From the WSJ Opinion Archives
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Not
Quite a Lynching
From Austin, Texas, comes this horrific story:
Police on Wednesday were pleading for witnesses to help them track down members of an angry mob that beat a man to death after the car he was riding in apparently struck and injured a child.
Investigators were struggling to piece together what happened Tuesday when David Rivas Morales died defending the driver from members of a crowd leaving a Juneteenth celebration. There could have been anywhere from two to 20 attackers, Austin Police Commander Harold Piatt said.
The car in which Morales, 40, was a passenger had entered an apartment complex's parking lot when it struck a 3- or 4-year-old child, Piatt said. The child was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The driver got out of the car to check on the child and was confronted by several people, Piatt said. When they attacked the driver, Morales got out of the car to protect the driver and was attacked as well. . . . The driver got away and is cooperating with investigators, who are not releasing his name.
This happened on the same day that The Wall Street Journal carried an op-ed piece by John Steele Gordon, in which Gordon--writing about the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young black men who were falsely accused of raping a pair of white women--observes that they were in danger of being lynched and that a lynch mob "is almost inconceivable today." We emailed Gordon and asked for his comments on the Austin killing:
I don't think this is the same as a classic lynching.
A lynching is planned, however quickly, with a definite object in mind: the meting out of immediate justice by the death of the perceived wrongdoer. This was unplanned, a spontaneous response to an event that took place before their eyes. The wrongdoer--if such he was; it's unclear if he could have avoided the child--was not even the one killed.
So I think this differs from a lynching in much the same way as the old definitions of first- and second-degree murder differ. First-degree murder is planned: the husband decides to kill his two-timing wife and does so. Second- degree is unplanned: the husband finds his wife in bed with another man and kills her there and then in a fit of rage. Both are terrible crimes, of course, and severely punished, but the law drew a distinction (and, I think, a valid one) between them.
And, of course, lynchings in Jim Crow days had social acceptability. People even had their photographs taken beside the dangling bodies sometimes and it was by no means unknown for the local authorities to make no attempt to prevent the outrage. In this case the crowd quickly melted away (I'd be happily surprised if anyone is brought to justice in this case) and the community, I am sure, is appalled at what happened.
It's also unclear what role race played in the Austin incident. One may infer from the victim's name and the occasion for which the crowd had gathered (Juneteenth, short for June 19, is a celebration of the emancipation of Texas' slaves) that he was Hispanic and they are probably black. None of the news reports we've seen, however, have spelled this out.
That may be a good decision. There is something to be said for the journalistic practice of leaving race out of crime stories in the absence of a compelling reason to include it (such as the physical description of a suspect on the loose, or clear evidence that the crime was racially motivated).
On the other hand, if the mob had been white and the victim black, would the press have shown such restraint?
Giving
Till It Hurts
MSNBC.com has scoured Federal Election Commission records and "identified
144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start
of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records." We'll give you
three guesses as to which party received the lion's share of the donations:
Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.
Redeeming this dog-bites-man story, though is the lengthy sidebar enumerating all the donations and the comments from the donors. A particular standout is Mark Singer, who gave $250 to "Victory Campaign 2004, which supported America Coming Together, which opposed President Bush." He says:
"I believe very much that writers have to be aware of conflicts of interest in all sorts of situations. Probably there should be a rule against it. But there's a rule against murder. If someone had murdered Hitler--a journalist interviewing him had murdered him--the world would be a better place. I only feel good, as a citizen, about getting rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime. I certainly don't regret it."
Then there's Randy Cohen, who writes the "Ethicist" column for the New York Times and gave $585 to MoveOn.org, an Angry Left group:
Cohen said he thought of MoveOn.org as nonpartisan and thought the donation would be allowed even under the strict rule at the Times.
"We admire those colleagues who participate in their communities--help out at the local school, work with Little League, donate to charity," Cohen said in an e-mail. "But no such activity is or can be non-ideological. Few papers would object to a journalist donating to the Boy Scouts or joining the Catholic Church. But the former has an official policy of discriminating against gay children; the latter has views on reproductive rights far more restrictive than those of most Americans. Should reporters be forbidden to support those groups? I'd say not. Unless a group's activities impinge on a reporter's beat, the reporter should be free to donate to a wide range of nonprofits. Make a journalist's charitable giving transparent, and let the readers weigh it as they will.
"Those who do not cover anything, but write a column of opinion should have even more latitude. It is such a writer's job to make his views explicit. Those donations to nonprofits will no doubt reflect the views he or she is hired to express. In evaluating such civic engagement, it is well to remember that to have an opinion is not to have a bias. To conceal one's political opinions is not to be without them."
After MSNBC.com checked the names of Times staff and contributors on this list with a spokesperson for the Times, Cohen sent this addendum:
"That said, Times policy does forbid my making such donations, and I will not do so in the future."
Cohen's effort at self-justification approaches high comedy: If it's OK for his colleagues to make donations to nonpolitical organizations that he finds politically objectionable, it must be OK for him to make donations to political organizations! And anyway, he thinks of MoveOn.org as nonpartisan! We haven't read Cohen's column in ages, but we recall that his guiding principle always seemed to be that the ends justify the means, so long as the ends are liberal.
One could argue that journalists who make political donations are doing the public a service by disclosing their own biases. The reason that many news organizations bar such contributions (though not all do; see this sidebar for the details) is to protect their institutional credibility--that is, the plausibility of the claim to be unbiased.
