Last night while watching the 11:00 news, there was a story on KATU about four black girls that had attacked a white girl on a MAX train and robbed her. I also saw items on the same story on KOIN and KGW.

From the KGW web site:

A 16-year-old girl’s ethnicity may have been the reason why she was beaten and robbed at a Portland Max train stop Thursday.

Detectives said the girl’s attackers targeted her because she was white.

Following the alleged attack Thursday afternoon, Portland police arrested four girls between the ages of 13 and 16.

They have been charged with assault, robbery and intimidation.

The suspects are all African-American.

Police said the girls attacked and robbed the 16-year-old victim at the Lloyd Center Max train stop around 4 p.m. Thursday.

“They set out to rob someone,” said Portland Police Bureau spokesman Sgt. Brian Schmautz, “And they told detectives they chose this victim because she was white.”

KOIN also had the story (for some reason KATU does not have the story on their site, even though it was a lead story on their broadcast).

In addition, KATU also reported on a similar attack that happened on Wednesday (1/10/07) on N. Williams. Two white women were
riding their bikes home from work, and as they went by a bus stop on Williams, they were attacked by three white women. They interviewed the two women, who showed their injuries from the attack.

Guess which local major media outlet completely ignored the story? If you guessed the Dead Fish Wrapper, you guessed correctly! Not one mention of the story at all in Friday's (1/12) or Saturday's (1/13) paper. It happened at about 4:00 PM on Thursday, so there certainly is no excuse that it happened too quickly for them to get it published by now.

Now all this begs the question; what if this had been white girls attacking a black girl? I can only imagine the outrage that would be spilled all over the front page. You would have the hypocritical black "community leaders" up in arms about this (the Kendra James and James Perez incidents come to mind), raving on about racism and how blacks are so mistreated, and the editorial board writing about how we need to deal with this racism.

But because this is an attack of a while girl by a black girls, it obviously isn't even worth mentioning.

Another interesting thing to consider is that the Fish Wrapper doesn't even have an excuse for not putting this on the front page. As written in the Editor's Blog:

How do stories get chosen for the front page?

In general, The Oregonian's front page tends to favor local news, information that was not already available on the national news the night before and exclusive enterprise by our staff journalists.

This is especially true of the Sunday edition - the one that will carry the best of our news enterprise.

Here is the way Michael Arrieta-Walden, a former public editor, described our thinking:

Local stories over national or international ones. In the past 10 years, local stories have come to dominate the front page because editors see them as The Oregonian's franchise. The aftermath of Sept. 11 has changed that emphasis slightly, as editors always consider developments in the war in Iraq for the front page and look for stories about the economy.

Importance and significance of the story to readers. Several editors say they know many readers consider the front page to be a signal from the newspaper about what is most important, and so hold those stories to a higher standard of significance.

Staff enterprise and investigations over the spot story of the day. If the newspaper's own reporting can give readers new insight or break ground on a subject, editors usually will choose that over a crime story that will likely lead television news or can essentially be told in a headline. Given broadcast media, the newspaper strives to anticipate events or provide context or a different angle on developments that readers might have heard about the day before.

So this is a local story, and it would seem to be pretty important, but not only does it not merit something on the front page, it doesn't even merit a story at all?

Of course, it is also competing with the storyabout the Portland firefighters that got into a physical confrontation with a bystander, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be a mention of the story somewhere.

This all just goes to show the hypocrisy and reverse racism of the Fish Wrapper; it's important to publish stories of white on black crime, but they just choose to ignore black on white crime.

Update: They finally published a story on Sunday (1/14)- buried on page B7 of the Metro section.

Officer Catherine Kent, a Portland Police Bureau spokeswoman, said detectives concluded the girls had singled out a white victim after interviews with witnesses, the victim and the girls themselves. Black-on-white bias crimes are rare, Kent said.

And apparently, black-on-white bias crimes are not worth reporting on or getting excited about, either.