Your thoughts on the paper’s decision to keep quiet about the attack?
Two white reporters beaten by a group of 30 black teens & the paper doesn’t write it for 2 weeks? Confused ht.ly/aDhVg (@romenesko)
— Sarah Pulliam Bailey (@spulliam) May 1, 2012
“Editors hesitated to assign a story about their own employees,” writes Virginian-Pilot editorial writer Michelle Washington. “Would it seem like the paper treated its employees differently from other crime victims?”
[The two reporters'] story has not, until today, appeared in this paper. The responding officer coded the incident as a simple assault, despite their assertions that at least 30 people had participated in the attack. A reporter making routine checks of police reports would see “simple assault” and, if the names were unfamiliar, would be unlikely to write about it.
I’ve invited editor Denis Finley to comment the paper’s editorial decision. (I just received an out-of-office reply from Finley. I’ve now emailed managing editor Maria Carrillo.)
UPDATE: Here is the managing editor’s response:
As Shelly noted in her column, we handled this situation as if it involved any two people in our community. Police, at this point, still have it officially listed as a “simple assault.” It has not been determined that this was a hate crime. It’s beyond ludicrous for folks to assume that we would not report on this to protect those who attacked our reporters.
* A beating at Church and Brambleton
Clearly, no crime was committed because they were white people being beaten. If it were blacks, well, that would have been above the fold, front page…
Denis Finley is about as overmatched as an editor can be. It will be interesting to see how he explains this one.
I understand the reservation about “covering our own,” but this is one case where that often-acceptable norm does not apply.
If any person in a community is beaten by a mob, and the cop who responds is so burned out as to shrug it off, that’s news. Period. The conflicts of interest are very easy to manage in that situation, especially at a paper the size of the Virginian-Pilot (recent layoffs-to-profit-greedy-execs notwithstanding).
Sorry about that, Jim. The post from “anonymous” above is from me — I forgot to fill out the fields.
Just don’t want to be posting as a gutless coward.
Or a gutless, racist coward like Rick above.
If they knew about this (which clearly they did), it *is* indefensible. If it happened to other people and they heard about it, they would have pursued it.
I also think there are serious police issues if a car window being basked in and two people being beaten up is a “simple assault.”
Umm, Vince, Rick was being sarcastic.
Another fictional comment from Bizarro World:
Ben Bradlee: “The cops told us it was just a small-time burglary over at the Watergate. How were we to know different?”
“Police, at this point, still have it officially listed as a ‘simple assault.’ It has not been determined that this was a hate crime.”
in other words, until police tell us it’s a story, we won’t report it. and we can’t conduct our own investigation.
wow.
It’s crazy that people they pay to report say one thing happened to them and the cops say otherwise … and so that’s that.
Any beating of innocent people at the hands of a mob is news, Virgininan-Pilot,
Sorry for the typo: Virginian-Pilot.
The people who expect actual journalism from the Virginian-Pilot will need to live with disappointment.
Denis Finley’s response is almost as worthless as I expected.
Maurice A Jones, publisher at the VP since 2008, just left to be Obama’s Deputy Secretary of HUD. Can’t embarrass the homefront.
Martin — That’s not Denis Finley’s response; it’s the managing editors.
Go back to Fox News numbskulls above.