Here is the first paragraph of a story that appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News today, with the headline “Thugs attack cabbie, passenger”:
IN A HORRIFIC assault in Center City on Saturday night, three teenagers who were spouting racial slurs pulled a man out of a cab to beat him. And when the cabdriver intervened to stop the assault, the teens turned their rage on him, police said yesterday.
Studies have shown that most readers see the headline and read the beginning of a story and then move on. What do you think the reader would take away from this story, given the way race relations have been covered in the past 20 years of politically correct newspapering?
In the next five paragraphs the reporter discusses the sequence of events in detail, the comments of the police, and the fact that the perps had been charged with aggravated assault.
Finally, in the seventh paragraph of this short story, we get this (emphasis added):
Police said the three teens were black and the cabbie and passenger were white. Police did not immediately know whether the teens would or could face hate-crime charges.
If an editor’s job is to inform, the editors at the Daily News fell down on their job here. If you know that the reader is going to think immediately that this story is about white racists and black victims, your job is an editor is to, as quickly as possible, set the record straight and avoid this confusion.
To accomplish this, I’d have moved the seventh paragraph to the second spot in the story, where it belonged.
Now, why there would be any hesitation in calling this a hate crime is another matter altogether.
