Last June, when this story broke, I was careful to say that I did not know whether the Seattle youth was telling the truth about a racist attack by a black man and a Filipino.
I have no strong opinion on what actually happened — but I am absolutely certain that the coverage would be far different if the victim had been black or Hispanic. Or a follower of Islam.
Now one of his attackers, Ahmed Mohamed, has confessed, though he added an absurd excuse.
According to court documents, McClellan was walking home from a friend's house around 2 a.m. when Mohamed and Jonathan Baquiring, 21, asked the teen for a light.
When the West Seattle teen, who turned 17 on Friday, stopped, Mohamed and Baquiring attacked him.
For more than four hours, according to court documents, the two men punched McClellan, urinated on him, beat him with his own belt and burned him with cigarettes. They also poured Four Loko on the teen and taunted him by saying, "How do you like it, white boy?" and, "This is for enslaving our people," according to the charges.
Mohamed, who is black, said in his guilty plea that he and Baquiring targeted McClellan "because he was a different race than we are." McClellan is white.
(Baquiring has pled not guilty and is scheduled to be tried in February.)
In my original June posts, I said that the news coverage of this horrific attack was minimal; that's still true.
Here are my simple-minded views: Racial attacks are wrong, regardless of the races of the attackers and victims. And our news organizations should give about the same coverage to these attacks, regardless of the races of the attackers and the victims. Those views, which may be shared by most Americans, would prevent me from getting a job at most of our "mainstream" news organizations.
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
(The absurd excuse? Mohamed says that Four Loko made him do it. The Seattle Times reporter, Christine Clarridge, appears to take his excuse seriously.)
Update: Clarridge tells me that she thought the Four Loko excuse was like "the devil made me do it" excuses. That's a good comparison, I'd say.
Posted by Jim Miller at January 24, 2011 09:43 AM | Email This