The nation last night was treated to what is being billed as a “teachable moment” when it comes to race relations.

This week I’ve been having one of my own.

I did not get to share a beer with the president, or a professor, or even a local cop, although I’m sure Mike Chitwood would be more than willing to share a brew.

However, I have spent some time discussing race. I’ve been getting overnight voice-mail messages from a frequent critic who believes we have an inherent bias when it comes to crime and how it is portrayed in the newspaper.

Here’s the short version. Derek believes if a suspect is black, they are more likely to find themselves splashed all over the front page. If they are white, the story will get kicked inside.

I, of course, could not disagree more. The truth is, when I make the decision to put a story on Page One, I very often have no idea the race of the suspects, nor do I care.

Derek specifically took me to task for Thursday’s newspaper. He questioned why the story about three men charged with “savagely beating”
a fan during a brawl outside Citizens Bank Park was buried back on Page 11. He noted that on Page 1 that day we featured a story on the county’s billboard controversy as well as a reward fund for a cat that had been shot with a BB gun.

He openly questioned if the beating story had been placed inside because the suspects were white.

“If they had been black, they would have been on Page One,” he said.

Of course I did not hear from him on Tuesday, two days earlier. That was the day we had splashed the story of the arrest of the three white suspects all over our front page, including their photos.

The Thursday story is what we refer to as a “folo,” when we revisit something we have already reported, usually with new information. That’s why it ran inside. There’s also the matter that technically, this was not a Delaware County story. Neither the victim nor any of the three suspects was from here on our turf in Delco. That’s usually where we place most of our focus. We covered the story because it was what everyone in the region was talking about.

Ironically, Derek also did not mention the lead story on Thursday’s front page. It was about the arrest of three suspects in a big credit-card theft operation. We ran photos of all three suspects, two of them black, one white.

I kind of doubt I will hear from him today either concerning our story on the arrest of the 75-year-old woman on the Main Line in a hit-run accident.

That’s here right there on the front page.

I’m not saying we don’t sometimes make mistakes. I’m not saying there are instances when someone could infer that we appear to have a bias.

I’m saying that is not our intent. I’m saying that I don’t care what color a person is when I make the decisions about Page One.

Maybe that’s a teachable moment as well.