Marjon Rostami, a reporter with the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia, was riding in a car last month with fellow reporter Dave Forster. They were just four blocks from their office and stopped at a red light when their car came under attack from a band of young black men.
Someone threw a rock at her window. She locked the door. Forster got out to confront the young rock-thrower—something the police say you should never do in such circumstances.
Forster suffered a lot of bruises and his torso ached from all the blows, but he suffered no serious injury. Rostami stayed inside the car, but someone came at her though the driver’s side door and hit her. She called 911 on her cellphone and reports she twice got a recording saying all lines were busy before she finally got through.
The newspaper didn’t carry any story about the incident until two weeks later when a columnist, Michelle Washington, described the attack in her column, saying she thought the callousness of the attackers and the callousness of the responding police officer who brushed the whole thing off should not go unremarked.
The column came to the attention of Matt Drudge, the media commentator, and his Drudge Report. He saw all this as the liberal media covering up an attack by blacks on whites while making a huge mountain out of an attack by one white on a black in Florida, the Trayvon Martin killing. He headlined the story: “100 black teens beat white couple in Norfolk… Media bury attack.” (The Washington column said 30 people were involved, not 100; and the Virginian-Pilot did carry a long story on the attack, albeit two weeks after the event.)
Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly then took up his cudgel and pursued the same theme of the liberal media covering up black-on-white crime while highlighting white-on-black crime.
The story of the attack on the car of Forster and Rostami still has not gotten much news coverage. No wire service has carried any story on the incident, which might seem to confirm the Drudge-O’Reilly conspiracy theory.
But as other commentators have pointed out, white-on-black crime doesn’t always get the attention the Trayvon Martin killing has gotten. In fact, that has been exceptional. As for the Forster-Rostami case, no one was killed or even seriously injured. (Neither Forster nor Rostami went to the hospital.)
The editor of the Virginian-Pilot, Denis Finley, said the incident was listed on the police blotter as a case of simple assault and a reporter looking over the police blotter and seeing it would not normally have written any story. He also said Forster and Rostami both said “they did not want to be named in a story.”
Furthermore, Finley warned against jumping to the conclusion that the attack was racially motivated. “The truth is, we have no idea what motivated the attack. Was it a gang or a gathering? Did it just happen or was something planned? Was it racially motivated or random? We just don’t know,” he wrote.
The Norfolk police are incensed at the coverage. They aren’t mad at the attackers or at Drudge and O’Reilly, however. They are mad at the column by Michelle Washington for saying that were callous in their handling of the incident. They also say there is no evidence of a racial motivation.
“Could it have been? Yeah, it could have, I guess,” said police spokesman Chris Amos. “We certainly haven’t ruled that out, but we haven’t seen anything that jumps out at us other than someone throwing a rock at someone’s car. A whole lot of racial implications have been made. We don’t know the motive of this. Race didn’t become a factor until Twitter comments later [two weeks after the incident]. No one at the scene said it was racially motivated.”
Amos is incensed that the newspaper column quotes Rostami as saying the police officer at the scene told her to shut up and took down no names of any witnesses. Rostami is also quoted as saying the officers brushed the incident aside, saying the attackers “were probably juveniles anyway. What are we going to do? Find their parents and tell them?”
Amos said the responding officer gave Forster and Rostami his business card, took their report two days later and “vehemently denies the conversation reported by the Pilot.”
After all the uproar, another columist at the newspaper wrote a column on the incident. Kerry Dougherty said, “It was a lapse in judgment not to report on a violent mob on a Norfolk street, but not a left-wing conspiracy. The reaction has been obscenely overblown.” She also said that had she been the editor that day, she would have called for a five-inch brief on the incident.
With all the attention, the Norfolk Police gang unit has now opened an investigation.
Rostami was born in the United States of Iranian parents and speaks Farsi. She graduated from the University of Texas and worked at The Arizona Republic until joining the Virginian-Pilot in March 2010. She covers government in the city of Chesapeake, one of the jurisdictions that make up the Hampton Roads region of Virginia that the Virginian-Pilot covers.
