The abuse of whites in the mainstream media is a depressingly routine–and unchecked–affair. For years, characters like Mark Potok have gone unanswered and unchallenged as go-to sources on “hate.” But there’s more to the story than what the “watchdog” groups have to say, and two journalists have noticed.

Louis Andrews, a spokesman for the National Policy Institute, a white advocacy group, was included in an Australian radio broadcast (alongside Potok) and an Associated Press story on reaction to the Holocaust Museum shooting.

(“There’s no such thing as post-racial” is about as refreshing a quote as I’ve heard in a long time.)

It’s about time. Of course, for the willing journalist, there are plenty of white voices (both professional and otherwise) out there who might have a good quote about immigration, affirmative action and other issues facing them. Why not include them in your stories?

Like many others, I was surprised by the Department of Justice’s decision to drop charges against Black Panther members who paraded menacingly outside a polling place in Philadelphia. As the Washington Times writes, imagine Ku Klux Klansmen doing the same thing, and the antics that would ensue.

But I found a small clue that could explain prosecutors’ priorities. In the front of a “continuing legal education” publication of the Pennsylvania Bar Institute on “hate crimes” (not online), federal prosecutor Nancy Beam Winter submits a helpful cheat sheet titled “Interview Topics for Subjects/Friends of Subjects in Hate Crime Investigations”.

In two short pages, Ms. Winter packs enough politically troubling questions to bother Nat Hentoff, Camille Paglia, Ron Paul, George Orwell and probably a host of others. What are your views on racial separation? she wants to know. What do you think of affirmative action? she wants to know. Do you think blacks work less hard than whites? (Would it matter if they truly didn’t?)

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the questions are all aimed at “neo-Nazis” or “skinheads”. There were no questions for a Black Panther.

“You need to get them talking” Ms. Winter tells other would-be prosecutors, in a passage sure to gladden the hearts of criminal defense lawyers and civil libertarians everywhere. The questions themselves don’t quell concerns that “hate crimes” are 1) meant to target whites, and only whites and 2) end up criminalizing politically incorrect thought and speech instead of illegal actions.

I remember from law school that the “selective prosecution” defense is almost impossible to make out. But a federal defender in Philadelphia might make this cheat sheet Exhibit A in the next attempt.

Set in the midst of mostly-white Central Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, the state capital, is about 55 percent black. It was once known as the second most-distressed city in America. That was before Stephen R. Reed, a white man, assumed the mayoralty in 1982, and by most accounts, righted it.

On Tuesday, Reed, known as “Mayor for Life,” lost the Democratic primary to a black woman, city council president Linda Thompson.

I followed the developments through the Harrisburg Patriot-News, which announced in an editorial this morning that Reed lost because he lacked “transparency.”

I scoured the other coverage, and saw only the barest mention of race. I saw no discussion of how Reed, an award-winning mayor, was screwing things up — even from Thompson. I saw no discussion of how Thompson planned to run the city better. Most of the coverage lamely lobbed that the upset was a surprise.

Really? On the heels of the election of Barack Obama and in the face of an energized black electorate, this was a surprise?

For an acknowledgment that race played a role (and specifics on Reed’s sins, if any), you had to be reading the much bigger Philadelphia Inquirer.

It may well have been that with a white mayor interested in western-themed museums and a black woman calling for “change”, black voters didn’t agonize over how to vote. But the Patriot-News, following a media pattern I’ve come to expect, avoided the racial angle completely. The theme of the coverage was a that “man” who served for a long time was defeated by a “woman” on the city council. Wow!

As the newspaper industry dies, its defenders like to say that we need the smaller newspapers to expose local political corruption. But how probing that press is when it can’t identify such a crucial political reality makes me doubt that watchdog’s eyesight.

On a Google search for something unrelated, I was surprised discover that the world’s slavery reparations demander-in-chief–and notorious America-quitter–has slinked back into the states and is quietly cozied up as a “distinguished scholar in residence” at Penn State University’s Dickinson School of Law.

Randall Robinson, author of “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks” (wild guess: roughly what Barack Obama had in mind when he complained that the civil rights courts didn’t go far enough) also wrote “Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land“. America is just so confoundedly racist, you see, that poor Randall couldn’t breathe. So he needed to kick back on St. Kitts.

But I guess if a law school dangles some easy money in your face, you can brave the stifling presence of America’s whites for a semester. If he’s really doing any “distinguished scholarship”… here he is last month protesting the deportation of Haitians in New York.

Pennsylvanians, your tax dollars at work.

I remember the chuckle I had reading Peter Brimelow’s account of telephone calls to the Indian Embassy to see what it took to get Indian citizenship in Alien Nation (you’ve got to be Indian, of course).

