"If Obama had a friend from Australia, he might look like Chris Lane."

Navarrette's piece asks the same rhetorical question which every other sensible person is asking about the Chris Lane murder, but he rightly focuses the blame toward the media itself. The laugh line is great...

Meanwhile, where is President Obama's awkward statement that, if he had a friend from Australia, he might look like Chris Lane?

...but the substantive part is what kicks butt.

What is the media supposed to do about all this? There's a debate over when to mention race and when to leave it out. The longstanding rule in journalism is that we shouldn't mention the race of someone accused of committing a crime unless it is relevant to the story.

That rule seems half-baked. Why wouldn't a suspect's race be "relevant" -- especially when that suspect is still at large and the police need the public's help in locating him? It's a human characteristic. Would we leave out of a story any mention of one's gender or age, so we're not accused of sexism or ageism?

Self-censorship isn't the answer. When a horrendous crime like this happens, we need more information not less.

Besides, once we sanitize the news, or manipulate it to serve an agenda, it's no longer news. It's public relations.

Or worse. Think of it as nanny journalism. Too many people in my profession have strayed from the mission of reporting what happened -- or in my field of opinion writing, telling you what we think about what happened -- to massaging what happened in order to advance some greater societal good. And when journalists -- either on our own, or at the direction of the people we work for -- impersonate social workers, we ask for trouble.

We also surrender our credibility. And once that's gone, why should anyone listen to anything we say ever again?

Yes, why indeed. But this is the consistent habit of the leftist media on all crime reporting. It really doesn't matter to them who the victim is, it's the perp's identity which decides whether it's newsworthy or just another dog bites man story. Look at the abuse scandal in the Catholic church. It's reported to be a systemic problem but nothing is ever said about the sexual abuse of minors in the public schools. And look at the hand-wringing about so-called "torture" of terrorists by American intelligence by people who don't care about the victims of real torture around the globe enough to report on it.

If only we could teach the next generation to think critically, the leftist media would be history.