If you're one of those folks who really believes that they're getting unbiased coverage from the elite media, this one's for you...

All the world was up in arms, and it should have been, when 21-year- old gay college student Matthew Shepard was beaten to death in October, 1998. Not content to label the killing merely as a senseless, brutal murder, the media called it a hate crime. Presumably, if there were no "hate" in the motive, Shepard would have been less dead.

Shepard's death was used as a rallying point for all the politically correct to rail against conservatives, religious people, and anyone else who seemed a convenient target.

But did you hear about 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising from Arkansas? I'm betting that you didn't.

In September of this year, Jesse died from suffocation, after being bound, gagged with his own underwear, blindfolded, taped to a bed, and sodomized by one gay man, while another watched.

Incredibly, this story barely made the national media even AFTER it was written up in the Washington Times. Demonstrating a politically correct orthodoxy that Tomas De Torquemada himself would never have dreamed of, the Associated Press kept this story off the national wire for as long as it could.

As it was, the local dispatches that the AP did write never described the perps, Davis Don Carpenter and Joshua Macave Brown, as gay men. The very best that the Associated Press could do was put it on the national wire three weeks after the perps had already entered pleas.

Yes, indeed. The same national press corps, that constantly wails about censorship and the first amendment, ends up being its own best censor.

Hold onto your hats for how the media defends itself on this little breach...

A national AP spokesman said he was "perplexed" by the comparison of the Shepard and Dirkhising Cases. "One was a hate crime, the other was a sex crime."

Demonstrating enough gall to be divided into three parts, Sue O'Brien, editor of the Denver Post editorial pages, blows off their lack of coverage of the Dirkhising case, and then turns it back around with this gem:

"But unfortunately, Jesse's story itself has become a hate-crime story. But it's the use that the story is being put to that's a hate crime, not the crime itself. It is being used to fan hatred, to excuse discrimination--to say it's OK to target people for abuse because they're gay."

And finally, The Washington Post:

"Arkansas authorities have not characterized the Dirkhising death as a hate crime. Matthew Shepard's death sparked public expressions of outrage that themselves became news. That Jesse Dirkhising's death has not done so is hardly the fault of The Washington Post."

Forget political correctness. What we have here is far worse. By categorizing an event, and thus immediately placing its own value judgement on it, the media can now change its entire nature, or at least distort it to serve its own purposes. Many are unduly influenced, but then again, many others are upset and call into talk radio.

When Shepard leaves a bar with two thugs and is killed, it MUST have been because he is gay. This is beyond mere murder. This is a HATE crime.

When we drop bombs on civilians in Yugoslavia, it is all right because WE are doing it. Thus, these dead civilians matter much less than the ones killed by the Serbians. The Serbians killed the Muslims because of HATE.

The Reagan/Pat Buchanan comment that the German soldiers buried at a certain cemetery were just as much victims of the Nazis as anyone else is unacceptable and somehow "anti-Semitic." The notion that a teen- aged German, forced into military service, and then dying is tragic is never even considered. Is this because we hate the Germans, or because the media has already defined the official Nazi victim franchise?

How far back does self-censorship based on ideology go?

At least to 1924.

In the celebrated Leopold/Loeb case, it was never brought out at the time that Leopold was drawn into the murder of Bobby Franks with the promise of a homosexual relationship with Loeb. The acid being poured on Franks' penis was explained away as a means to hide his circumcision. Of course, he was STILL identified as Bobby Franks, and thus Jewish! Moreover, Franks' dilated anus received scant, if any mention.

In the early 1960's, there was extensive coverage of the Civil Rights movement in the South. The prevailing image was of Blacks who were discriminated against, and they wanted their rights. Nothing wrong with that.

But, when dispatches were filed by reporters on the scene describing the seamier side of the whole business, which included public fornication, and the purposeful targeting of tiny county clerk offices with huge lines of hundreds of people--designed to cause big trouble, the stories never made the national media.

If all this suggests that you should view the news with a healthy skepticism, good for you.

Be wary of what is being fed to you by the elite media. It most assuredly has an agenda.

God gave you a brain and free will. Exercise them!