New York Post images of an alleged white supremacist murderer and his victim. Guess which one the tabloid described as a “career criminal”?
According to police, white 28-year-old Maryland man James Harris Jackson took a Bolt bus up to New York City Friday for the express purposes of killing black men and did just that, stabbing 66-year-old Timothy Caughman in Hell’s Kitchen Monday night. Police say the suspect, an ex-military member of a white supremacist hate group, asked police to arrest him, warning he would attack again if they didn’t.
Reading media reports of the incident, however, one would hardly know which of the two men was the cold-blooded killer and which was the victim. The New York Daily News (3/22/17)—which has a history of smearing black suspects simply on the say-so of the NYPD (FAIR.org, 5/2/16)—felt the need to mention the black victim’s prior, wholly irrelevant police record (emphasis added):
Coughman lived in transitional housing on West 36th Street that serves people with HIV/AIDS. Praxis Housing Initiatives holds a contract with the city. He has 11 prior arrests, including for marijuana, assault, resisting arrest and menacing.
What, one might ask, does this have to do with anything? The reader is provided with no indication of Jackson’s criminal record, or whether there was any attempt to find it out, but somehow the rap sheet of the murder victim was primed and ready to go.
Daily News reporters Rocco Parascandola, Graham Rayman and Thomas Tracy also all-lives-matter the hate crime by inserting a non sequitur case of a black man driving up from Baltimore more than two years ago to kill cops:
In December 2014, Ismaaiyl Brinsley traveled to the city from Baltimore and assassinated Police Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were in the car near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Brinsley had made anti-police statements on social media prior to the murders.
This is a bizarre journalistic choice that appears to be some kind of attempt at “balancing” the coverage, suggesting that there could be a bit of score-settling going on: Yes, this black man was senselessly murdered by a white supremacist, but some other black guy killed cops two-and-a-half years ago, so….
The New York Post (3/21/15) would do one better, turning Coughman—again, let’s remember, the victim of a heinous, gratuitous hate crime—into the bad guy:
Caughman, who has 11 prior arrests, walked for about a block after the stabbing and staggered into the Midtown South Precinct, looking for help. He died hours later after being rushed to a nearby hospital.
Police sources said the career criminal was refusing to talk to police about the incident and acting combative before his death.
A homeless man is fatally stabbed by a Nazi with a 26-inch sword, simply because of the color of his skin, and the Post insists on calling him a “career criminal,” and accuses him of “acting combative” to police right before he had the audacity to bleed to death.
The bizarre inclusion of the victim’s criminal record probably explains why an AOL News report (3/22/17) based on the Daily News article mistakenly attributed the priors to the person who is actually accused of the crime:
Jackson has 11 prior arrests, including for marijuana, assault, resisting arrest and menacing, according to New York Daily News.
It’s an understandable mistake–after all, we typically discuss the criminal pasts of suspects, not victims.
It’s not uncommon, though, for the media to dredge up the unrelated pasts of black victims. An August 2014 New York Times profile of Michael Brown, who was shot and killed two weeks prior by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson, infamously insisted he “was no angel,” despite no one ever insisting that he—or any other human—was. When the LAPD shot and killed homeless man Charly “Africa” Keunang, local media, as FAIR noted at the time (3/4/15), rushed to bring up all his prior bad acts and plaster his mug shot all over their websites:
The LA Times digs up irrelevant dirt on a homeless man killed by the LAPD.
The Washington Post (4/29/15) helped smear Freddie Gray after he was killed by the Baltimore Police Department, insisting in a since-discredited and corrected story that Gray had caused his own injuries.
It’s unclear why editors and reporters can’t resist the impulse to bring up black victims’ irrelevant prior bad acts. Given the frequency of this trope in corporate media, the effect—regardless of intent—is one of racist smear.
UPDATE: Daily News reporter Aidan McLaughlin’s byline was removed from the piece in question after this post was published. McLaughlin said on Twitter that neither the suspect nor the victim had been identified at the time he wrote the original short item the article was based on. The reporters now mentioned in the post now are the ones whose bylines are currently on the article.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. You can find him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
Another separate problem with the NY Post writing “11 prior arrests” is the implication (incorrect) that police arrested the murder victim for what would have been his 12th arrest.
Yep, the NY Post is racist.
I see they’ve done away with the comments on web articles.
They have done away with the comments because they don’t want anyone to point out their obvious racism.
@Donald:
And the comments on the NY Post website, even once one had to log into Facebook to post, trended toward violent white power types.
While the underlying racism is palpable, I’m still wondering why the number of arrests was “reported” while no mention was made of convictions. Since Giuliani was first Mayor, the police have made the lives of the poor and homeless miserable with stop-and-frisks, area sweeps of homeless based on phony assault, resisting arrest and who knows? maybe even “menacing,” often with no charges brought against them. When they’re released, there’s a new entry in their “record” that can be used in the announcement of the person’s death.
We’re not in Kansas, anymore.
And it turns out this guy was not homeless.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/nyregion/james-harris-jackson-timothy-caughman.html
Not rich or anything.
