Charlotte may be calming down just in time for the weekend, but the national media keeps wildly spinning its false narrative about the race riots here — even as this narrative is starkly contradicted by the facts.
Yes, the journalists who’ve come to North Carolina (just for a few days) are determined to expose police officers as abject racists, and to focus their institutional biases on Charlotte and the South as a whole. They also keep omitting, rather conveniently, the key detail in the Charlotte story: the officer who shot Keith Lamont Scott is also black.
And instead of actually reporting the shooting story, media outlets are playing amateur social anthropologist. They’re “going big” on day three of the story — focusing on Charlotte’s supposed identity crisis as that of a forward-looking, progressive city now regressing to its true nature of small-minded racism and segregation.
To wit, the Wall Street Journal’s Valerie Bauerlein and Cameron McWhirter, call Charlotte a “beacon of the new South,” as though the troubles it’s facing come from Southern (white) barbarians at the gates, hell bent on preserving the traditions of segregation – the price of being a “global powerhouse” in the stereotypical “Deep South” of journalists’ imaginations:
Charlotte until recently had boomed as a beacon of the New South, with a pragmatic approach to civic problems that said what was good for all was good for business. Locals credited the city’s businesslike approach with everything from luring professional sports to the city, to avoiding the type of violence that racked other cities during school desegregation.
But now the vaunted “Charlotte way” isn’t working.
The Journal also failed to mention that Brentley Vinson, the cop involved in the fatal shooting, is African-American, and a product of Charlotte.
In an identical story to the Journal’s (talk about wasting newsprint), The New York Times‘s Richard Fausset and Allen Blinder struck again, claiming that the racist police shooting has “shak[en] Charlotte’s self image” as an inclusive, diverse, liberal town that was so forward thinking, it once hosted the Democratic National Convention:
This has always been a place that has prided itself on order, consensus and a can-do corporate mentality that turned a locale with no real geographic reason to exist into one of the hemisphere’s financial dynamos.
It has also gained a reputation for racial amity, from its nationally recognized commitment to busing and integrated schools in the 1970s and ’80s, to the election of Harvey Gantt in 1983 as one of the South’s first prominent black mayors.
But the fatal police shooting on Tuesday of a black resident, Keith Lamont Scott, and the protests that have followed are among numerous bumps and jolts that have shaken Charlotte’s sense of itself recently as it emerged from a successful small city to a more complicated larger one.
Why, do we ask, did Charlotte “have no real geographic reason to exist”? The city started as the site of America’s first gold rush, and later was a rail hub for distributing cotton. 200 years later, it would be the second biggest banking city in the country, after New York. Yet according to the Times, it had no reason to exist.
And why does a Southern city have to be “so forward thinking” in order to host the DNC? Is the South somehow allergic to Democrats? North Carolina has a proud history in Democratic politics and is blue enough that it’s been a key battleground state in the last three presidential elections. Yet the Times thinks it’s extraordinary that Charlotte would host a major Democratic event?
(The Times, like the Wall Street Journal, also happens to leave out basic details of the case, such as that the officer who shot Scott was black, and that police say they confiscated a firearm from Scott after the shooting.)
Similar sins of omission were made by the Associated Press on Friday when its lengthy write up of the story, leading with the new videotape of the shooting, also failed to mention that the officer involved is black. Writers Meg Kinnard and Jonathan Drew did make sure, however, as they wrapped Charlotte into their pet narrative, to point out that the Tulsa officer charged Thursday in a police shooting is white:
Charlotte is the latest U.S. city to be shaken by protests and recriminations over the death of a black man at the hands of police, a list that includes Baltimore, Milwaukee, Chicago, New York and Ferguson, Missouri. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Thursday, prosecutors charged a white officer with manslaughter for killing an unarmed black man on a city street last week.
An op-ed published at NBC News by Heather Ann Thompson sounded almost giddy at the eruption of violence, noting that Charlotte was “waking up from the American dream,” and that Charlotte, which is not a “broken” city like Baltimore or Chicago, is finally learning about the racism that bubbled just below its surface:
Some still think that this nation is doing just fine except for those ugly pockets of poverty and segregation that routinely explode like Baltimore or Chicago. Others know better, but hope to move away from, and thus avoid addressing, the persistence of ugly racial injustice and the cries for help coming from black families.
Charlotte is their wake up call.
Even the staid Financial Times gave a one-sided account of Charlotte’s troubles, relating the basic facts of the story, but again missing the race of the Charlotte police officer. Instead, FT writers Neil Munshi and Barney Jopson (writing from New York) called the incident, simply, “the latest police shooting of a black man,” and said the “peaceful vigil” held for Scott Thursday night was for a man “killed by police.”
And while news organizations continue to print glowing biographies of Keith Scott, only local media has talked to friends and family of the officer, who told media they were praying for Vinson, too. “One of the things I wanted for him to know is that we’re here for him,” one friend told WSOC Charlotte. “Feel free to reach out to me when and if you need to. Our family, we’ll be praying for you and your family.”
