RIGHT SPEAK: Remember the Capitol Hill Killer? The Media Sure Don’t

The murder of an officer in the very center of our democracy is being treated as just some random thing that happened, all because the narrative didn’t fit.

So a crazed white nationalist fanatic professing allegiance to a notorious hate group rammed a car into a security fence on Capitol Hill, killing a black police officer and injuring another after proclaiming on social media: “The U.S. Government is the #1 enemy of white people.” And what did the media do? They yawned. Reporting the basic facts of the case, along with a short profile or two of the killer, was the limit of its interest. No in-depth exploration of his “ties” or his “radicalization” or a broad inquiry into his hateful ideology was deemed necessary. No one explored the hate group’s links to celebrities, a current senator, and even a recent president.

The above scenario did not, of course, occur. And nor could it conceivably have occurred. A white-nationalist attack on the seat of our democracy getting memory-holed after a couple of days of perfunctory coverage? Not within the realm of possibility. If this had happened, it would have been one of the biggest stories of the year. There would have been hundreds of columns written about it. There would have been long panel discussions on CNN. There would be dozens of follow-up pieces and news analyses running on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. There would have been a National Conversation on this insidious issue.

Yet an attack like the one I’ve described did happen with the racial polarity reversed, and the media lost interest after a few days. Have you forgotten? On Good Friday, Noah Green, a 25-year-old donor to and aspiring member of the Nation of Islam, which the National Archive dubs a “Black nationalist movement” and which occupies “a prominent position in the ranks of organized hate” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, killed a white police officer on Capitol Hill with his car and badly injured another officer, who was hospitalized. Green, who had written, “the U.S. Government is the #1 enemy of Black people” on Instagram and posted a link to a Nation of Islam speech entitled “The Divine Destruction of America,” then exited the vehicle with a knife and lunged toward other police officers, at which point he was shot dead.

This was no run-of-the-mill random attack, or at least that’s how it appeared at first. The assault “sent shockwaves through Washington DC,” CNN.com intoned. In an unusual joint statement, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer dubbed the slain officer, William “Billy” Evans, “a martyr for our democracy.” Mitch McConnell issued a similar statement. Presidesdent and Jill Biden sent their condolences. White House and Capitol flags were lowered to half-staff.

So this was a major national story. Or was it? The New York Times published three pieces about Green and the attack on April 2 and 3, but has since gone silent on Green. In contrast, the Times has done seven stories in the same time frame focusing on the location of MLB’s All-Star Game.

That beats CNN.com, which has run stories on the slain police officer, the attack itself, and politicians’ reactions to it, but as far as I can tell hasn’t run a single story primarily about Green himself, except for a piece that ran on its scrolling Politics Live blog. Nor has CNN explored his possible motives in any depth. Apart from the blog post, the most detail I can find about Green on CNN’s website is three paragraphs within a 25-paragraph story about Capitol Hill tensions that ran hours after the assault.

Read the rest from Kyle Smith HERE

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