Back in 2020 I wrote of the execution-style murders of Paul and Lina Marino in a Delaware cemetery by a Black gunman. Early reports indicated that the murderer was dressed in black, with a rifle, and waited in ambush for the couple; that he was motivated to take revenge on the White couple after the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger killed by three White men in Georgia. The Marino murderer was killed in a shoot-out with the police.
To find out the facts, I sent a Freedom of Information request to the Delaware State Police only to be turned down as a non-resident. Was it a hate crime? Don’t know. So, I filed a FOIA with the FBI, thinking that such a heinous interracial crime and the various reports on the motive would have involved them in the investigation. The FBI wrote back that they never heard of the Marino murders. The Delaware State Police kept a lid on it.
At the time, this brutal crime was not reported by any Nightly News programs – Lester Holt (NBC), Norah O’Donnell (CBS), or David Muir (ABC). I heard about it on FOX News which picked it up from a local Delaware news outlet. The corporate media kept a lid on it.
Fast forward to June 25th, three weeks ago. A triple murder in Newton, MA – Gilda and Bruno D’Amore and Gilda’s 97-year old mother Lucia Arpino were viciously stabbed to death in their home by a Black intruder, Chris Ferguson, now under arrest. Lucia still had a knife embedded in her frail body. Did Lester, Norah, or David see fit to report this massacre to the nation? No.
The corporate media takes many forms including broadcast and cable. For example, NBC has a cable version called MSNBC which openly sustains leftist/Democrat narratives – it is the foil for FOX News, a rival right-wing cable network. NBC, as well as ABC and CBS, as broadcast (wireless transmission) networks are subject to FCC monitoring and must project an unbiased image; but with subjective editing or omitting of news they easily get their corporate narrative across – just like my blogs!
TV journalists nowadays ultimately work for mega-corporations not TV networks. Huntley and Brinkley used to work for NBC, Lester Holt now works for NBC’s parent Comcast; Walter Cronkite reported to CBS, today Norah O’Donnell reports to Paramount Global; Harry Reasoner worked for ABC, now David Muir reports to the Disney Corporation – a sworn enemy of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The new mega corporations have global agendas and product sales that require “velvet glove” reporting. Most Nightly News sponsors are major pharma. How did that shade the news during Covid or even now? How many reports on mass murders include the shooter’s blood work? Was he on drugs or prescription meds – a risk to the sponsors? It’s more important to know if he was a White “supremacist,” right?
I believe the world would be a better place if every night, Lester, Norah, and David were required to inform their viewers that they edit and omit news and could be biased. The FCC should require them to run a screen crawl to that effect during each broadcast. That might blow the lid off their reports.
In the case of Artificial Intelligence taking over the various media, as Hollywood fears, the computer app wouldn’t have far to search for Italian stereotypes. Institute analyst Tony Vecchione stumbled on the photo on the right purportedly generated by AI. It is the image Europeans have of U.S. residents by state. Oddball Americans posing with lobsters, ears of corn, and other local props form a humorous collage in the European imagination. Of 50 states only New Jersey is seen in ethnic terms…Italian of course. AI has a treasure trove of TV and movies to guide it to that conclusion.
This is one lid that needs to stay shut. -JLM
I recall that, a number of years ago, the EU assigned an image for each of its member countries. Italy was assigned the image of a pizza. Of course, Italy protested, and I believe the image was changed. Who is going to protest the NJ image? NIAF or OSDIA? Don’t bet on it.
Given the way the media distorted the racial murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 and the shooting death of Yusuf Hawkins in a clear case of mistaken identity in 1989, transforming it into a racial killing, none of this should come as a surprise to anyone.
Yes, I used to teach the Kitty Genovese murder case via a U.S. history class. I used that famous newspaper story about it. The case was long-seen as a classic example of “see no evil, hear no evil,” that is, frightened residents not getting involved even when hearing her screams outside for help. Yet the reporter loaded the deck a little bit: One neighbor did call police, and another shouted out the window at the man, scaring him off. That neighbor should have then gone downstairs and assisted Kitty; by not doing so, the killer merely paused, came back and finished her off. Sad.
What’s interesting in modern accounts of the case is that Kitty Genovese is now hailed as a heroine in the LBGTQ community. She was apparently a lesbian.
Yet the ethnic or racial or sexual identity of the killer? Even in that 1960s newspaper story, no specifics. A Google search reveals someone Spike Lee should know about.
And–just as in the recent NY stabbing of that grad student–this murderer, too, had a long history of violence. The so-called US justice system fails non-Blacks, too.
it is hard to fathom, but in San Jose, a neighborhood was on fire, a couple of homes trashed and one burned to the ground…., set by a mentally ill person in a homeless encampment…..hardly a word about it in the local press….that story was killed, its, not a national news thing but still it is the same attempt to keep people uninformed, and ignorant of the dangers…….this is an old story…and the classic tale was Death in Venice…where the authorities tried to not let the tourist know of a cholera epidemic. even what letters to the editor get published is a complete mystery to me…….so much for real dialogue…
Even a prominent Italian left wing journalist, Federico Rampini, complained that the American left-wing media does not care for Italian victims.
You may remember the death of an Italian PhD student at Columbia University in NYC a couple of years ago. The perpetrator was an African American gang member who hates whites. Rampini observed that the NY Times kept a lid on the story.
Many conservatives in Italy were surprised that Rampini made such observation. More details below.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/italian-lives-matter-crime-new-york-times/
A beloved Italian immigrant in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood (where the University of Chicago is located) was also stabbed to death a few years ago by a deranged individual. The Italian was a relative newcomer to the States, yet his persona in a local watering hold endeared him to everyone in the area (below).
Similarly, a popular pizzeria maker in Cicero who often gave left-over slices to homeless residents in the area (Black and Hispanic) was robbed at gunpoint by another thug, who ended up shooting him when the man tried to defend himself.
These stories never seem to reach the mainstream media. But Spike Lee’s relentlessly propagandistic, anti-Italian movies certainly do.
https://wgntv.com/news/chicagocrime/18-year-old-charged-in-stabbing-death-of-hyde-park-bartender/
https://chicago.eater.com/2013/6/20/6416985/albanos-pizzeria-owner-shot-and-killed-inside-restaurant
not at all being a techie so I cant reproduce it , someone shared with me a historic marker about the lynching of Italian immigrants in the 1880’s in the South. The ancestors and community erected a historic marker..This is not the large lynching in NO, but a small one either in Louisiana or Mississippi…will try to forward the photo, It was a tragic event, and history is full of tragic events along with heroic responses…..”it was what it was”, and I am kind of getting upset about not teaching this stuff in history….Italian American history does not get a blink of an eye…Columbus, maybe Sacco and Vanzetti, maybe Prohibition, and that’s about it. To a quarter or so, Italian American, it does not even get an “oh hum”, yet what a legacy they have inherited…and know nothing about…..,
Italian Americans don’t want to be reminded of hatred toward them. We have never made a dollar off our suffering, as other have developed whole industries for that purpose.
Sadly, many of our kind have even made the negatives (eg. La Cosa Nostra) into a “positive” and source of pride.