If it was a black-on-white attack, this also should be reported. Let the reader decide if that pushes it into the hate crime category. In such cases, local officials and editors often claim that mentioning the black-on-white nature of the event might inflame passion, but they never have those same qualms when it’s white-on-black.

Any time a group of whites attacks a black person it is immediately labeled, usually by the police responding to the event as well as the media, as a “possible” hate crime. No editor or police official has ever adequately answered, to my satisfaction, the question: why aren’t those assumptions made when the racial roles are reversed? Perhaps they should not be made at all, no matter who’s involved, until all the facts are in.

Sometimes the media doesn’t even have to know anything about the alleged lawbreakers to make a hate crime allegation. Just Google “possible hate crime” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Even now, we have no idea if the victim, Eric Loznicka, was white or black, but I’m guessing that someone with an Eastern European surname likely is not black. This is not something a reader should have to be making guesses about.

Any journalist who claims these days to report the truth “no matter where the chips fall” simply is not telling the truth.

One of the depressingly predictable reactions of the news media is that if a group of whites beats up a black victim it’s automatically a hate crime and is major news, but if a group of blacks beats up a white victim, race is never mentioned in the story, if one even gets published at all.

The news broke on Monday of a man in Henderson who was pulled from his car and beaten after he hit a man who ran into the street in front of his car. Not one of the stories mentioned the race of the man pulled from the car or of the group that pulled him out and beat him. This alone was enough to raise the reader’s suspicions.

First off, if the driver had been black and the assailants white, this would have been written in the first paragraph of the story and it would have been telegraphed in some way in the headline.

The absence of any reference to race in these stories alerts the reader to a) the victim was also black, so race was not important, or b) the victim was indeed white and the assailants black, so political correctness had to be invoked and all race references excised from these stories.