These articles constantly miss the point; they constantly compare the arrest of the Jena Six black kids for assaulting a white boy, to the failure of police to arrest the three white boys who hung the three nooses. As best I can tell, no supporters of the Jena Six are mad because the three white noose hangers didn't get arrested. The are mad that:
1. The noose hanging white boys got only suspended, rather than expelled. The white school principal expelled them, but the white (all-white?) school board overturned that.
2. White boys beat one of the future Jena Six guys simply for attempting to attend a white house party; they beat him with beer bottles. Only one of those white boys got charged, and only with simple assault, resulting in only probation.
3. That same future Jena Six guy got assaulted a second time by another white boy, one wielding a pistol. The Jena Six guy wrested away the gun. The police response? The Jena Six dude got arrested for stealing a gun.
4. Now comes the Jena Six incident. The press accounts constantly omit the two previous white-on-black assaults, and the fact that the white boy who got attacked here is (1) a self-described friend of the three noose-hangers, and (2) he (according to the black kids) had minutes before taunted the Jena Six dude who had already been assaulted twice.
This is some of the worst reporting I've ever seen, much worse even than the usual reporting. All sorts of obvious questions never addressed (what role had the attacked white boy previously play?), and preposterous claims made (black kids demanding arrest of white kids for hanging nooses).
Here the LA Times also screws it up. This article jumps from the three white boys hanging nooses to the six black guys beating the white boy without provokation. The article skips the two white-on-black assaults on the future Jena Six guy, and the white boy's affiliation with the three who hung the noose, and his taunting (allegedly) of the Jena Six guy who had been previously assaulted.
The reporting is a disgrace.
2007-09-20
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http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8RPL6MO0&show_article=1
Above a report from yesterday's rally. The same old poorly reported, inaccurate story: White kids hang nooses, in response to failure of those white kids to be arrested, black kids sneak-attack an innocent white boy.
I certainly hope that the thousands of protesters know the full story, and are not as angry as they are over the false reports.
The article cited above is the only one I've found that estimates the crowd. None of the televised reports mentioned crowd size, and I think I know why: Farrakan's 800,000 Man March. When the US Parks Service estimated that even had attracted 800k people, the leaders of the Million Man March got so mad that the parks department ended its practice of estimating crowd size (it used satellite photos). Since then I have noticed that reports only mention crowd estimates for non-political events, where they face no prospect of an interest group loudly opposing low estimates.
In this report the Jena police estimated 15k, and event leaders estimated 50k. The only TV report that mentioned figures other than those offered by protesters themselves had the crowd at "between 30k and 40k", as I recall.
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