[Rod Dreher] Mohammed Anwar’s Mystery Murderers

Well, in Our Nation’s Capital™ the other day, two teen girls — a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old — allegedly tazed an Uber Eats driver in an attempt to steal his car, and ran off with it, crashing the thing and killing the driver, who was a South Asian immigrant, Mohammed Anwar.

You can read the entire account of the felony murder in the Washington Post and never learn a thing about the race of the alleged carjackers. But if you watch the video, you will see that they are black: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MajX6b5OSQU

Black teenagers allegedly kill South Asian man in carjacking. It would seem that if we were concerned about crimes against Asians, this would be a story. But as of this writing, there is nothing about it in The New York Times. I googled to see if any of the networks had covered it. NBC News had something three days ago, which did not mention the race of the alleged perpetrators. This is understandable, because at that point, no video existed. Well, now it does. The story has not been updated. The other two networks aren’t carrying it, at least not that I could find. USA Today finally reported the story this afternoon, but said nothing about the race of those arrested for the crime.

The New York Post reported on it, but did not mention the race of the alleged perpetrators (though it did embed a video). Nothing on NPR, as of this writing.

As a matter of news judgment, I can understand not including race in crime reporting if it does not appear to be connected to the crime. But our news media did not care that one bit of evidence in the Atlanta mass murder connects that crime to racial animus (an NPR show last week conducted a lengthy interview with a professor who said that yeah, the Atlanta police say there is no evidence of racial bias in that crime, but they probably don’t know what they’re talking about). That suspected killer was a white man, and therefore fit the narrative. There is as much evidence that the crime that these two black juveniles are charged with had an anti-Asian racial-bias element as there was that the Atlanta shootings were racially biased — but the media treat these stories with very different standards.