Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Take a bow, La Shawn Barber

If you don’t know who La Shawn Barber is, you ought to get to visit her blog and read some of her Washington Examiner and Townhall columns.

Here’s something La Shawn wrote last Spring. It’s only two sentences but for readers’ ease, I put some spacing into the first sentence:

The emerging images pop right out at you: two strippers start dancing, the players get rowdy, the strippers get angry and start to leave,

the players get angry and call them names as they head out, one of the strippers returns the taunts, the drunk accuser-stripper goes back in to retrieve her shoe (but may not have found it), second stripper is angry at the players and the drunk stripper, calls 911 to report name-calling, has someone else call 911 to report drunk woman in her car,

cop arrives and sees drunk woman passed out, drunk woman is taken to a “substance abuse” center, realizes she may be in big trouble because of her past drunken criminal behavior (leading police on a car chase and trying to run down an officer), claims rape, is sent to hospital where exam reveals injuries “consistent” with rape, points the finger at three men at the party,

media and black “leaders” go crazy and play up race angle, DA - in a fight for political survival - takes the race bait and vilifies 46 men, some of whom weren’t at the party, tests all but the black player, and despite no evidence charges two men with rape.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
La Shawn posted her "story" last April 23rd.

That was one week after the now disbarred DA, Mike Nifong, and Durham Police officers Benjamin Himan and Mark Gottlieb teamed up to fraudulently indict Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann; and it was three weeks before they did the same thing to David Evens.

For the next nine months Duke President, Richard (“Whatever they did was bad enough”) Brodhead and Duke’s trustees could find nothing critical to say about Nifong and the obvious framing of three Duke students for gang rape and other felonies.

Also for the next nine months, the editorial pages of the Durham Herald Sun and the Raleigh News & Observer cheered Mike Nifong on and were pleased when he won the November election.

The H-S, under the leadership of Editor Bob Ashley, is imploding as its circulation and ad revenues plummet. But the N&O has a weekday circulation of over 170,000, and says it’s always on the lookout for talented black journalists and columnists.

So why doesn’t the N&O hire the smart and talented La Shawn Barber? Why, instead, does it hire and foist on its readers a race-baiting news columnist like Barry Saunders?

Message to N&O Executive Editor for News Melanie Sill: Care to answer those questions?

Message to La Shawn: Take a bow.

Message to readers: Visit La Shawn’s outstanding blog and read her columns here.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

John: Your praise of Ms Barber is justified and appropriate. Also unselfish. Very good question for Ms Sills to ponder.

Anonymous said...

Stephen -

You're right about JinC and LaShawn Barber.

Unfortunately Melanie Sills is busy defending the barricades from barbarians and is too busy to respond, much less ponder.

-TombZ

Anonymous said...

Agreed, Ms. Barber is an excellent columnist (have read many of her pieces at Townhall) but she'd be considered a conservative and therefore unwelcome balance at the N & O.

Anonymous said...

La Shawn was not mentioned in Until Proven Innocent. Stuart Taylor apologized for that.

Michael J. Gaynor

Anonymous said...

I'm hearing there's a lot more KC and Taylor should apologize for.

People say there are lots of things the N&O did they don't talk about. Someone said they don't even mention Anne Blythe who wrote those first terrible stories with Samiha Khanna.

Can anybody say something about that part of the book?