Can you say that? Apparently not. Reporting on the Justice Department's study showing that about half of U.S. murder victims are black exclusively focuses on African Americans as victims of violent crimes. But the study also showed that African Americans disproportionately commit such crimes. That information isn't fit for a headline--anywhere. Washington Post: "Study: Almost Half of Murder Victims Black." Detroit Free Press: "Nearly half those slain in U.S. black." UPI: "Nearly half of all murder victims black."

Nice job pointing out that articles about a crime victimization survey are headlined with findings about crime victims. Did you have a point?

Note that the data collected is oriented from the point of view of victims, and none of your three cited articles neglected to mention the disproportionate amount of blacks committing those crimes.

Shocking. Truly shocking. The numbers must lie.

Yeah, Brian I do have a point, which I think is rather obvious. The media favor sensitivity over truth. They emphasize that which will not get them in hot water and downplay that which will. They are predictably conformist, in that no article headline on this story that I came across through a google news search mentioned the wild demographic overrepresentation of African Americans as murderers and almost everyone that I came across mentioned the wild demographic overrepresentation of African Americans as murder victims. Why not report the news rather than sugarcoat it?

"Did you have a point?" B. R.

Yeah. In fact, he made it quite effectively, imo. It has to do with the selective emphasis of race in pc victimilogy.

If that's your point, it's unsupported by your evidence. All of the articles were reporting the same news: that the Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report based on the Crime Victimization Survey. Have you looked at that report?

Most of the articles were probably just summarizing this press release and the abstract without looking at the actual report.

Where does it give the statistic you want to see in a headline? The only line remotely relevant is the line "Among single victim-single offender homicides, about 93 percent of black victims were murdered by black offenders." That would be quite a long headline, and even then, to get the whole picture it would need to be preceded by the explanation that victims are black in 49% of homicides. Just how long do you think headlines should be?

Nowhere in that report does it say what percentage of blacks are murderers or what percentage of murderers are black. That's because it's a survey of victims, not a survey of perpetrators. The article headlines reflect this.

"Where does it give the statistic you want to see in a headline? The only line remotely relevant is the line "Among single victim-single offender homicides, about 93 percent of black victims were murdered by black offenders." That would be quite a long headline, and even then, to get the whole picture it would need to be preceded by the explanation that victims are black in 49% of homicides. Just how long do you think headlines should be?

"Nowhere in that report does it say what percentage of blacks are murderers or what percentage of murderers are black. That's because it's a survey of victims, not a survey of perpetrators. The article headlines reflect this." -Brian Rogers

Don't be silly. It sure does say what percentage of murderers are black. Revisit grade school math: 93% x 49% = 45.57%. I.e., 45.57% of murders in the U.S. are committed by blacks, according to the report. Hence the quick headline Dan offers, "Nearly Half of U.S. Murderers Black."

And of course a headline never needs to be "preceded" by explanation. Explanations follow headlines.

When you tell somebody to revisit gradeschool math, it's a good idea to perform the next calculation correctly. 45.57% is the percentage of single-victim, single-offender murders that were black-on-black. That figure doesn't take into account murders of non-black people by black people, and even if you do add that it still isn't a reliable measure of the demographics of murderers. It excludes multiple murderers and murderers that had accomplices.

A newspaper would have to go out of their way to draw a headline like Dan's out of the data in this report.

Brian R., Point taken. I'd implicitly accepted and ignored the black-on-black restriction of the data, because one can correctly infer that the percentage only goes up as soon as we account for black-on-nonblack murders. But multiple murderers and accomplices certainly do muddy the waters.

Brian: Are "nearly half of U.S. murderers black"? Yes. If you look at the statistic since 1976, it actually eclipses 50 percent. Do "African Americans disproportionately commit" murders in America? Yes. African American make up about 12 percent of the population but commit about 50 percent of the murders. I'm really not sure what your point is. You quibble with the piece, as if something is inaccurate, but everything there is accurate. What's more, anyone with a brain looking at the report on black victimization could make the inference regarding perpetrators--and they would have been correct. You seem to argue for a docile media that accepts government reports without so much as a question. I think reporters would have done themselves more credit had they gone beyond the politically-correct information spoon fed to them by the government and highlighted the whole truth--African Americans get victimized more in the case of murders, but they also victimize more. It's stunning to me (but not to you?) that every headline that I've seen demurs from pointing out the obvious (that is contained within the report) that African Americans disproportionately contribute to the high murder rate in America.

Had the press uniformly reported it this way--that blacks make up 12 percent of the population but commit about 50 percent of the murders--my sense is that you'd be screaming bloody murder. Alas, it would be as factual, if not as politically incorrect, as highlighting the disproportionality in black victimization.

Why do so many people continue to deny the truth and defend falsehoods with regard to this topic?

When I open my local newpaper in the morning, and I read multiple articles about recent murders, I can pretty much predict the areas where those murders have occurred. And those murders by majority occur in AA neighborhoods perpetrated by AAs against AAs.

In fact, it happens so often that the details have become inconsequential.

Dan,

I think you are imagining things. I was a participant in the crime victimization survey. Do you realize it was performed by calling households every six months and asking each member about any crimes that happened to them during the last six month period? This method produces very good data about what crimes occur, how often, and who the crimes are committed against. It is simply the best crime data you can get, because it is collected in a very direct way and includes crimes that were never reported to the police.

However, this survey method produces data oriented from the perspective of the victims. You can't infer the size or demographics of the criminal population. Consider this: one criminal that victimizes twenty people looks the same in these statistics as twenty criminals that each victimize one person. How, then, are we supposed to infer the demographics of murderers from the data collected in this survey?

Or did you intend to suggest that they should pull murderer demographic data from an entirely different (and older) source, and use that for the headline in the piece about the BJS report? I can't imagine how that would read, considering that for accuracy the article text would need to clarify that the information presented in the headline didn't actually come from the report the article was about. Don't you think the editor would want to remove that awkward statement and change the headline so it isn't necessary?

You suggested that the BJS itself was the source of bias. Well, that's easy enough to fix. Give the Bureau of Justice Statistics a call, and suggest that rather than asking about what crimes people are victims of, they instead ask people what crimes they committed in the past six months. Then they will be collecting the kinds of statistics you want them to report. Oh, and let me know how that call goes.

"You quibble with the piece, as if something is inaccurate, but everything there is accurate."

Isn't that what you're doing? Everything in those articles you complain about is accurate. They don't even omit the fact you want them to draw attention to. But you quibble over the headline. As I explained, no accurate headline can be written based on the survey results, saying what you want it to say, in a reasonable word count. If I'm wrong about that, you can prove me wrong by writing such a headline.

The only thing a news organization can do, with regards to this news, to avoid sounding politically correct is to simply not report it. Thus, your experiment with searching Google News can only confirm what you already believe, regardless of the actual truth value.

Is the media trying to sugarcoat the news? Read these links and find out:

CBS sugarcoating black issues #1
CBS sugarcoating black issues #2