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Thursday, November 28, 2013

Criminal Justice Quote: Knockout Game a Non Story for The New York Times

     The New York Times has discovered that the media panic over the "knockout game"--in which primarily black youths engage in random, violent, racist attacks against mostly white victims--is just a product of "fear sown by reports" that "may have racial roots."

     In " 'Knockout Game' a Spreading Menace or a Myth," a...story from Saturday's paper [November 24, 2013], reporter Cara Buckley, with the help of two other credited journalists, reports that "police officials in several cities where such attacks have been reported said that the 'game' amounted to little more than an urban myth, and that the attacks in question might be nothing more than the sort of random assaults that have always occurred"… However, the paper's record on other seeming trends is an unbroken tissue of credulous reporting about alarming phenomena that did not stand up to close scrutiny…[Racially motivated church burnings, crack babies, killer bees, global warming, etc.]

     According to a journalistic rule of thumb, three examples of any phenomenon are enough to constitute a trend. "If there ever was an urban myth, this was it," a Jersey City [New Jersey] police spokesperson told the Times' Buckley when asked about the knockout game.

Tim Cavanaugh, The Daily Caller, November 25, 2013


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