when black supremacist kidnapper-murderer-extortionist Sonny Carson died, the Sun’s black columnist, Errol Louis, devoted a thoroughly dishonest column to Carson, whom Louis fondly referred to as a “trickster.” Louis spent not word on Carson’s history as a violent gangster. A reader who was unfamiliar with Carson would learn nothing about his history of murder, of his kidnapping conviction (the kidnapping victim was murdered during the kidnapping, and Carson was convicted of kidnapping, but somehow not convicted of murder), of his years-long violent campaign terrorizing, seeking to extort money from Korean produce store owners, and in one case, murdering them, or of his other campaign to run competent white teachers out of black-dominated schools, and even to violently run out black school principals who were not his allies.

The Sun is supposedly a conservative newspaper, and so one would expect that it would hire a conservative to be its token black columnist. However, in the racially sycophantic way Republicans have of dealing with race, the newspapers editors were apparently happy just to have any black New Yorker on its masthead, and so hired Louis.

I wrote a letter exposing the true Sonny Carson that Louis had hidden from readers, but the newspaper protected him – and left its readers in the lurch.

The politics of news, indeed!