Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jack Cashill began his Sept. 20 WorldNetDaily column by complaining:
As half of America now knows, last month two teenagers in a stolen Hyundai consciously targeted an innocent Las Vegas cyclist and ran him over, killing him in the process.
The other half of America does not know about this incident because their media have chosen not to tell them.
The Poynter institute, a nonprofit that "provides fact-checking, media literacy and journalism ethics training to citizens and journalists in service to democracy," weighed in on this issue Tuesday.
Instead of holding the media to account for their silence about the murder, Poynter scolded Elon Musk for daring to talk about it.
But the issue is not that Musk was "daring to talk about it"; it was that he was falsely accusing a newspaper of suppressing the story, which resulted in death threats to the newspaper. As befits somone who wrote a VDARE-endorsed book seeking to absolve white people for fleeing cities in the 1960s, Cashill obsessed over racial issues here, pointing out that the victim was white and that at least one assailant was black, and baselessly assumed that the media was trying to hide that:
Some have assumed that both of the perps are black.
It is this assumption that has likely kept the media silent. The video surfaced on Aug. 29. As of this writing the New York Times has yet to say word one about the murder of Andreas Probst.
Cashill didn't explain why the Times should have rpeorted on this story. His goal was to justify Musk's attacking on the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the threats that followed:
The video of the Probst murder surfaced on social media this past Saturday, Aug. 16. Poynter took exception to an Aug. 17 tweet by Musk.
"An innocent man was murdered in cold blood while riding his bicycle," Musk tweeted. "The killers joked about it on social media Yet, where is the media outrage? Now you begin to understand the lie."
By the following day the post had been viewed more than 68 million times. And still the major media remained mum.
Once the video surfaced, many citizens apparently focused their anger on the Review-Journal and its crime reporter, Sabrina Schnur.
According to Poynter, an unnamed "they" made "anti-Semitic comments" about Schnur and "accused her of being anti-white."
To its humble credit, the Review-Journal did report on the murder and acknowledged the video, but as with the Las Vegas TV media, bicycle safety was the theme of much of the reporting.
Cashill omitted the fact that Poynter reported that the reporter who originally reported the story "received 700 notifications on X and an onslaught of angry emails and voicemails," that poeple were doxxing her and digging up posts the reporter made as a teenager, and that other staffers and the paper itself also received numerous hate messages and threats. (Also, Twitter video view counts are virtually meaningless.)
Rather than actually try to prove that the Review-Journal was trying to hide somsething, he complained that Poynter pointed out that a reporter for the newspaper was murdered last year by a local politician, so the place is a little on edge over threats to its reporters. Even though Poynter specifically noted that the politician "had made angry social media posts referencing the journalist and his work" before killing him, Cashill counterfactually claimed that "social media had nothing to do with [the reporter's] murder" and that bringing it up "is gratuitous and misleading."
Cashill concluded by making his race-bating more explicit and misrepresenting Poynter some more (and plugging his VDARE-endorsed book):
As I report in my new book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities," the media have been sweeping away black-on-white crime for the last 60 years.
This would be bad enough, but the media make the situation much worse by amplifying the relatively rare instances of white-on-black crime.
This is the "lie" to which Musk alludes. In this instance, Poynter does not labor "in service to democracy." Poynter labors in service to the lie.
But the real liar here is Cashill, who is trying (with an assist from Elon Musk) to smear a reporter and a newspaper as reverse racists based on nothing but circumstantial evidence he (and Musk) can't be bothered to prove is true, and he's seeking to justify threats and potential violence based on those specious assumptions. He's sounding more and more like Colin Flaherty, whose more overt brand of race-baiting was a WND staple several years back.
