Our taxpayer-subsidized national radio network NPR faces a difficult task in covering the nationwide outbreak of unprovoked attacks by young black males. The result is a sad, yet hilarious segment, whose transcript is found here, suggesting we call them "random street assaults" rather than anything which might mention the awkward fact that the attackers are black and the victims white, Asian, Hispanic, or, when available, Hasidic Jews.

An NPR host named Rachel Martin interviews someone named Gene Demby, who is employed by NPR to be "lead blogger" at an NPR blog called "Code Switch," that presents itself as offering the "frontiers of race, culture and ethnicity." In the Demby/NPR world, it is a major problem that conservative media are failing to suppress the stories of black-on-white violence for fun:

MARTIN: Depending on what kind of media you are absorbing, that could be affecting your perception of what this is, this phenomenon?

DEMBY: Right. The knockout game is, in a lot of tellings, a racialized game, in which young black men attack unsuspecting white people. There is a pretty sizeable part of the conservative blogosphere that has stumped for the existence of the knockout game for some time. Tom Flaherty, who works for World Net Daily, has catalogued what he sees as instances of the knockout game. And to be clear, there are kids who say they participated in games similar to this and they call it different things: the knockout game, point them out, knock them out, knockout king.

MARTIN: And that is being blown out of proportion or that's being represented differently in different media?

DEMBY: Depending on which media you consume, you get a very different story. One other thing that's important to note is that while people say this is on the rise, there are very few YouTube videos of this apparently happening, which is part of the phenomenon that we're supposedly - it's part of what's supposedly driving this trend. When you watch local news and you see coverage of the knockout game, you'll see the same security camera clips running over and over of kids attacking someone. But there isn't a lot of evidence of it happening online.

This last statement seems highly questionable, as a continuing stream of incidents keep getting reported. But Demby has the solution:

DEMBY: I guess it's more of a question: what do we gain by calling this thing the knockout game, right? What is the benefit in assigning this nomenclature to it? Why doesn't random street assault work, right? And that's the thing we should be thinking about.

Let's just call it random, as if the attackers weren't nearly all of one race and the victims of another.

Perhaps most interesting of all are the comments that follow this transcript, almost universally negative, and many of them pointing out that on his own blog, Demby deletes comments which take him to task.

Our tax dollars are subsidizing this foolish propaganda effort.

Hat tip: Lucianne.com