Washington Post reaches right for the race card in Miami shooting

With almost no confirmed details about what happened or why, it's nevertheless time to stoke more race riots

American Politics, News | Comments | July 21, 2016

I'd like to ask a question of whoever makes the style decisions at the Washington Post. Does the paper now intend to put the race of the primary players in the headline of every story? Every crime story? Or only the crime stories in which it appears that a police officer might have done something wrong - even though no one has the police side of the story yet and there's no way to know for sure? Because as far as I can see, the Post does not write headlines like "Black man shoots store owner," or "Black woman commits carjacking," or "White former cabinet secretary violates gross negligence statute." They don't write headlines like this because it would be completely inappropriate to do so. The race of the people involved in a news story is not what matters. It's what was done that you're reporting, not the skin color of the people involved.

But that apparently does not apply when it comes to any discharge of a police weapon in which the race of the person hit is black. In that case, it's in the headline, even though no one knows if the man's race has anything to do with why he was shot. It doesn't matter. The media has decided to push a narrative, and nothing - even potential irrelevance - is going to stop them from doing so. So of course they ran this morning with this headline: Fla. police shoot black man with his hands up as he tries to help autistic patient Sheesh. It can't get much worse than that, can it? If that's what really happened. The following video does look bad. It's hard to understand why the cop shot the man who was lying on the ground with his hands up. My layman's instinct tells me this has to have been a terrible mistake - and thank God the injuries are not life-threatening - but here's what we don't know:

The Post told us the race of the man who was shot, but not the race of the shooter.

We haven't heard any statement from the police about what else might have been going out outside what the video captured to better explain why the shots were fired.

We don't know why the police were called to the scene in the first place. A therapist trying to calm down an autistic man who wandered away from a home doesn't even seem like a situation that requires a police presence. What are we missing here? The Post story doesn't explain that.

None of this means it couldn't have still been a terrible mistake. It doesn't even mean it couldn't have been racist. But what we do know is that the Washington Post went right ahead and ran a headline implying that without knowing one way or the other. Watch the video below. Like I said, on first glance this looks terrible. And maybe it is. But maybe it had nothing to do with race. And maybe there's more to the story. But the Washington Post doesn't care. Its interest is in pushing the narrative of racist white cops so as to stoke more race riots, which are the news media's favorite kind of story in the entire world. We may find out that the Miami cops acting very irresponsibly here. We already know the Washington Post did.

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