What If She Were Hispanic?

Outside of Donald Trump, the only thing on Fox or Right Wing Hate Radio these days is the Kathryn Steinle story--the one where the undocumented immigrant who had previously been deported several times shot and killed a woman in San Francisco.

Groups like FAIR--which Rachel Maddow have covered extensively--have had a field day with this, going on media outlets and spewing their wrongness.  Also "having a field day" is the Center for Immigration Studies,a group closely linked with FAIR, with the same racist ties, and under the eye of the SPLC.

Over at Fox there has been non stop coverage, with bloviating about "Sanctuary Cities" and wanting that program to end.

It's adding fuel to the Trump-mentum in the polls.

Even Hillary, Boxer, and DiFi have spoken about this.

But here's my question:

What if she were Hispanic? Or another person of color?

Would this be as big a story?

Or would it be a non-story altogether?

We all remember Elizabeth Smart.

But how many of us remember Tionda and Diamond Bradley? Certainly they never got the wall to wall 24/7 coverage Elizabeth Smart did.

That's the way the media is. And they know it.

Rarely were those biases more glaring than in the 2003 coverage of an ambush on U.S. soldiers during the Iraq War. One female solider, Lori Piestewa, a Hopi from a poor background — and also a single mother — was killed in the attack. Two others, Shoshana Johnson (a black woman and single mom) and Jessica Lynch (a blond white woman who was childless) were hurt and taken as prisoners. Most news organizations focused only on Lynch's story, which the Pentagon embellished by vastly overstating her heroics. Lynch herself criticized the Defense Department's propaganda and slammed the news media for singling her out.

“I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary,” she testified before Congress. “The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes and they don't need to be told elaborate tales.”

Critics' outcry about media bias grew louder in 2005 during the media blitz about Natalee Holloway, a pretty blond teen who had disappeared in Aruba. While her story dominated headlines, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson decried the "damsel in distress” mythology that was preoccupying the nation.

“It's the meta narrative of something seen as precious and delicate being snatched away, defiled, destroyed by evil forces that lurk in the shadows just outside the bedroom window. It's whiteness under siege. It's innocence and optimism crushed by cruel reality. It's a flower smashed by a rock,” Robinson wrote.

This is the narrative the media--especially right wing media wants to push on the people:  To reinforce an unequal view of people, giving people of color less "value". How does the media report a shooting on the South Side of Chicago versus the mugging of a White woman in a middle class neighborhood? How much attention is paid to getting the perpetrators versus the attitude of "that's just the way it is for these people"? And the subconscious message is that people are lulled into apathy and blindness about all the unseen inequity in the country still yet to be addressed.