This is the lede on a story in The Indianapolis Star today:
Elected officials and leaders from the city’s black community this morning called for and received an apology over racially offensive comments posted in an online forum in The Indianapolis Star this week.
It gets worse:
“We demand a public apology from The Indianapolis Star,” Crawford said, “not to us but to a community that has strived to celebrate diversity.”
Peterson said he stood on the same site eight years ago and called for a new dialogue about race in the city.
“It seems that today the Internet has become the rallying place for today’s haters, for racists,” Peterson said. “The impact of racism can be devastating.”
The criticism of the newspaper stemmed from an editorial columnist’s online discussion board posting, known as a blog, that criticized City-County Council President Monroe Gray.
The blog referred to Gray and other city Democrats using language that both the Star’s editor and elected officials called offensive and unacceptable.
So, some racist white editorial writer let his true feelings show on a blog. Not so fast, multiculti breath. It turns out that the editorial writer using the racist language was black, but you’d never know it from the story in the very paper for which he worked.
Newspapers agonize over when to mention race in a news story. The white guilt of lily-white newsrooms is simply palpable. But I would suggest that this is certainly a story that warranted a race identification, at least on “man bites dog” grounds.
