On Thursday, August 13, CNN finally slapped together a few sentences about the execution-style slaying of five-year-old Cannon Hinnant. Four days earlier, Cannon, out riding his bike in front of his house, had been shot point-blank in the head by a neighbor, a 25-year-old black man named Darius Sessoms.

So much for “The Most Trusted Name in News.”

We can only speculate as to why it took CNN a full four days to report on this most monstrous of crimes, but that outlet wasn’t alone in journalistic malpractice. As Amanda Prestigiacomo reported, “As of Friday morning, NBC, CBS, ABC, New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, and MSNBC have all yet to cover the shooting of young Cannon.”

It must’ve been a really busy week all across the mainstream media landscape. And on Capitol Hill, too, where Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and their fellow Democrats couldn’t be bothered to take a knee for Cannon. Of course, kneeling to honor the life of a murdered little white boy won’t bring them the votes that donning the Kente cloths for our nation’s least-deserving martyr will. Nor, it seems, will kneeling for any of the innocent black children who’ve been lost to the everyday genocide of black-on-black crime.

Why is it, then, that the rare and unlawful killing of a deeply troubled black man named George Floyd launched a thousand riots, while the execution of a blameless little white boy named Cannon Hinnant brought nary a broken bottle? Sadly, the former fits a narrative of an irredeemably racist nation, while the latter merely muddies those waters.

“Say his name,” tweeted blogger and columnist Matt Walsh. “5-year-old Cannon Hinnant was executed in cold blood while riding his bike. The accused killer is Darius Sessoms. He allegedly walked up to the boy and shot him dead in front of his sisters. Reverse the races and this is the only thing anyone talks about for a month.”

Imagine the scenario that Walsh suggests: A 25-year-old white man walks up to a five-year-old black boy and executes him in the coldest of cold blood. The stories of nationwide outrage and protest write themselves. And yet here we are, with a virtual blackout by a mainstream media whose narrative isn’t being served.

“This lack of interest would be odd in any other situation,” says columnist John Jiang. “In the context of recent events, however, it is deeply disturbing. George Floyd, a career criminal, has been elevated to a virtual saint of social justice by thousands of articles across all of America’s most influential news outlets. Though neither Floyd nor Hinnant deserved to die, the moral gulf between them could not be larger.”

Jiang continues, “The common thread linking the media circuses over figures like George Floyd, Jussie Smollett, and Bubba Wallace, is the entrenched belief that white supremacy is omnipresent and constantly acted out in any interaction between black and white Americans. The flipside of this dogma has been willful ignorance of people like Cannon Hinnant. Black on white violence is considered unremarkable and no evidence of systemic injustice, nevermind [sic] the fact that it’s far, far more common than the inverse.”

It’s the nature of unspeakable crimes that we still speak about them, but it probably says something good about humanity that the murder of young Cannon Hinnant is so unsettling, so unnerving. Because it indicates that certain acts of evil are still utterly off limits — regardless of the race of the victim, regardless of the race of the perpetrator, and regardless of the agenda of our mainstream media.