No one comes forward as a spokesperson for white guy civil rights.
by Ron Jackson (pictured)
Our world has changed drastically since former Vice President Al Gore invented the Internet, especially the speed and type of news we receive. Newsworthy events that might happen at 4 a.m. in Butte, Montana, or St. Petersburg, Russia, can be available to the public almost immediately. News and information are readily available to us at microwave speed.
No more waiting for the Nightly News at 10. The way our news is presented to us has also changed. News used to be the mere reporting of facts and letting the viewer decide what to believe. Now most news formats are mainly giving the audience what news programs want them to think. We sometimes get the same story on every broadcast, every night for years. Generally, there’s nonstop news coverage for murder or missing person stories. Remember O.J. Simpson, Scott Peterson, missing congressional aide Chandra Levy or the Duke University rape story.
Thinking that any heinous or outright unfathomable crime would make the national news, I was skeptical when I received a couple of e-mails asking if I had heard of the gruesome multiple murders that occurred almost six months ago. I hadn’t. Thanks again to Al Gore, all I had to do was click on a link, and bingo, there was the story as if it had just occurred yesterday.
Sure enough, on Jan. 6 of this year, a young Knoxville, Tenn., couple had been carjacked, kidnapped, raped and murdered by four other young people from the same city. Channon Christian, a 21-year-old University of Tennessee college student, and her friend, 24-year-old Christopher Newsom, were both raped. Christian was found strangled and her body left in plastic bags inside the house where the crimes were committed. Newsom was shot and burned and his body dumped near some railroad tracks. Reports of mutilation of both bodies have not been confirmed.