How the Media Fell for A Racism Sham
I've been watching this story develop for weeks, and finally someone has put it all together in one place that doesn't have a paywall and isn't a Twitter thread.
Basically, all of our major media once again fell for a fake racism claim (I don't know if "hoax" is the appropriate term quite yet), one that could have easily been cleared up if they'd, you know, done any journalism, but they didn't and thus got scooped by the student paper at BYU, which has to sting if you're the NYT or other major "paper of record" type outlets. I'm not quite at the full blown Alex Jones "they're deliberately trying to divide the country by race" claim yet, but at the minimum major institutions are not doing any due diligence on certain stories, as if they want them to be true.
https://www.commonsense.news/p/how-the- ... acism-sham
After the match, 19-year-old Richardson told her godmother, Lesa Pamplin, about the incident. Pamplin is a criminal defense attorney running for a county judgeship in Texas, and was not at the game—but the next day, she published a tweet that rocketed the story to national attention: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team. While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”
The tweet is no longer available, but it racked up 185,000 likes before it was archived. LeBron James himself responded: “you tell your Goddaughter to stand tall, be proud and continue to be BLACK!! ! We are a brotherhood and sisterhood! We have her back. This is not sports.”
Richardson’s story also spread via her father, Marvin Richardson, who is Deputy Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and who spoke with multiple outlets on behalf of his daughter. In an August 27 story about the incident in the New York Times that named him but not his daughter, he described an alarming, potentially violent scene. Despite an onslaught of slurs, he told the Times, his daughter thought the safest choice was “to keep her head down and continue playing.” He said that “as the crowd got more hyped and the epithets kept coming, she wanted to respond back but she told me she was afraid that, if she did, the raucous crowd could very well turn into a mob mentality.”
Rachel Richardson posted her own account to Twitter on August 28 (archived here), viscerally relaying the horror of the evening. She explained that “my fellow African American teammates and I were targeted and racially heckled throughout the entirety of the match. The slurs and comments grew into threats which caused us to feel unsafe.”
Things got so out of control, she said, that “my teammates and I had to struggle just to get through the rest of the game.” She accused BYU’s coaches and the game’s officials of having “failed to take the necessary steps to stop the unacceptable behavior and create a safe environment.” In an interview with ESPN that aired just a few days later, Richardson said that as the match progressed, the “atmosphere of the student section had changed,” growing “more extreme, more intense.”
The national response to this heinous allegation was swift and righteous. Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, issued a statement on Twitter (now deleted) expressing his shock and disappointment. “I'm disgusted that this behavior is happening and deeply saddened if others didn’t step up to stop it,” he wrote. “As a society we have to do more to create an atmosphere where racist a**holes like this never feel comfortable attacking others.” For its part, BYU quickly acknowledged that something horrible had happened in the fieldhouse. The day after the game, it published an apologetic statement, saying that the fan deemed responsible for shouting the epithets—who was not a BYU student—had been banned from all university athletic venues.
Unsurprisingly, major media outlets were all over this story. The Times’ coverage set the tone, with the Washington Post and CNN and Sports Illustrated and NPR all publishing similar articles, alongside the predictable think pieces. The incident also had consequences for BYU sports more generally. The head coach of women’s basketball at the University of South Carolina canceled its home opener against BYU. A match between Duke and Rider University’s women’s volleyball teams—scheduled to be played at the BYU arena—was moved to a nearby high school gym in order to provide both teams “the safest atmosphere,” according to Duke’s Director of Athletics, Nina King.
For millions of people watching this story unfold, this was yet another example of the ineradicable stain of American racism, of just how little progress we’ve really made.
Except it didn’t happen.
There is no evidence that the chain of events described by Richardson and her family members occurred. There isn’t even evidence a single slur was hurled at her and her teammates, let alone a terrifying onslaught of them.
All the journalists who credulously reported on this event were wrong—and it was an embarrassing kind of wrong, because the red flags were large, numerous, and flapping loudly. Richardson and her family members reported that racial slurs had been hurled with abandon, loudly and repeatedly, in a crowded gym filled with more than 5,000 people. But the journalists covering this incident never stopped to notice how odd it was that none of these vile slurs were captured by any of the thousands of little handheld cameras in the gym at the time, nor on the bigger cameras recording the match. Nor did they find it strange that in the days following the incident, not a single other eyewitness came forward—none of Richardson’s black teammates, and none of the players for either team.
