-By Warner Todd Huston
Last week a newspaper in North Carolina gave its readers a perfect example of underhanded, media bias in its reporting about a woman who was arrested for voter fraud. The bias was revealed in two parts of the story. First the suspect’s party was never once mentioned — naturally she was a Democrat. And even more absurd, the story of a Democrat arrested for vote fraud was illustrated with a giant Trump-Pence campaign sign as if the criminal was a Republican Trump supporter.
The story in question was published in the Raleigh News & Observer on April 5 and told the news of a Granville County election worker who was arrested for altering records to allow convicted criminals to vote Democrat in the 2016 election.
Joy Yvette Wilkerson, of Henderson, North Carolina, was arrested for the vote fraud and faces a felony charge. The story gives all the whats, wheres, whos and whys… but leaves one tiny detail out. The suspect’s party is never once mentioned.
Unsurprisingly, Joy Yvette Wilkerson is an African American Democrat registered at 101 Cheatham Lane, Henderson, NC.
This refusal to name a suspect’s political party when they are arrested is part of a very long practice of newspapers going back decades, a practice that I started calling “name that party” when I worked for Newsbusters.com back in the mid 2000s. It is the practice where newspapers will write a story about a political person getting arrested but never mention when that suspect is a Democrat while leading the story with a party ID if the suspect is a Republican.
But this story added yet another layer of bias to their “name that party” story. Along with never bothering to mention that this vote fraud suspect is a Democrat, the story was initially published illustrated by a giant photo of a Donald Trump campaign sign.
Here is a screen shot of how the header of the story appeared below the headline when it was first published:
It wasn’t long, though, before the paper changed its web posting of the story to eliminate the Trump sign because it got so many complaints about media bias.
Nonetheless, the paper’s first inclination was to illustrate a story about Democrat voter fraud (that it wouldn’t identify as Democrat voter fraud) with a photo of a Trump campaign sign. Clearly the paper hoped that casual readers would see a headline about voter fraud coupled with a photo of a Trump campaign sign and immediately assume the criminal was a Republican Trump supporter.
It all adds up to a perfect example of liberal media bias.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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