Except for white people
The Society of Professional Journalists has decided that it is best to leave a suspect’s race out of crime reporting except for “extraordinary” reasons. Of course, to the SPJ, “good reporting” means race info in a story about crime isn’t “useful to people in the community” even if the race of a suspect is part of a police report apparently. Despite their claim that they aren’t toeing the PC line, their explanation is filled with just the sort of reasoning based on PC thinking — one of which is that all whites are racists.
Some of you may remember the story in September of 2007 when the Sacramento Bee announced that they were revisiting their policy of including race in their crime stories. A particularly gruesome crime occurred that brought the Bee to revisit their policy when they reported on the suspect leaving out race while Internet reporting as well as the Bee’s own comments section on their internet posting of the story reported the race of the suspect anyway.
SPJ continues, however, to come down on the side of leaving the race of a suspect out of crime reporting. I find their reasons, though, less than convincing. In fact, their concerns are so broad as to make all reporting on every issue untenable if applied farther than just race in crime reporting.
The SPJ says that whites will always assume that “an object in a black man’s hand” is “a weapon,” seeming to accept the premise that all whites are racists. They point out that racial intermarriage and breeding makes skin color and race impossible to determine. They say that Hispanics can look black and they bring up the unreliability of the human memory. All these, they say, are reasons never to mention the race of a suspect in a crime story. “Fuzziness” and that “memory is delicate, and especially so when it comes to emotional situations, as well as cross-racial descriptions” seems to be enough for the SPJ to exclude race in crime reporting.