That spirit continues in the Indian bar, a prominent member of which is outraged at the notion that foreign lawyers would be allowed to practice there:Legal Profession in India Not “Up For Sale,” Lawyer Writes, April 2, 2009,

The American Bar Association, meanwhile, has given its stamp of approval to legal outsourcing. This means that not only can you have your computer helpline operator speak to you in a thick Indian accent over a scratchy distant line, you can now get… document review summaries in a thick Indian accent over a scratchy distant line.

Once again, America dismantles the bricks of its own wall while other nations scoop them up.

Hat tip, Above the Law.

Beneath the dry data on mortgage defaults, I suspect you’d find exactly the kind of stuff unearthed by New Yorker writer Tad Friend as he accompanied a foreclosure realtor on his rounds in Southern California: Letter from California, “Cash for Keys,” The New Yorker, April 6, 2009, p. 34

Non-English speakers, Nigerians squatters, and dwellers of any race who leave dried feces in toilets and other charming housewarming items. Not exactly the “blue-eyed bankers” that world leaders want to pin blame on (though the realtor declares that stubborn “white rednecks” are a problem for him, and I can see where he’s coming from there). Something tells me that the anecdotes in this New Yorker article are just scratching the surface–you’d find a lot more of the same if you kept digging.

It’s this kind of shoe-leather, knock-on-the-door journalism that rounds out the pictures of our world, and I commend Mr. Friend for leaving the good stuff in there. Too bad Barney Frank couldn’t go along.

Driving to work the other day, I heard a remarkable ad on the radio for Cabot cheese (click on “Cheddars Are The Same“)

The interviewer poses a series of questions: “All women are the same.” “All nationalities are the same.” And so on. The interviewees respond that of course, not all these things are the same. And neither, says the interviewer, is our delicious cheddar cheese, which is clearly better than the other brands!

Advertising has always fascinated me, and I suspect that sometimes ad men sometimes sneak a little subervision into their pitches. Yes, most advertising today is solidly politically correct, with improbably racially mixed groupings, the clueless white man who needs to be straightened out by the cool black woman, and so on. But other stuff, like the GEICO cavemen, is hilarious.

And this exception, from an apprently Ben-and-Jerry’s like cheese concern, was deliciously sharp. Is someone on Madison Avenue starting to question “equality”?

From my time as a journalism student and newspaper reporter, I can vouch for Peter Gadiel’s description of the “corporate gypsies” who populate the profession. Working for small-town newspapers was seen as a way to get “real” experience until you worked your way up to bigger papers — and, for the lucky, talented (or black) few, The New York Times. In other words, suffer these patriotic hicks for a while, then get out of town.

A few years back (and maybe still), unknowns (i.e., people who hadn’t won Pulitzers or gone to Yale) had to apply through an African-American woman named Sheila Rule to beg for a job at the Times.

Needless to say, Ms. Rule’s rule probably didn’t help white applicants much.

I share some of Mr. Gadiel’s happiness about the death of newspapers. Yes, they are evil, and they are supreme sinners on the topic of immigration. What I find amusing is that the open borders they champion are likely hastening their death: immigrants don’t read newspapers, and if they do, it’s one in their native language.

The profile of your average newspaper reader today is probably old and white — and much less liberal than the producers of the product. Thanks in part to the Sex in the City attitude the papers promote, new whites aren’t replacing old whites. There is something particularly delicious about newspapers’ own hatreds helping to bring them down.

Even the Washington Times (Vdare.com readers will recall it fired Sam Francis), which I understand to be a big money-loser, is slipping further into irrelevance with the hiring as editor of a weasel named John Solomon who’s said to be enforcing political correctness in coverage.

But I can’t be completely enthusiastic about the death of newspapers. Atrocious politics aside, newspapers are a great joy to me, and a part of what made the once-great America great. The written word, carefully crafted, is a high point in a civilization. As we descend into Third World madness (ever notice how newspaper boxes aren’t found in ghettos, and increasingly, suburbs?), we’re losing that.

The Internet is great. But somehow, it doesn’t replace the warmth of a newspaper, big town or little town. I should point out that there some fundamentally conservative things about newspapers: they (can) hold officials accountable, tell of local sports, deaths, births and marriages, bounce around the latest controversy, and, horror of horrors, enforce community norms. And the thing’s on paper. Unlike fleeting ones and zeroes on our screens, it’s got some tangibility.

The death of newspapers is a part of the death of America. On a personal level, that’s painful to me, because I’m forced to watch whites being sharply shoved aside to make room for the sprawling Idiocracy our country is literally becoming. I put newspaper death in the same category as “Press One for English,” a president whose preacher damns America, illegal alien gatherings at 7-11, the “diversity recession” and all the rest.

So while the thought of America-hating journalists out of work makes me smile, the bigger picture is a little sadder.

Back when I lived in New York, I remember seeing the national debt clock in Times Square, with its constantly flipping numbers — and the vague feeling of helplessness they created.

