News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Tues. Sept. 2, 2014: Is it racist or simply stupid that five shootings in Brooklyn that occurred in the wee hours of Monday morning were automatically linked by white-owned media entities in New York City to the West Indian American Day Carnival?
The carnival, the largest in North America which draws a large percentage of black Caribbean immigrants annually for the past 47 years, kicked off at 11 a.m. yesterday at Schenectady and Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, NY. But shootings that occurred at 3:30 a.m. and 4:45 a.m., respectively, were quickly linked to the Carnival.
PIX 11 via the AP ran a story that began with the lead: “For all the festivity that surrounds the annual West Indian Day Parade, the event has been scarred in recent years by violence nearby and that was the case Monday morning.”
Though the shooting occurred six blocks from the parade route, the headline screamed: “Man shot, killed near Caribbean Carnival route.”
For the record, a gunman opened fire at about 3:30 a.m. on a crowd of people who had gathered along Eastern Parkway, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, police said. Michael Sampson, 55 years old, of Crown Heights, was killed, and two other bystanders were wounded.
Two other shootings occurred: one near Utica Avenue and the other on McKeever Place in Brooklyn. A 22-year-old man was shot in the foot and a 28-year-old woman was shot in the buttocks, police said but both victims were expected to survive.
ABC News via the AP carried the same headline with a lead in that stated: “… a massive Caribbean celebration …. was marred by a fatal shooting nearby before the official festivities got underway.”
The same story went around the world to the Daily Mail in London while the New York Daily News linked the 3:30 a.m. shooting to the carnival, falsely noting that “a gunman opened fire into a crowd in Crown Heights that had already begun festivities for the West Indian Day Parade.” CBS 2 went with the story of ‘One Dead, Two Injured Before Parade.’
But the Wall Street Journal was the absolute worst offender. Its headline writers went with the farce: “Barrage of Bullets Before West Indian Day Parade.”
None of the shooting were related to the West Indian American Day Carnival, which began its five-day celebration last Thursday night on the grounds of the Brooklyn Museum and ended with the grand finale – the parade down Eastern Parkway from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. yesterday.
The real story of course went unreported of course.
No one was injured, shot or killed at the carnival or on the parade route which drew tens of thousands.
But you would never know this reading the Journal, which reported: “A rash of shootings near the route of Brooklyn’s annual West Indian Day Parade left one man dead, five other people injured and cast another pall on one of New York City’s largest public celebrations.”
Last we checked there was no pall over the carnival yesterday, but simply a celebration of culture and pride with floats, costumed revelry, good food and music.
And, under the watchful eye of the NYPD’s 4,000 plus, the only big news of the day were: the hypocritical politicians who suddenly became Caribbean for a day but only managed to walk a block of the parade route and the many women who really should be charged for exposing way too much cellulite and injuring the eyes and mind.
Give us your thoughts? Is this racism or simply journalism at its worst?
