Another Associated Press Scandal: Wire Service Covers Up Black-Male-on-White-Male Rape Spree

By Nicholas Stix
Published 2:32 a.m., December 29, 2006.
Last updated 4:53 a.m., December 29, 2006.


What Did the AP Know, and When Did It Know It?

Imagine you were a member of a group being targeted by a serial rapist, but the media refused to provide you with this urgent information, which in the age of AIDS and resistant forms of venereal disease, could protect you from having your life destroyed or even ended, because it didn't like the way the truth looked? Or imagine you wanted to learn about the prevalence of rape but you couldn't, because the media refused to provide the public with the real story? Or you're simply a citizen who wants to be informed, as an end-in-itself?

There is nothing theoretical about the above questions. In and around Baytown, TX, since April an armed serial rapist – "a clean-shaven black man, 18-21 years old... [5'10"-6' tall] and with a shaved head" and carrying a backpack -- has been targeting small, frail, white men, 18-21 years of age, who live in their parents' houses. The last reported rape was committed on November 30. And yet, the Associated Press doesn't want potential victims, students of rape, or inquisitive citizens to know the truth.


Racial Profiling, in the Real World

In an 18 December story, Houston-based Associated Press reporter Joe Stinebaker refused to identify the race of the Baytown rapist's victims, even though they were almost surely chosen based on their race, and knowing that the black rapist attacks only smallish, frail, young white men is an essential piece of information for potential victims to protect themselves, and for residents to look out for, in preventing further rapes, and possibly helping to catch the assailant.

The rapist -- who also robs his victims -- has so far victimized at least five young white men in and around Baytown, at 30-60 day intervals; the Baytown police are sure he's raped more men than that, but surmise that other victims have so far been too ashamed to come forward. The rapist's m.o. is to pick out a victim, stalk him for a time, ensure that he is alone, and then confront him either just outside of his house, or break into the house and confront him inside, first robbing and then raping him. The rapist favors a gun, but has also used a knife; he is always armed.

(If Baytown police can be certain that the local rapist has violated more white men, is it not equally likely that there are more black rapists loose, racially profiling and violating white men?)

Baytown is an oil refinery (ExxonMobil, Chevron Phillips, and Amoco) and chemical plant-dominated (Exxon Chemical and Bayer) city of 66,430 souls (2000 census) on Texas' Coastal Plains, in Harris County, where Houston is the county seat. The city's information page puts it "on the northern shore of Galveston Bay" between Houston on its eastern flank, with Beaumont to the west, and Galveston to the north, and provides a photograph of a peninsula jutting into the bay.

News accounts of rape often hide behind euphemisms such as "sexual assault," but "homosexual rape" means just that. A man violates the anus of another man, forcing his sexual member into a place not designed to accommodate it, tearing the flesh, and ejaculating into the delicate, bloodied tissues. If the rapist is HIV+, he will almost certainly infect his victim, thus ending the latter's chance at ever having a normal sex life, and possibly, any life at all.

Unprotected homosexual intercourse is far and away the most high-risk form of sex for the transmission of HIV; no other sex act even comes close.

Since the rapist is targeting exclusively young white men, we are also talking about racist hate crimes and civil rights violations.

Since 1999, the American public has continuously been inundated, via Big Media, by phony claims of innocent black males being "racially profiled" and even murdered by the authorities. But when a real case of racial profiling arises, Big Media fall silent. Imagine the outcry, coast to coast, if a white man were targeting and raping young black men. (While I am convinced that the notion of hate crimes is unconstitutional, as long as white men are going to be charged with them, blacks who target victims based on the latter's race must also be so charged.)

AP reporter Joe Stinebaker buried victims' description of the rapist in the penultimate paragraph of his 252-word December 18 story. That was because many readers quit reading a news story early on.

Stinebaker's last paragraph read, "The victims have all been men in their late teens."

Just "men."

One police press rep (surprise, surprise!) Stinebaker quoted also was anything but helpful.

"'I wish we had a link between the victims, because we might have a better chance of catching him,' said Lt. Richard Whitaker of the police department in Baytown, where took of the attacks took place. 'We don't have any affirmative links at all.'"

