my interpretation is that there is an emerging social problem, made worse by double standards about race in our society. Blacks (meaning those blacks who are committing these crimes) benefit from the media's preferential protections, and the public is deliberately misinformed by media outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, all of whom refuse to accurately report on the racial element of these violent crimes. The net result is that the public, of all races, is placed at greater risk as we fail to address a social problem.

Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich writes of the "quandary" faced by journalists who must decide whether to use racial identifications in crime stories. The issue was raised by readers when the Tribune failed to cite the race of a dozen teens who attacked and robbed five people on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago's toniest shopping district last Saturday. The youths were black. Readers accused the paper of political correctness and of using a double standard.

Schmich writes, "So why would a news organization avoid a fact? This fact? It's a reasonable question, even if many of the people asking it on Internet comment boards have wrapped it up in irrational, irresponsible venom. I'm ambivalent about the omission of the attackers' race in the news accounts, but I think I would have decided to leave it out too. As an editor pointed out when I asked about it, the crimes don't appear to be racially motivated. There's no sign the criminals picked victims because they were of a certain race. They picked them because they had certain stuff...Here's the quandary, for editors, for cops, for all of us: Race alone doesn't predict or explain behavior. Just because this mob was young and black hardly means that all young, black people in groups are a violent mob. Knowing the race of these attackers is no form of protection. And yet race is an aspect of what happened Saturday night."

"We do not reference race unless it is a fact that is central to telling the story. By all indication, these attacks were motivated by theft, not race. Further, there is no evidence to suggest that the victims were singled out because of their race. Therefore we did not include racial descriptions in our initial news reports."