Media criticized in slayings with racial overtone

The victims did not know the attackers and were just "at the wrong place at the wrong time," Gill said.

The four murder defendants will be given separate trials, beginning next May. Prosecutors have yet to say whether they will seek the death penalty.

Among the bloggers who have questioned the media coverage is country singer Charlie Daniels.

"I am not going to call it reverse racism," said Daniels, who has written on his Web page about how little he has heard of the case in Nashville, about 150 miles west of Knoxville. "But I will say it is very selective.

"There are probably not five stories in the country that could possibly have been more important than that one during the time it was going on," he said. "It is totally, completely unfair to the memory of these young people not to inform people about what happened to them."

More than a dozen e-mails to the Cleveland Plain Dealer in recent weeks have raised similar concerns, reader representative Ted Diadiun said. "Why are you guys covering this up?" they ask.

Diadiun said that based on the AP stories, it appeared that the crime was horrible but not substantially different from ones that "regrettably occur all over the country every day."

Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates Instapundit, a current events blog, said he was branded an apologist after he wrote that he had seen no evidence the killings were a hate crime.

However, he said: "I think it is totally true if the races of the perpetrators and the victims were reversed, the press would make a bigger deal about it. I think some people have been hanging back for fear of inflaming things."

Ted Gest, president of the Criminal Justice Journalists group, a national organization of reporters who cover crime, courts and prisons, said interracial crime tends to get more coverage than when the criminal and victim are of the same race.

"But I can't say that this one would have had any more coverage if five whites had been accused of doing these things to two blacks, absent a blatant racial motive," he said. "As bad as this crime is, the apparent absence of any interest group involvement or any other `angle' might also explain the lack of coverage."

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