Try that they were all "white, smallish, frail men, between the ages of 18 and 21, and all lived in their parents' house," Lieutenant.

That’s what police call, "fitting the profile." If Stinebaker quoted Lt. Whitaker exactly and in context, the Lieutenant was saying that there is no profile.

Lt. Whitaker did not return my telephone messages requesting comment for this story.

The socialist MSM's smearing of police as racist thugs notwithstanding, the truth is that thousands of police departments all over America are almost as politically correct as your average university sociology department.


What's the Story?

The reader may well be wondering how I know that the AP is suppressing information. What are my sources?

In a Houston Chronicle story that was posted to the newspaper's Website on Dec. 16, 2006 at 2:51 P.M. (i.e., exactly fifty hours before Joe Stinebaker's AP story was posted around the country), Cindy Horswell reported,

But what makes this case so unusual is that women are not the target. So far the five victims have all been young, white males in their late teens or early 20s, mostly students still living at their parents' homes.

The attacker is described as a light-skinned black male, clean-cut and nicely dressed, in his late 20s. He stands 5-foot-6 to 6 feet tall and weighs about 200 pounds.

Far from burying the most essential information at the end of her article, or even suppressing it altogether, Horswell put it all in the second and third paragraphs of her 728-word story, where they belong.

"Who?" "What?" "When?" "Where?" "How?" are still the essential questions that every news story – even more so every crime story – must answer. Answering them does not mean burying the information at the end of the story, much less not publishing it at all.

Kudos to Cindy Horswell.


The AP Stonewall

I first contacted AP on December 20 to ask Joe Stinebaker why his story lacked such essential information. That contact was a mere formality; unlike every single other American press organization I know of, AP refuses to provide telephone numbers or even eddresses, where readers, journalists, and researchers may contact its writers. And if that weren't bad enough, the AP demands that anyone seeking to contact one of its staffers, write to its media relations department at info@ap.org. I provided my telephone number, in addition to my eddress, in a request to Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations. Stokes never responded.

"Media relations" at the AP is a euphemism for institutionalized stonewalling.

This is not the first time that I sought a response for a story from the AP's corporate lords. In early September 2004, when I wrote a story on the "Boosgate" hoax that AP reporter Tom Hays had engineered, I repeatedly emailed and called AP's offices, requesting comment before going to press, but never got a response.

In my experience, AP is much worse than non-media corporations, in its refusal to respond to journalists. When I call a Fortune 500 company for a comment on a story, I often get a call-back within the hour.


Get the Story!

Having no time to waste on stonewalling operations, on 21 December I bypassed the "suits" and sought out Joe Stinebaker on my own, but was informed that he was on vacation until 2 January, using up accumulated time, as was his editor, Wendy Benjaminson. However, an AP source assured me that AP reporter John Porretto had done a follow-up to Stinebaker's story, in which Porretto had spent a full day in Baytown during the middle of last week, and had written a story on the case that would include the victims' race that would appear on news Web sites last Friday (22 December) night, for the Saturday edition.

I searched the Web for Porretto's story last Friday night, and ever since. Finally, the 762-word story was posted at, among other places, the Houston Chronicle's Web site Tuesday at 2:05 p.m. But after being held back for four days, Porretto's story still failed to mention the race of the victims. (Wouldn't you love to have been a fly on the wall at the editorial meetings during that period, when Porretto's article was discussed?)


A Half-Truth is a Whole Lie

Meanwhile, Democratic Party strategist, law professor, and rape victim Susan Estrich wrote a syndicated column based on the Baytown rapist story that went out on Christmas Eve. In "Male rapes occur, and it's time to address them," Estrich used the Baytown case to press the point that male-on-male rape is a real problem that has been swept under the rug. Estrich's column was a perfect case of "a half-truth is a whole lie," in which she swept the problem of black-on-white male rape under the rug.

Again, since the vast majority of prison rapes are perpetrated by black men, this "real problem" Estrich speaks of, has a distinctly racial dimension about which she maintains silence.


