Many have noticed that all home invaders and burglars are white in those home-alarm company commercials. Somehow I think the demographics of home invaders is a bit more diverse than that, but the alarm companies don’t want the NAACP down their backs. So they invent a world where all the bad guys are white.

It’s one thing for a for-profit business to engage in such fictions. It’s an easy decision if you don’t want to be accused of racism. But its another thing entirely for the media to engage in airbrushing reality. Fox News ran a story today about a Memphis High School in which 86 teens are pregnant. Along with their story they ran what appears to be a stock photo of a young pregnant woman. They chose a white girl. Here’s the photo:

Suspecting that the high school, Frayser, was not a predominantly white suburban school, I did a little Googling. It turns out that Memphis’ Frayser High School is 98 percent black, 1 percent white, and 1 percent “other.”. With fewer than 1,000 students in grades 9-12, that means that approximately nine students at Frayser are white and nine are “other.” Even if all the white and “other” students were girls, and all of them were pregnant, which is highly unlikely, that still means that about 66 of the pregnant girls would have to be black. The reality, going by the school’s demographics, is that probably all or most all of the pregnant students are black.

So why did Fox News feel the need to illustrate this story with a pregnant white girl? Simple answer: Political correctness. Fox catches a lot of flak already without having to defend itself against racism charges because of a random piece of internet art. The same thing motivates alarm companies to create a myth that all home invaders, burglars and violence-prone boyfriends are white. It’s just easier to use white people in these cases because white people won’t complain.

But what is the cost of these fictions? Journalists used to feel that it was their duty to expose social problems so that they could be addressed honestly and forthrightly. Illegitimacy has been a problem in the black community for many decades, coinciding with the advent of the War on Poverty and all the dependency-creating programs it spawned. Illegitimacy rates for whites and Hispanics have risen in the past 40 years, too, but nowhere near the levels found in the black community.

Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a U.S. Senator, pointed this out in 1965 and caught holy hell for it. At the time, black illegitimacy was only about 24 percent. It’s now more than 70 percent. In the 1980s, when I was an editor at a daily paper, I suggested doing a series on black illegitimacy in hopes of getting the issue some serious consideration. The idea was immediately vetoed by nervous editors and publishers who didn’t want to take the heat for that kind of a series.

I wonder what the situation would be today if Moynhihan’s warnings had been heeded, if social and governmental agencies had mobilized to head off the coming disaster instead of ignoring it out of squeamishness, if the media hadn’t been so politically correct and afraid of offending black readers.

But I do know one thing. It couldn’t have turned out worse.

Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper, Carolina Journal.