(We probably should note that MSNBC's list includes five employees of Dow Jones & Co., which owns this Web site--three from the news side of The Wall Street Journal and two from Dow Jones Newswires. All donated to Democrats or pro-Democratic organizations, and four of the five tell MSNBC that they asked for their donations to be returned, either contemporaneously or after being contacted by MSNBC. Dow Jones policy says that "news employees and members of senior management with any responsibility for news should refrain from partisan political activity judged newsworthy" by their superiors.)
Woo-Hoo,
We're at 22!
A new Gallup poll has bad news for Nancy Reid and Harry Pelosi:
The percentage of Americans with a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress is at 14%, the lowest in Gallup's history of this measure--and the lowest of any of the 16 institutions tested in this year's Confidence in Institutions survey. It is also one of the lowest confidence ratings for any institution tested over the last three decades. . . .
Of the 16 societal institutions tested in Gallup's 2007 update, Americans express the most confidence in the military. They have the least confidence in HMOs and Congress. Americans have much more confidence in "small" business than in "big" business.
The survey suggests Americans are generally grumpy; all the institutions surveyed showed a decline in confidence since last year except HMOs and "big business," which held steady at 18% and 14% respectively.
Newspapers, meanwhile, have a confidence rating of 22%. Eat your heart out, Nancy!
That's
Entertainment
People who support legal abortion--even those who applaud the Supreme Court
for its preposterous decision elevating abortion to a constitutional right--generally
insist that they're not "pro-abortion," just "pro-choice."
Sometimes, for good measure, they add that abortion is a tragedy; it's just
that making it illegal would be worse.
Not syndicated columnist Bonnie Erbe. For her, in some circumstances, abortion is the only choice:
Seems like ancient history at this point, but as one who came of age as a 1970s Ivy Leaguer, no self-respecting career-oriented peer who conceived out of wedlock would have considered bringing that pregnancy to term. What, and sacrifice the promise of a "good" marriage, rewarding career and children who would later be born to two involved, concerned, emotionally and financially secure parents? The tradeoff was not even worth discussing.
Erbe goes on to criticize two current movies, "Knocked Up" and "Waitress," in which female characters carry their pregnancies to term despite being unmarried and in an abusive marriage, respectively. Opines Erbe:
Get real, Hollywood. One producer told the [New York] Times there was better "material" in a script in which the unwed woman has the baby. What if, instead, the "Waitress" had an abortion after leaving her abusive husband, went to college, landed a six-figure job and found a non-abusive spouse with whom she had children? That would have provided the best "material" of all.
Echoing Erbe is Sue Hutchison, a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News:
What's frustrating about "Knocked Up" is that it is so insightful about the pitfalls and complications of marriage, commitment, growing up and growing old. One scene alone, where a nightclub bouncer turns away Alison and her sister Debbie because they're too over-the-hill to pass the velvet ropes, is worth the price of admission.
It's a shame that with so much going for it, the movie couldn't have turned the same intelligent lens on the real agonies of choosing to have an abortion or not.
Some say that abortion is murder. Some say it's a tragic but necessary choice. And some say it's entertainment.
What
About Child Labor Laws?
"Survey Sees Support for Embryos in Stem Cell Work"--headline, Reuters,
June 20
The
Pepper Mill Distracted Him, With Tragic Results
"Boater in Crash Seasoned at Helm"--headline, Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Press, June 20
- "Ugly Fish Is Seen as Aphrodisiac"--headline, Associated
Press, June 20
- "Frozen Man Found in Fish Shop"--headline, Associated Press, June 20
Breaking
News From 1939
"Tensions Persist Between Germany and Poland"--headline, New York
Times (Paris edition), June 20
Police
Identified the Victims as Blinky and Clyde
"Pacman Charged With Two Felonies in Melee"--headline, AOL Sports,
June 21
Man
Bites Dog
"Expert Calls for Dog Chips"--headline, Preston (England) Citizen,
June 21
News You Can Use
- "Drinking Linked to Poor Decisions"--headline, Daily
Iowan (University of Iowa), June 21
- "Cluttered Home Worrisome"--headline, Enquirer
(Cincinnati), June 19
- "RV Advice: 'Making a U-Turn Is a Nightmare' "--headline,
CNN.com,
June 20
- "Vacations Necessary, Experts Say"--headline, Ventura County (Calif.) Star, June 21
Bottom Story of the Day
- "Fire Sprinkler Advocates Honored"--headline, News
14 Carolina Web site, June 20
- "Travolta Disapproves of Anti-Depressents"--headline, MSNBC.com, June 19
'Best
Job in the World'
From USA Today:
New Mexico governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson finds himself answering the same question every day from voters and reporters: Is he really running for vice president?
"I have the best job in the world and four years to go as governor of New Mexico, and that's where I would return" if his bid for the top job fails, he said in a telephone interview between campaign stops in Las Vegas. "But it's frustrating because nobody believes me."
How can anyone not believe a man who is so selfless that he is willing to give up the best job in the world for a crummy position like president of the United States?
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Danny Brown, Nathan Sturtevant, Radu Aghinii, Monty Krieger, J. Kaplan, Pat Rowe, Michael Garrett, Kathleen Sullivan, Ed Lasky, Rod Pennington, Barbara Vaughey, Teresa Hanson, John Sarna, Tim Willis, Kyle Kyllan, Brian Cronin, Scott Wright, James Chen, Doug McPeek, John Sinnott and Keith Rayburn. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: Bloomberg's politics: A post-partisan savior, or just another spoiler?
- Dan Henninger: Is the media a "feral beast"?
- Tony Blair: Today's media are too concerned with "impact."