More Rapes are Committed Against Men than Against Women

As I have -- or rather, as Human Rights Watch has shown, male-on-male prison rape is a huge problem, particularly black-male-on-white-male prison rape. Indeed, in her 2001 report for Human Rights Watch, No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons lawyer-investigator Joanne Mariner revealed,

Past studies have documented the prevalence of black on white sexual aggression in prison. These findings are further confirmed by Human Rights Watch's own research. Overall, our correspondence and interviews with white, black, and Hispanic inmates convince us that white inmates are disproportionately targeted for abuse. Although many whites reported being raped by white inmates, black on white abuse appears to be more common. To a much lesser extent, non-Hispanic whites also reported being victimized by Hispanic inmates.

Based on her reading of studies by prison rape scholars, Joanne Mariner estimated that more men than women are raped each year in the U.S.

I would not be at all surprised to find that the Baytown rapist is an ex-con who developed a taste for raping white men while in prison. The victims he has targeted match almost all of the characteristics of prisoners targeted for rape that Joanne Mariner cited in her study. (Mariner cited one more characteristic -- that of seeming delicate or vulnerable or slightly feminine, which I don't see any American newspaper citing in this day and age, though Los Angeles Times reporter Lianne Hart’s quote -- see two paragraphs below -- of a Baytown police captain’s roundabout description of the relative sizes of perpetrator and victims, is close enough.)

As America’s prisons are practically laboratories for the production of HIV by violent convicts who often deliberately infect other prisoners, let us hope the Baytown rapist is not also HIV+.

Public health researchers Hammett, Harmon, and Rhodes estimated that in 1997, 7.5-10 percent (150,000-200,000) of America’s prison population was HIV+.


Honest Reporters

Another non-AP reporter who did her job on the Baytown rapist story is the Los Angeles Times' Liane Hall. In a Christmas Eve story, Hall revealed the victims' race, as well as suggesting that they were small and frail – "… 'fairly identical in stature,' [Baytown Police Capt. Roger] Clifford said. 'He's bigger and can dominate them.'"

(Hall's story also appeared on Christmas Day in the
Dallas-Forth Worth Star-Telegram, which keeps its Web stories up longer than the L.A. Times.)

Kudos to Liane Hall.

As one might expect, local news operations had been way out in front of the national organizations.

An 18 December story posted at the Web site of Houston's KHOU-TV Channel 11 looked odd. It was credited to the "Associated Press," yet included the victims’ race in its description, in the final paragraph.

Note, however, that when a news organization buys an AP article, it is not obliged to run it as is. It may cut an article for space or content considerations, or supplement it with material it has uncovered through its own staffers, and/or through other media organizations.

The KHOU staffer I spoke to, who requested anonymity, "We actually did the story before that. I guess, let's see, the police department gave us that information," as to the victims' description. "We actually did that story on December 4."

The KHOU source insisted that it was AP that had used KHOU material, not the other way around.

Kudos to KHOU.

And kudos to Houston TV's Channel 2 News, which already on 16 December ran a 256-word story, whose fourth paragraph read,

The five known victims have been white men in their late teens or early 20s, many who are students still living in their parents' homes.

I saved the Channel 2 story for last, because it too ran under an "Associated Press" byline, but it was obviously supplemented by Channel Two News staffers, who added the victims' race and an indirect quote from Sgt. Bryan Pair of the Harris County Sheriff's Office, neither of which were in any other AP version of the story.


Associated Propaganda

The AP cover-up is significant for two reasons. First, AP is, with the New York Times, one of the two most influential news organizations in America. Through its over 1,000 print, radio, and TV outlets in America and abroad, AP reaches as many as one billion people per year; Joe Stinebaker's censored male rape story was published as far away as India. The New York Times also publishes many AP stories. And across the country, newspapers large and small buy much of their non-local news from AP.

Indeed, newspapers even buy local news from AP. Thus, we were treated to the spectacle of the Houston Chronicle running Joe Stinebaker's racially censored AP story on the Baytown rapist on 18 December, two days after the newspaper had run Chronicle reporter Cindy Horswell's more informative story on the same topic. And on 26 December, the Chronicle ran John Porretto's racially censored story.

