CV NEWS FEED // In a series of viral posts to his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), billionaire businessman Elon Musk argued that the “legacy media” are “racist against Asians and Whites” when reporting on murders.
“So, yeah, the legacy media is super racist,” Musk wrote on X Tuesday. “The legacy media is racist against Asians and Whites,” he wrote in a subsequent post about 15 minutes later.
The two comments came shortly after Musk replied to journalist Andy Ngo. Ngo reported that in Philadelphia, “[t]wo black male suspects have been arrested over a mass shooting at a bus stop that injured eight children on March 6.”
“The mass shooting of school students failed to generate wall-to-wall national media coverage,” Ngo pointed out.
In his response, Musk agreed: “Seems to be hardly any coverage of this mass shooting.”
“The legacy media is racist against Asians [and] Whites, so only prints crime involving those races,” he added. In just five hours, X users “liked” this post over 100,000 times.
To back up his claims, the X owner cited a 2022 analysis from The Washington Free Beacon penned by Manhattan Institute fellow Charles Fain Lehman.
In his analysis, Lehman wrote that a Free Beacon “review of hundreds of articles published by major papers over a span of two years finds that papers downplay the race of non-white offenders, mentioning their race much later in articles than they do for white offenders.”
“These papers are also three to four times more likely to mention an offender’s race at all if he is white, a disparity that grew in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the protests that followed,” Lehman added.
“The data suggest an alarming editorial trend in which major papers routinely omit information from news reports, presenting readers with a skewed picture of who does and doesn’t commit crime,” Lehman continued:
These editorial choices are part and parcel with the “racial reckoning” that swept newsrooms in the wake of Floyd’s murder, which saw journalists dramatically overhauling crime coverage to emphasize the view that the criminal justice system is racist at the root—perhaps at the expense of honesty about individual offenders’ crimes.
Lehman noted that the “disparity” between mainstream media sources’ reporting on homicides committed by white perpetrators and those committed by black perpetrators “widened following George Floyd’s murder.”
“Before May of 2020, papers were roughly twice as likely to mention the race of a white (13 percent of stories) versus a black perpetrator (7 percent),” he indicated.
After Floyd’s murder, “the numbers were 28 percent [for white perpetrators] and 4 percent [for black perpetrators], a ratio of seven to one.”
Again from Lehman:
It could be that there were more stories in which a white offender’s race was relevant after Floyd’s death than before. But it is also easy to see how the increased attention to white murderers represents a change in what reporters and editors thought it was, and was not, important for their readers to hear about, particularly after they publicly committed to revamping their crime reporting following Floyd’s death.
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