NBC News is hardly the only news outfit to infuse a headline with the racism narrative, but the real crime is that NBC is so intent on forwarding said narrative that it manipulates the readers and buries the facts that prove the opposite point.

If you were just to read a little bit of this NBC story, this is what you’d think were the facts of the case:

A desperate black mother and her 37-year-old son who had been missing for months have been maligned and mistreated by the police. Dexter Wade was a sweet boy who had been living with his mother and didn’t return home after a quarrel, which was unlike him. The mother, Bettersten Wade, filed a missing persons report. Bettersten never trusted the police — her brother was killed by a police officer in 2019 after being slammed to the ground — but she filed a missing persons report anyway, even against the advice of others. The true tragedy was that she eventually found out her son had been dead for seven months. He had been hit by a vehicle driven by an off-duty police officer and was buried in a pauper’s grave after lying in the morgue unclaimed. NBC wants readers to understand that the Jackson, Mississippi, Police Department had the answer the whole time but left this tormented family to wallow in uncertainty because of systemic racism.

Therein lies the racism/anti-police narrative, which was established right from the get-go. If one didn’t bother to read a little further into the story, one would miss all the pertinent details. Here are the facts that were mentioned but glossed over:2

Dexter was far from the angelic individual the story paints him to be at the beginning. He was a father of two children, but Dexter lived with his mother and his children lived with their mother. He had been arrested several times for auto theft and armed robbery. At the time of his death, he had PCP and meth in his system and he was attempting to cross an interstate highway.

It is legal in Mississippi to walk on the shoulder along the highway facing oncoming traffic. However, crossing an interstate highway (six lanes of traffic) on foot is illegal in Mississippi and is dangerous anywhere. Not only was Dexter crossing an interstate highway while high on drugs, but it was also after 8 p.m. when he attempted to do so. On March 5, 2023, when the accident occurred, the sun set at 6:01 p.m. and so by 8:00 it was well and truly dark outside.

The off-duty police officer who accidentally hit Dexter immediately reported it to the Jackson PD, passed all the sobriety tests, and this whole incident was ruled an accident. If crossing a busy interstate highway on foot at night while high isn’t enough of an indicator of an accident waiting to happen, the off-duty cop passing the sobriety tests should be the final nail in that coffin.

Then we get to the most poignant accusation of the whole story: that the Jackson PD knew the entire time that Dexter was gone but either through neglect or racism (NBC implies the latter) Bettersten was not informed of the accident until seven months later, “letting his body go unclaimed for months in the county morgue.”

There was some miscommunication in the Jackson PD, but there is a big detail missing. Dexter had no ID on him at the time he was hit. The only means of identification was from a prescription medication bottle found on him. The police investigator tracked down Dexter’s identity though his pharmacy and called Dexter’s mother on March 8. The investigator only got her voicemail but did leave a message.

For some reason, Bettersten never got that message and filed a missing persons report on March 14. The Jackson PD was unable to connect the dots between this missing person and Dexter’s death until August, when a new police investigator was assigned to Dexter’s missing persons case.

Was it a tragedy of errors, or was it “retaliation” against Bettersten because of her brother’s brush with the Jackson PD? NBC would have you believe the latter.

Corporate news media outfits like NBC are so desperate to demonstrate that the American systemic racism narrative isn’t a boogeyman that they are bending the truth and burying the actual story in the hopes that people won’t read beyond the headline or first few paragraphs. NBC is also exploiting a mother’s pain to further an evil narrative.

Trumped-up racism narratives like this one take away the meaning of what racism actually is. We are seeing the consequences of that tawdry treatment of the meaning of racism now on college campuses, where terrorist-supporting students are getting away with outright anti-Jew/anti-Israel racism.

Corporate media has earned the distrust of the nation, and stories like this one are the reason. Bad-intentioned headlines are meant to disturb the peace.