This is just sickening to read. I hope there are many other whites, besides me, getting just sick of this kind of reporting. As if a black men has no right to be angry with police, as if anyone’s rap sheet has ANYTHING at all to do with getting murdered. Did this racist, nujtjob white guy go after this poor black man BECAUSE of his rap sheet of petty (sounds like) crime? If not, stop feeding the white racists!
I cannot help but think there’s going to be more of this insanity with who is now running our country. This man was a human being. He was killed by some other ignorant, hateful white man. But, too many out there don’t believe that yet.
This is just sickening to read. I hope there are many other whites, besides me, getting just sick of this kind of reporting. As if a black men has no right to be angry with police, as if anyone’s rap sheet has ANYTHING at all to do with getting murdered. Did this racist, nutjob white guy go after this poor black man BECAUSE of his rap sheet of petty (sounds like) crime? If not, stop feeding the white racists!
I cannot help but think there’s going to be more of this insanity with who is now running our country. This man was a human being. He was killed by some other ignorant, hateful white man. But, too many out there don’t believe that yet.
Join me in my boycott of the Washington Post.
The killer looks a bit like Ted Cruz. Just sayin.
I have 11 prior arrests – and 2 prior convictions both over 10 years ago both for marijuana possession.
But I am white so hey bitter uptight racist agitators at the NY Post and NY Daily News, if I got murdered are you going to call me a career criminal?
I have 11 prior arrests – and 2 prior convictions both over 10 years ago both for marijuana possession.
But I am white so hey bitter uptight racist agitators at the NY Post and NY Daily News, if I got murdered are you going to call me a career criminal?
It should be noted that the racist NY Daily News has updated their text and removed their slander about the 11 prior arrests. Maybe they realized they were lying, who knows. The NY Daily News did not remove the irrelevant mention of the murder of officer Liu and Ramos, but other than that they changed the text to be not so much a vilification of the victim. The racist NY Post did not clean up their article at all, which makes sense because the NY Post is far more arrogantly and passively-openly racist.
This is typical of the New York Daily News and the New York Post. As a native New Yorker, I grew up with both the News and the Post. The Post changed when it was bought by Rupert M. It became very antagonistic towards the African American Community. The Daily News, at one time, reported the news without the added commentary. That has changed over the years. I used to buy the Daily News when I lived in Syracuse, NY just to keep tabs on what was happening in the City. I now live in Maryland. I stopped buying the Daily News when I noticed a change in their reporting.
News media get more information from cops if the media treat them with kid gloves. The result is that they are free PR agents for the cops, and not journalists, but journalism is mostly dead in the mainstream media anyway.
It’s a hoax. None of these mass media stories are true. Crisis actors used, foment racial strife, hatred.
If you’re going that route, this whole darned “existence” is scripted. Sometimes, I wish I could just be an extra, but I keep being cast in supporting actress roles. True to the hologram though, I perform. I feel so Manchurian, boxed and hungry for enmeshment with the universe. But this projected “reality” takes all prisoners. It’s like in 1984 or Brave New World: the reader knows that the work is fiction, but the characters are never privy to such objectivity.
How’s your MA – Truckstop Tillie?
Richard:
So the mass media story that Trump is president is untrue?
I think you meant to type something else, and that something was totally inapplicable here. Begins with “mass…
Just another day in paradise. Mr. Caughman is free now. May God Bless his soul. The demonic racist nature of whites is a curse upon humanity.
And to make matters worse: Mr Caughman was not transitioning from being homeless, he just happened to have lived in residential hotel for 20 years that is now used to house formerly homeless people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/nyregion/james-harris-jackson-timothy-caughman.html
So it’s not okay to bring up his criminal record. It’s not okay to bring up Trayvon punched Zimmerman first. It’s not okay to bring up Mike Brown attacked that store clerk. But everytime I bring up Yankel Rosenbaum’s lynching I get told “the Jews started it” by referring to a car accident caused by a Jewish man hours earlier in which a black child died. The Crown Heights Pogrom happened over 25 years ago and Jews are still blamed for this black racist mob violence. Where is the objection to that?
It’s irrelevant, not “not okay”. He was murdered in cold blood, not for his past arrests, but for the colour of his skin. Both are facts, but one has nothing to do with the other. Whether “Trayvon” punched Zimmerman first is not a fact but a contention of Zimmerman as there were not witnesses, and is completely irrelevant to this article. Your other fixations and obsessions have nothing to do with this article or the event it refers to, or the media smears being talked about. You are complaining that an article about a murder and how it was covered by complaining that it doesn’t address your obessions, which makes you a narcissist, like Trump.
Thank you, Brian, for your cogent response to tara. Nicely put.
yo what the fuck are you talking about? these deaths are all unrelated with unique circumstances but you see them as elements of some bizarre tit-for-tat system. you’re an hysterical, irrational person, please be more cognizant before posting, or really just don’t post at all.
wow corporate media what a bunch of wastes of inks. chain,chain, chain, chain of literally fools. great mythbusting as always Adam, FAIR and AlterNet were smart to hire you :)