Although for years, the conventional wisdom has held that the news business is dominated by TV, and more recently, the orthodox "unconventional" wisdom has held that the Internet has made newspapers obsolete, the New York Times and AP are more powerful than ever. While local TV news focuses on fires, car accidents, bad weather and murders, national TV news organizations set up their news day according to what they read the night before in the New York Times and/or from AP.

And so, for most of the public, the revised version of the philosophical chestnut becomes, If the AP or the New York Times didn’t report an event, did it happen?

Presently, the top of AP's home page has a link to a statement of support for Pulitzer Prize-winning Iraqi AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who is in U.S. military custody. (Yet another tainted Pulitzer.) What the AP statement leaves out, is that Hussein is a terrorist suspect whom U.S. military authorities found with traces of explosives on his person. Perhaps AP's corporate chieftains deemed the reasons for Hussein's detention irrelevant. Meanwhile, AP VP for Corporate Communications Ellen Hale issued a statement in which she misrepresented the Geneva Conventions and U.S. military law, in saying that "AP is insisting that the U.S. military follow accepted due process under the law and the Geneva Conventions..."

Those charged with being unlawful combatants, of colluding with them, or of being spies or saboteurs, are specifically excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, and U.S. Military law is no more generous.

Second, not content to censor and suppress the news, AP engineers hoaxes in which it publishes fake news. I already cited its "Boosgate" hoax. It has also published staged photographs shot by Bilal Hussein.

More recently, AP reporters have been exposed for piping quotes, which they attributed to a non-existent Iraqi Police spokesman named "Jamil Hussein."

A number of years before the War in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was able to plant a spy within the AP.

(The AP is also guilty of pedestrian socialist media bias, as in the cases of its reporters Tim Martin and Jennifer Loven, and a passel of AP stories analyzed by the Republican Media Research Center's Newsbusters Web site.)

AP is especially egregious in matters of interracial rape. It has suppressed reporting on black-male-on-white-female gang rapes, such as the January 21, 2006 case from Henrico County near Richmond, VA, in which four black students (some of whom had been athletes) at black Virginia Union University were charged with gang-raping a white coed from the University of Richmond's Westhampton College for women. John Patrick Cates, 21, and Brian Anthony Ridgeway, 24, were eventually convicted of rape in early November for the attack, but may serve token terms of less than five years in prison. A third attacker, Julian Dewayne Williams, 21, pleaded guilty to assault and battery, and will not spend more than four months in prison, even though he participated in a vicious gang rape, and charges against a fourth man, Sherrod Donte Jeffrey Jr., 21, were dismissed altogether.

Although the AP ran a brief local story on the arrests, its national team shunned it, and I had to find out the disposition of the case through The Collegian, a student newspaper at the University of Richmond.

Kudos to The Collegian's Sloan DeVilbiss.

And kudos, too, to the local Richmond Times-Dispatch, which ran a more detailed story on the convictions of Cates and Ridgeway, but oddly, left out the reporter's byline.

By contrast, when Duke rape-hoaxer Crystal Gail Mangum first made her false charges against Duke lacrosse team members, AP declined to report that not only is white-male-on-black-female rape a crime so rare as to be statistically non-existent (accounting for 0.0 percent of all rapes in a given year), but that white-male-on-black-female gang rape has actually been non-existent nationally in recent years. AP also declined to report that in Duke's Durham, NC home, as my Autonomist editor, Rocco DiPippo reported, black men have for years made a sport of raping white women. Meanwhile, three innocent young white men stood to spend the rest of their lives in jail for crimes that had never been committed.

AP's "reporters" and "editors" declined to inform their readers that between 2001 and 2003, blacks committed, on average, 15,400 black-male-on-white-female rapes per year, while whites committed, on average, only 900 white-male-on-black-female rapes per year. Since there are five-and-one-half as many white as black males in this country, that means that black males rape white females over ninety times as frequently as white males rape black females.

The [Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey] tells us that interracial multiple-offender offenses are even more lopsidedly black than interracial crime as a whole. In fact, whereas blacks [males] committed 10,000 gang-rapes against whites [females] between 2001 and 2003, the NCVS samples did not pick up a single "white" [including Hispanic]-on-black [female] gang rape.

