Untold

One Joseph Czuba was sentenced to 53 years (with credit for time served) in prison for attacking a Moslem woman who was renting from him with a knife and stabbing her 6 year old son to death. I'd heard about the case, which has made international headlines, but hadn't really followed it. According to the coverage I'd seen, Mr. Czuba had pled Not Guilty to the charges, and I was curious what his defense had been. People plead Not Guilty in a lot of cases where it appears that they were caught red-handed, and I've started wondering if they're entering mental disease or defect pleas (claiming mitigating circumstances that separate legal guilt from factual guilt), or simply claiming that, despite what it looked like and/or whatever witnesses their may have been, they didn't do it.

In any event, I'm learning that standard search engines are a terrible tool for finding this sort of information. Mainly, I suspect, because I'm one of those weird people who takes an interest in these things when no-one else does. The results I was able to find were stories about the sentencing from various news outlets, from the local to the international, although the local Fox affiliate did have what I was looking for, noting that Mr. Czuba's defense team "focused [...] on trying to question the clarity of the evidence."

Conspicuously absent from the search result, however, was a story from Fox News. Although the Times of Israel covered the story (while also being at pains to add that "antisemitism and anti-Israel incidents" also happened in the United States), and even the famously conservative New York Post ran a story, when I searched Fox News, nothing about the sentencing came up. Which struck me as odd. They could have simply run (albeit with some much-needed editing) the WFLD story and called it a day. And it's entirely possible that they're simply taking their time, and that by the time anyone reads this, a story specifically on the sentencing will have been posted, even if there isn't one there now.

But on the face if it, it seems to point to the idea that news outlets cater their audiences in their story selection as well as framing, posting items that affirm their worldviews and sometimes leaving out stories that don't. And while people tend to insist that news organizations they understand as ideologically opposed should be running the stories that they want people to see, it's much less likely that pressure will be brought to bear to force their favored news sources to cover the "other side's" preferred narratives.