The Associated Press can describe a Mississippi murder in the language of 1930. What it will not do, at least on X, is show the face of the man charged with it.
Why? Because doing so would completely invalidate their narrative that the killing was yet another example of today’s supposedly rampant white supremacist violence.
Tasia Fortune, 29, a mother of four, was found dead behind an abandoned Jackson, Mississippi, house on Aug. 3. The medical examiner later ruled the death a homicide. Police arrested Jarques “Jock” Ratliff, 51 for allegedly committing the crime. He pleaded not guilty and was denied bond.
51-year-old Black man Jarques Ratliff was arrested in connection to the hanging of 29-year-old Black woman Tasia Fortune from a tree in Mississippi.
CNN initially suggested that White racism was to blame for the incident.
Follow: @AFpost https://t.co/uguEL63mAw
— AF Post (@AFpost) September 12, 2026
Jackson police say Ratliff knew Fortune. They have not announced a racial motive. This week they booked a second suspect, Earnest Lloyd Jr., 25, also on a murder charge. Like Fortune and Ratliff, Lloyd is black. A warrant is out for a third person.
Fortune’s mother, Christy Spivey, said she does not believe the killing was about race. She has described it as personal. That is the case on the ground.
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It is not the case the Associated Press sold on social media, however.
The AP posted that Fortune’s death “stirred distressing memories of the grim history of lynchings.” It framed the Jackson homicide as a national racial emergency — and purposefully did not include the mugshot that would have wrecked the narrative they spun.
The death of Tasia Fortune, a Black Mississippi woman found hanging from a tree on Aug. 3, has stirred distressing memories of the grim history of lynchings across the U.S. South. https://t.co/sCmPZt6C8K
— The Associated Press (@AP) September 21, 2026
A Community Note had to be added to the post to bring attention to what the caption skipped: police arrested a black man who had an association with Fortune after the death was ruled a homicide.
If the suspect were a white stranger in a hood, that photo would be the headline. But because the charged men are black, their pictures become “inconvenient,” and the media suddenly chose to look away.
There have been many other such instances of left-wingers dishonestly framing the deaths of minorities in recent weeks.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats have already tried to turn a string of recent hangings into “modern-day lynchings.” The Western Journal fact-checked that claim. Most of the cases they bundled were ruled suicides, including the 2025 deaths of Trey Reed at Delta State and Cory Zukatis in Vicksburg. One homicide in Jackson does not convert those rulings into a Klan revival.
Mississippi has seen this stunt before. When Nolan Wells died, national voices rushed to a racial script but a grand jury did not. The View and Al Sharpton were left holding a theory the evidence would not carry.
Sunny Hostin also has a bad habit of turning every Southern tragedy into a morality play about white America, then discovering the suspects, the friends, or the facts do not fit her theory.
Fortune’s death is a homicide investigation, the two men have been charged and the police expect more arrests. That is a typical crime story. It is not proof of a nationwide lynching outbreak.
CNN painted Tasia Fortune hanging from a tree in Mississippi as a reminder of “painful history.”
Two Black suspects have now been arrested for her murder.
The lynching narrative is obliterated.
CNN has dropped the story.
They never cared about Tasia https://t.co/6xVsB13DGD
— Alec Lace (@AlecLace) September 23, 2026
What the AP did is worse than sloppy. It took a black woman’s murder, sanded the suspects out of the picture, and invited the country to relitigate Jim Crow.
That is how race hoaxes are built: with a caption that hides the booking photo.
Ratliff and Lloyd are accused, not convicted. The motive is still unstated. None of that licenses a wire service to imply a racial terror campaign while declining to show the men in custody.
If the press wants to honor Fortune, it should report who police say killed her. If it wants to lecture America about lynching, it should start by putting the suspect’s picture next to the sermon. The refusal to do both at once is not journalism.
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