MRC Wants You To Know That Person Who Caused Hockey Player’s Death Is Black

Media Research Center’s Jorge Bonilla whined in a Nov. 14 post:

In a bizarre throwaway report, the kind that is used as a timestuffer towards the end of a newscast, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt goes through the trouble of mentioning the arrest of a suspect in the gruesome death of an American hockey player, but has a most difficult time identifying the suspect.

Watch the report in its entirety, as aired on NBC Nightly News on Tuesday, November 14th, 2023:

LESTER HOLT: In England, an arrest in the death of an American hockey player who died after the blade of an opposing player’s skate cut his neck. Adam Johnson, who once played for the Pittsburgh Penguins, was on a British team when the incident happened. Police did not identify the suspect but said he was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter.

The report is opaque, and goes to great lengths to bifurcate the fatal slashing of Johnson from the manslaughter arrest. Was the arrestee, mayhaps, someone other than the opposing player who kung fu-kicked Johnson in the neck?

The problem here is that local authorities didn’t really name a suspect. But that didn’t deter Bonilla’s whine:

The events were a kung-fu kick across the throat. South Yorkshire clearly identified a suspect before making an arrest, so it isn’t so much a lack of identification as a refusal to publish. 

Even if the suspect wasn’t identified by South Yorkshire, the whole world knows that Matt Petgrave is the one who slashed Adam Johnson. Surely, Holt could’ve spared a second or two to provide that context. Reports like these, with critical information missing, do little if anything to inform the public.

Why is Bonilla so desperate for you to know that Petgrave was arrested in Johnson’s death? Presumably because Petgrave is black.That’s something that other right-wingers have seized upon has well; Petgrave gas been targeted with racist hate since the incident, portraying him as a murderer; Bonilla leaned into that narrative by accusing him of having “kung fu-kicked Johnson in the neck,” heavily implying it was deliberate despite a lack of evidence to support that conclusion. Even though hockey fans love a good bad-guy enforcer, this tends not to apply to black players. Indeed, one writer argued that the situation would likely not be the same if the races were reversed: “If Petgrave had been killed by Johnson’s skateblade, do you believe he would have gotten arrested and charged with manslaughter, too?”

Bonilla doesn’t want to actually say any of this out loud to keep a veneer of plausible deniability. His implication of racist motive is enough.