The material in the previous two paragraphs (and the quoted text in the latter paragraph), while all deriving from the federal Department of Justice, was published in the 2005 state-of-the-art report, The Color of Crime, which was published by the New Century Foundation, which also publishes American Renaissance magazine.

But suppressing the news wasn't enough for the folks at AP. In late April, they ran a hoax article by one of their national propagandists, New York-based Erin Texeira, in which she quoted young black women who complained of routinely suffering boorish and sexually abusive behavior from white men.

The young black women can almost finish each other's stories. They go to a party, a concert, a nightclub. Twenty-somethings of all colors are flirting and dancing. And then it happens.

Inevitably, a woman says, a white man asks her to dance erotically while he watches. Or he grabs her rear end. Or asks for sex, in graphic detail, without bothering to ask her name.

Many of Texeira's quotes, if they were quotes, were recycled lines that black racists had used to complain about Halle Berry’s Oscar win in 2002. The complaints were that in Berry’s movies she was always sleeping with white men (John Travolta in Swordfish, and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster’s Ball), and/or doing strip teases for them (Warren Beatty in Bulworth), which the blacks considered racial outrages. And Texeira made it clear that she was aware of the complaints, since she referred to them later in the story.

Anyone with any experience in such racially mixed situations in today's America knows that were a white man to mistreat a young black female in such a fashion, that the female would slap or punch him and scream, at which point, every black (and likely, Hispanic, too) male in the vicinity would immediately pummel the white. Young black women do, however, endure such lewd, crude behavior all the time -- from black boys and men.

White men are notoriously timid around black women, and with good reason. In New York, in a practice going even beyond Jim Crow, it has for many years been a pastime for black females of all social strata to casually assault white men in public. The black females know that if the white man defends himself, he will be beaten to a pulp by every nearby black and Hispanic male, while whites will either stand around and do nothing, or support the racist thugs, and the white victim may even be arrested for a racial attack. And if the white man does nothing to defend himself, the black female will at minimum enjoy having racially humiliated him.

Such is the racial power that every black female in America today possesses. I call the world that grants them such power, Jim Snow.

A reporter is guilty of journalistic fraud, whether she "pipes" fictitious quotes or uncritically quotes transparent lies. Erin Texeira was engaged in a form of journalistic jury tampering; she was seeking to predispose the jury in the Duke "rape" case to be biased against the white defendants and in favor of the hoaxer-plaintiff, and thereby to railroad three innocent young white men.
(Texeira's Duke story is but one performance from a veritable walking race hoax machine.)

In another exercise in fiction, on 1 July, Texeira "reported" that educated black men train themselves to act in a passive fashion, to try and put at ease frightened whites.

According to an influential leftist/black myth, crime is merely a "function" of poverty; blacks have a high poverty rate, and thus a high crime rate. And since poverty is due to white racism, and since the arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of black males are due to racial profiling, blacks are not at all to blame for their high crime rate.

Lies, lies, lies.

As has been proven ad nauseum, "racial profiling" is a hoax. As The Color of Crime showed, there is no correlation between poverty and crime. (And correlation isn’t causation, anyway.) And as I have previously pointed out, the 32.1 percent figure of black men aged 20-29 years old currently under criminal justice supervision (in jail or prison, or on probation or parole), is 33.2 percent higher than the black poverty rate of 24.1 percent.

The problem, as anyone living in an urban area knows, is that over the past twenty years or so, an increasing proportion of middle-class black men have adopted the thug life mentality. Although middle-class black men rage to collusive reporters, and write letters to newspapers about whites' unforgivable sin of seeing them as scary, the truth is that a substantial and ever-growing proportion of youngish, urban, black middle-class men is obsessed with intimidating whites, and becomes enraged when whites refuse to be intimidated.

So, there you have the AP's alternate universe of interracial rape, which for the wire service is in turn a microcosm of race relations, a world in which seemingly upstanding white men routinely assault and rape black women with impunity, and in which gentle, innocent black men must cope with racist white stereotypes and profiling.

(In the foregoing story, I used some material from reporter Ken Fountain of the Baytown Sun newspaper (free registration required); Fountain has been covering the Baytown Rapist story since at least 21 September. A tip o' the hat to VDARE columnist James Fulford, who blogged on this case back on 18 December.)