Thoughts on the racist Bartosh video and the way the Turner Report covered it

I promised a couple of days ago I would write about the thought process that went into publishing the post on the video that featured the 16-year-old son of Jasper County Presiding Commissioner John Bartosh drinking and singing a racist version of an Alabama song at a Bernie's Bar and Grill in Avilla.

Many of you disagreed with that decision and I fully understand your reasoning.

This is a 16-year-old boy, after all. He did not kill anyone. He did not commit a brutal crime. Videos of underage drinking make it onto social media all of the time.

I am not tempted to write about any of them. There has to be another consideration for me to do that.

In this case, there was.

If it had been an elected official's son and the only thing the video showed was drinking and rowdy behavior, it would never have been mentioned on the Turner Report, unless it was directly connected to some crime or accident.

The racist lyrics the teen was singing made up my mind for me. It was an easy decision.

The next decision was to whether to mention the connection to John Bartosh. That decision was not as easy and I understand anyone who finds fault with the way I handled it.

One basic concept people have of racist behavior is that it is limited to a certain lower level socioeconomic group, lacking in education and lacking in the kind of home environment and that the teens who exhibit this behavior are not among the most popular students.

You can find this behavior anywhere.

The headlines are filled every day with examples of the racial problems that this nation still has on our streets and in our schools. It is a major issue in this year's presidential election and is one of the topics moderator Chris Wallace selected for tonight's presidential debate.

Racism among students is still happening 66 years after the U. S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision integrating our public schools.

Sometimes it happens with children from the best of homes.

After careful thought, I decided to go with it, but in a decision that seems naive in retrospect, I referred to the elder Bartosh as a Jasper County elected official and did not name him.

By the time I published the post, the video had already gone viral. Everyone knew who it was, so I was not omitting the name to protect anyone or to give myself a fig leaf, so I could say I did not name the boy, when it was obvious to many readers who I was writing about.

 I did not mention the name because what I was publishing will likely be easier for someone years from now to find in a search and I did not want the young man's children to see something like that.

That changed when I received the e-mail from Bartosh's attorney, Norman Rouse, Monday containing Bartosh's statement. 

While this was not an official statement in his capacity as Jasper County Presiding Commissioner, it was a statement made by an elected official.

The decision not to run the video was an easy one.  I realize thousands of people are going to see that video, but they are not going to see that racist poison on the Turner Report.