Racism-in-Media 101: The Omaha World-Herald’s Disgraceful Reporting on a White Supremacist’s Murder of an Unarmed BLM Protestor
“If it bleeds, it leads,” goes local media’s mantra for news-coverage priorities. But is all spilt blood equal?
According to studies summarized by The Sentencing Project, today’s reporting “exaggerates crime rates and exhibits both quantitative and qualitative racial biases.”
Alleged black perpetrators are disproportionately likely to be shown in mug shots and under police custody than their white counterparts.
Black-on-white victimization constitutes just 10% of actual crime reports, but 42% of televised cases.
Statistically, the media at once “exaggerates black crime while downplaying black victimization,” among other troubling data-driven findings.
“Given that the public widely relies on mass media as its source of knowledge about crime and crime policy, these disparities have important consequences,” The Sentencing Project warns.
These consequences are on full display in Omaha media’s race-slanted coverage of Jake Gardner’s murder of James Scurlock.
By now nearly one-million people have read my Facebook posts and Medium articles on this topic. No one has disputed a single fact in any of them. The following is established:
(1) Jake Gardner is openly and notoriously racist. His bars have white-supremacy symbols baked into their logos, scores of people have made public allegations of personally experiencing acts of racism at Jake’s bars and by Jake, and an eyewitness heard Jake’s father, Dave, barking the n-word into the BLM crowd shortly before Jake shot and killed James Scurlock. A decades-long Gardner relative recalls hearing Dave and family saying “horrendous things” about what they’d do to race-rioting minorities if given the chance.
(2) That chance came on May 30, 2020, during Omaha’s BLM protest following the killing of George Floyd. Dave and Jake came downtown with guns, and they initiated and provoked every violence-escalating act leading up to Scurlock’s death. After hurling racial expletives, Dave pushed a girl in the crowd, twice, without cause; when someone finally pushed Dave back, Jake — who’d previously called Black Lives Matter “a terrorist organization” — bypassed white protesters, pulled his gun, and picked a fight with black protesters, according to multiple witnesses.
(3) Every single witness I’ve spoken with believes Jake’s shooting of James was murder. No one who was actually there — *no one* — believes Jake acted in self-defense. Remember: James Scurlock only jumped in after the first intervenor — a 19-year-old woman, who feared Jake was an active shooter — tried and failed to disarm him.
This should all be astonishing. But if you scoured the Omaha World-Herald from cover-to-cover every day since May 30, you wouldn’t know any of this.
You would know, however, that 45 minutes before his death Scurlock vandalized a downtown building: He “hoisted an office chair and, using both arms, hurled it into two computer monitors, then ripped what appears to be a phone from a desk and chucked it against a wall.” (World-Herald, June 1) You’d be well-versed in the fact that days before his death, Scurlock used cocaine and methamphetamine — even though, according to medical experts, he was not under their influence on May 30. (World-Herald, June 27) We know this because County Attorney Don Kleine — the same man who called a reporter’s inquiry into Jake Gardner’s criminal history “a loaded question” but mentioned James Scurlock’s vandalism three times during his June 1 press conference — released James’s autopsy and toxicology results to the World-Herald. (Jake, the shooter, was never even drug-tested.)
My friend Matt Savener is a former World-Herald editor who now works for Medium. He reached out to the World-Herald’s Executive Editor, Randy Essex, imploring the state’s flagship paper to cover personal, family, and eyewitness accounts corroborating Jake Gardner’s violent racism.
Essex’s response is sickening: Deeming “relevant” Scurlock’s criminal history and his “smashing [of] computers . . . before the shooting” even though this information is actually, legally, irrelevant; relaying what he admits are unverified reports that Scurlock threw a rock at The Hive’s window (this is false); and dodging Savener’s persistent requests for a straightforward explanation why the World-Herald is not reporting on (1) Jake’s well-established racism, and (2) eyewitness reports refuting Jake’s self-defense claim. Essex’s cryptic, non-responsive answer: “I think people need to choose their heroes and narratives carefully.”
This is Racism-in-Media 101: Dehumanizing the black victim by shoveling-on evidence of past, irrelevant-to-the-homicide mistakes; all while conveniently and inexplicably ignoring damning, readily-available, highly-relevant-to-the-homicide evidence of the white killer’s motive for targeting, provoking, and shooting an unarmed black man during a BLM protest.
So many of you have asked what you can do to pursue #JusticeForJames. Here’s one concrete step: Call or email Randy Essex today. (randy.essex@owh.com, 402.444.1182)
Ask Essex why the World-Herald spills so much ink giving detailed play-by-plays on the black man’s computer-smashing episode and the chemical contents of his dead, autopsied body, but won’t whisper a word about the white killer’s established history of violence and racism.
Ask Essex: Is all spilt blood equal?
