There’s a lot of news happening around the world and it’s simply not possible to cover it all. That’s understandable.

And even though some of that news is tragic, only a handful of it can possibly make the front page. I get it.

Every news outlet is (supposed to be) different and editorial decisions that include which stories to run will necessarily produce a bias. That’s fair.

Or at least it would be fair if there was even a hint of balance between the outlets. It would be fair if there was an occasionally alternative voice, if they weren’t all in lock-step, pushing forward a very obvious agenda.

Case in point: everyone remembers Treyvon Martin, the young black man whose name we’re all supposed to perennially keep on our lips, killed by a “racist white man” in Florida in on his grandmother’s front lawn after going out to buy some Skittles.

For a brief moment the media reluctantly wavered in their “racist white man” tirade when pictures of the killer began circulating. Turned out that, if anything, he was Hispanic or Latino. The story wouldn’t have been any better if Treyvon had been killed by a green Martian but the point I’m trying to make is how it was immediately spun into a “yet another racist white man kills an unarmed, innocent black child” narrative.

The brief moment was followed by renewed attempts attempts to paint George Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic“, as idiotic as that sounds. But if race is based on physical characteristics and ethnicity is based on culture and upbringing, as the increasingly absurd news kept promoting, then surely “Latino Catholic” would be far more accurate. Or since Catholicism is widely understood to have been founded in what is now Italy, maybe his ethnicity should be Italian? And since his mother is Peruvian and undoubtedly injected some of her culture into his upbringing, wouldn’t it have made sense to call him Hispanic? How about “Latino Hispanic-Italian”?

Come to think of it, it’s absurd to call someone a Latino Hispanic if they have Latino racial characteristics and Hispanic cultural roots, but this precisely the lengths that the media insist on to ensure that their narrative of a murderous “racist white Hispanic” (emphasis on “white”), is maintained.

And what kind of fucked up demarcation are we supposed to engage in to determine when someone has sufficiently “Latino” (or “Black”, or whatever), physical characteristics? Who gets to decide, and on what basis, who qualifies as predominantly black or Latino or white or Asian or Indigenous, and how is this not unbelievably racist and segregationist?

Yet this is precisely what the incoherent media demand, all so they can continue the narrative that yet another “racist white man” killed an unarmed, innocent black child.

And it was this completely false and ridiculously twisted narrative that spawned the Black Lives Movement which aims, ostensibly, to end “systemic” racism against black people, especially in the context of the police.

Except Zimmerman is neither white nor a cop. And the “stand your ground” laws that Zimmerman successfully used to get away with it aren’t mentioned at all by BLM.

But why should that matter when yet another “racist white man” kills an unarmed, innocent black boy?

Let’s contrast this against a very recent murder in North Carolina in which a 25-year-old black man walked up to a 5-year-old white boy playing in front of his house, put a gun up to his head, and literally executed him in front of his two young sisters.

The handful of US news outlets that bothered to report on this were careful to include “allegedly” in the headlines (was Zimmerman described as the “alleged” killer?), and made sure to remind their audience that the motive for the murder was unclear (flip the skin colours and it’s instantly “racism”, case closed).

Here in Toronto you won’t find a single mention of this story anywhere.

I searched CityNews, CBC News, Global News, the Toronto Star, National Post, Globe and Mail, and Toronto Sun, and although there’s an occasional article about racist (i.e. white) North Carolina cops being fired, apparently the news out of the same state of a little white boy being brutally murdered on his front lawn in front of his sisters by a black man simply isn’t worthy of even a mere mention. Is that because the victim is white or because the perpetrator is black? Maybe a little of both.

But none of this is new.

Everyone’s heard of Treyvon Martin and the immediate rage that followed his death but who’s even heard of Cannon Hinnant?

Everyone knows about George Floyd, maybe not so much about his less-than-angelic past, and who has any idea of who Timothy Coffman was? Where’s the outrage and protests for Corey West? What about Tony Timpa?

Everyone remembers Rodney King but who remembers Reginald Denny?

Due to sheer numbers, there are bound to be far more examples of these kinds of things happening to white people than to black people. The way these incidents are constantly ignored by the media, onlookers, and society in general, goes a long way in explaining why we simply don’t hear about them and why examples of such injustice, when black people are victims, flood every media channel out there.

I’m not suggesting that it’s acceptable when black people (or anyone!) are brutalized, what I’m asking is why similar incidents are nearly completely ignored when the much more numerous victims are white?

And who bothers to mention that in the US, white hate crime victims outnumber victims of anti-semitism, anti-Islamism, or anti-LGBTQ-ism, often by a large margin. The media go to great lengths to make it seem that the exact opposite is true. In fact, behind black people, white people are the second most likely group to be hated on of any racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation group — as long as every individual is considered equally.

And even though they occupy the number one position for hate crime victims, black people are only slightly less likely to be hit by lightning (0.0002% = 1 ÷ 500,000), than they are to be the victim of a hate crime (0.0007% = 2,325 ÷ 328,200,000 total US population).

The overall numbers are minuscule no matter how you look at them, yet hate crimes against everyone except white people are regularly played up in the media. Why is that?

And to what lengths will the media go to defend, justify, and “explain” violence against a white person when they would balk at even the hint of a suggestion that a black person be criticized and analyzed in the same way?

When they claim that they want to “dismantle white supremacy”, are they advocating that everyone simply be left to their own devices or that it be replaced with the dominance of another group? Has anyone bothered to ask this question?

Don’t even get me started on the constantly evolving definition of what constitutes “white privilege” which now is supposed to mean how a white person’s life isn’t made more difficult because of the colour of their skin. I can write at length on this topic with plenty of personal, first-hand experiences of exactly how my life was made more difficult specifically, directly, and very openly because I’m white (and a man). I bet plenty of other white people have similar experiences to share, at least until it’s decided to shift the definition again.

Despite the daily avalanche of examples we see demonstrating something entirely different (I’m working my way through a detailed write-up about the OHRC’s latest road apple), we’re supposed to believe that black people are being “systematically targeted for demise” (according to BLM), and being oppressed by “white supremacy” and “white privilege” everywhere.

In the words of Jeanie Bueller, “dry that one out and you can fertilize the lawn.”