Washington Post Silent on Black Panther Case

As news of the Black Panther voter intimidation case unraveled, the Washington Post apparently decided to simply not report on it.

As a recap: the Black Panthers on election day stood outside of a Philadelphia polling place and threatened people with brandishing sticks to vote for Obama. When they were prosecuted, only one of them was punished, and even that was just a slap on the wrist - he couldn't come within 100 yards of a Philadelphia polling place for a few years.

Please.

So after readers complained to the ombudsman FOR MONTHS about not reporting on the case, the ombudsman scolded his own newspaper for neglecting the topic, and the Post finally issued a full length news article about the Black Panthers.

Many people are now accusing the Post of a double standard. Critics of the Black Panther case say that the only reason people such as J.Christian Adams are fighting for a harsher prosecution is purely partisan politics.

This is just simply not the case. Since when is the right to have a fair and equal voting process only a Republican issue?

Adams spoke out, to the media and the US Commission Civil Rights, that the Justice Department was showing favor to the defendants because they were black, as if trying show reversal racism.

But in the case of the Post not reporting the issue, it should not matter that this has become the conservative fight (even though I really don't understand why), or that it is a possible issue of reverse racism, or even if it's a partisan fight (which I really don't believe it is) - the important thing is that it is an issue. It is a story. And a newspaper's job is to report stories of interest and importance to it's readers. Many other newspapers and news organizations felt it was worth reporting except for the Washington Post.

See this is why I get frustrated when people complain about Fox News, calling them out for being too conservative. They're absolutely right - Fox News is conservative, and I'm not going to act like they aren't unbiased. Journalism is supposed to be unbiased, but really, what newspaper is nowadays? Fox News just reports about more issues that are of interest to the conservative audience. It was the first to pick up on the Black Panther case, and if Fox News doesn't report about these issues, then who will?

Obviously not the Washington Post.

It's clearly not just Fox News and conservative agencies showing a bias in what they choose to report - it's the liberal side, like the Washington Post too.

And again, it still baffles me why this has become a conservative issue. Why does it have to be on one party/ideoligical side at all? It's about the right that each citizen has to vote without any intimidation and experience a fair and equal voting process.

What's so political about that?

And that's my two cents.