I was reminded of it today. Court had me sitting in an administrative law judge’s office for the entire morning. The “pro-se“, or do-it-yourself, litigant had burned up another morning a few months back by declaring, at the end of the proceedings, that she wanted an interpreter for her particular Middle Eastern language.

So, we were back again today. The interpreter was there, on the taxpayer dime. Only this time, toward the beginning of the proceedings, the litigant declared that she wanted a lawyer. The judge wasn’t pleased, but allowed for another hearing. The judge asked why lawyer-hiring couldn’t have been attended to earlier, and litigant explained that she had been in her particular Middle Eastern country for most of the time.

So, two whole mornings of wasted time, all paid for by American consumers and taxpayers. This litigant’s citizenship status wasn’t clear, but even as a full citizen, she’s imposed on the rest of us a cost because of her inability to understand English (and demonstrated that she’s not exactly fully committed to living in the United States).

My experience won’t make the news. But things like this happen every day, all day, in many places across America. Maybe what we need, to drive home the point, is a clock that measures all these costs.

Early this month, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a death sentence that dates back to 1988. The defendant claimed that the prosecutor, Jack McMahon, had, contrary to the rule in Batson v. Kentucky, stricken black jurors on racial grounds alone. [Justices OK Juror Challenges Involving Prosecutor From Controversial Training Tape By Amaris Elliott-Engel, The Legal Intelligencer, August 5, 2008]

The journalist and her favorite in the fight, death row inmate Robin Cook, were excited by McMahon’s having been taped giving advice on how to skirt Batson. This advice from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, in varying forms, is circulated in the law schools as an example of naughtiness, although I remember my own unfailingly liberal professors being pretty blase about it (the ones who had practiced law, anyway). And the actual remarks are nuanced: older black men from the South, for instance, are preferable because they’re more conservative and likely to convict.

But a few points. One, any attorney who’s ever tried a case, civil or criminal, in any place in America with more than one race, knows the reality on the ground: blacks and other minorities are likely to side with plaintiffs and criminal defendants, and whites (and to some extent, Asians) side with civil defendants and prosecutors. It’s so blindingly obvious that most attorneys, regardless of their personal political views, will agree to this.

One supervising attorney years ago said his own Jewish mother wouldn’t vote for his client (a frequent civil defendant), even if he were defending the case. In areas where the jury pool is predominately black, that fact alone can be the biggest driver of a personal injury case’s value, especially when the plaintiff is black. A plaintiff’s attorney with the ubiquitous Hispanic injury victim once told me, as the case languished without settling, “Well, I’ll just have to hope I get some sympathetic Hispanics on the jury.”

Which brings me to my second point. The rule in Batson is that a trial lawyer can’t strike a potential juror for solely — or perhaps even partly — racial reasons. In other words, “Oh, I see that Juror No. 3 is black” is not a lawful reason for striking him. There must be a “race-neutral” reason, like, his brother’s in jail, so he’s not likely to side with police and prosecutors.

But presumably, Batson would not prohibit keeping a juror solely for racial reasons. As in, “Juror No. 2 is Hispanic, and so’s my plaintiff, so I’ll scramble to keep him on.” (It does prevent striking white jurors solely for being white, and a former colleague was said to have brought up several “reverse Batsons”). Does this square with the spirit of “race doesn’t matter” said to inform these issues? Isn’t the “keeping attorney” engaging in the same racial generalizations as the striking attorney? Wouldn’t consistency require barring all profit from racial generalizations? Ah, well, not when the beneficiaries are black or Hispanic, you see.

As a sub-point, note that these challenges typically come up when there’s a black criminal defendant, which means that black criminal defendants have an attenuated right to a jury of as many fellow blacks as possible (courts will deny that anyone has this right, but it’s a practical result of Batson games). Do whites benefit as often, either as criminal defendants themselves, or members of society at large? Probably not, and one wonders how sympathetic white jurors are to white criminal defendants, anyway.

As another sub-point, note how nobody in any of these dramas ever questions the reality of race, a point so satisfyingly noted in Race: The Reality of Human Differences, by Sarich and Miele. I suppose a prosecutor in a jam might retort, “Well, your honor, given that various authorities have declared that ‘race does not exist,’ I think the burden switches to the defense to show that the juror I struck was actually black.”

And keep noting: the assumption that a black juror is likely to be sympathetic to a black defendant is never questioned by lawyers or the courts, who, as Sarich and Miele observe, would be expected to question anything even remotely questionable. (Nobody ever questions this in Voting Rights Act cases, either.)

Some reformers, mindful of these games, have suggested getting rid of “peremptory” (no explanation required) juror challenges altogether, which is worth considering. But the Batson batty-ness is yet another example of the way in which we can’t, in fact, all “just get along.”