Instead of heeding the red flags and slowing down to ask some questions, mainstream journalists simply consumed and regurgitated the story as it had been fed to them by Richardson, her godmother, her father, and a major university’s public relations apparatus (which was in DEFCON 1 mode, doing everything it could to broadcast contrition and contain the growing damage to the university’s reputation).
If any of these journalists had demonstrated an iota of curiosity or skepticism—if they’d practiced journalism as it was meant to be practiced—they could have had a major scoop. Instead they acted as stenographers, with terrible results.
Everything that happened here fits into a growing problem in mainstream newsrooms: the injection of political values even into straight reporting, undermining the very purpose of journalism.
Among activist journalists, the basic idea is that appeals to “objectivity”—meaning that the journalist will seek out crucial information and act as a neutral arbiter—doesn’t advance social justice. Instead, these journalists are making the same errors they decry from the past, but in the opposite direction. Journalists used to ignore accusations of racism? Well, now the default should be to accept them at face value. Prior generations of (mostly male) journalists didn’t take sexual assault seriously? Well, now we should #BelieveWomen, and journalists themselves should proudly tweet #MeToo. Let’s not worry too much about the fact that believing things reflexively, or participating in activist movements, has typically been anathema to old-school journalism. Leave those concerns to the rapidly aging dinosaurs who will soon be departing our newsrooms.
Even as major media outlets were ignoring the red flags surrounding the BYU incident, some of their smaller competitors were busy doing actual journalism—and it’s revealing who didn’t botch this story. On August 30, the local paper, the Salt Lake Tribune, published an article questioning whether the correct perpetrator had been identified and banned: “BYU Police Lt. George Besendorfer said Tuesday that based on an initial review of surveillance footage of the crowd, the individual who was banned wasn’t shouting anything while the Duke player was serving.” Besendorfer issued a plea for someone, anyone, to corroborate Richardson’s story. “So far, Besendorfer also said, no one from the student section or elsewhere at the volleyball match last week has come forward to BYU police to report the individual responsible for the slur. He also said no one has come forward to say they heard the slur being shouted during the match. He implored students who heard the comments to come forward.”
But the best reporting actually came from an even smaller upstart. On August 30, the Cougar Chronicle—a conservative campus paper at BYU—published a story by student journalists Luke Hanson and Thomas Stevenson. They reported that according to a source in the athletic department’s office, the search for any evidence of a slur had, thus far, turned up zilch. Moreover, Hanson and Stevenson reached out to a number of spectators, and they, too, said they heard nothing unusual.
This is all Journalism 101—but the big guys couldn’t be bothered. What’s more, the Chronicle writers revealed that, according to their source in the athletic department, the man who was fingered as the culprit was not only innocent but “mentally challenged,” and was punished to “appease a mob.”
Last Friday, their reporting was validated.
BYU issued another statement that completely imploded the dominant storyline about this incident. The university explained that it had conducted a thorough investigation of the evening’s game, including extensive review of the available video footage and interviews with more than 50 individuals in attendance, and had not found evidence of a single fan yelling a single slur. The ban on the innocent fan had been lifted.
By this point, between the original New York Times story and a tepid followup, a combined five reporters and researchers had been pantsed by a small student paper. If all this provoked any soul-searching on the part of the Times, it was unclear from its report on BYU’s findings.
Remarkably, their most recent story treated the events as unresolved: “B.Y.U. did not directly address why its findings contradicted the account by Richardson, and the statements by both universities left questions unanswered.” It also included a statement from Duke’s athletic director saying the university stood by the volleyball team. The story ends with a reminder that at the overwhelmingly Mormon school, less than 1 percent of students are black, and that a recent report highlighted the university’s diversity issues. It’s unclear exactly why this is relevant; the point seems to be for the Times to advertise that it understands racism is a serious problem at BYU, and that even if the school were not guilty of it this time, everyone knows the university’s soul is not entirely spotless.
The BYU non-brouhaha brouhaha is part of a growing problem. From the outright criminal fraud of Jussie Smollett—in which some of the most prominent journalists in the world accepted a storyline that never really made much sense—to the unwarranted piling on of the Covington Catholic High School kids, there’s an established pattern of journalists being far too credulous when these incidents first burst onto the scene.
There are real-world consequences to this sort of shoddy reporting, not just for newspapers’ reputations and their pocketbooks (Nicholas Sandmann, the face of the Covington controversy, sued and settled with CNN, the Washington Post, and NBC), but for those caught in the crossfire. In this case, a vulnerable, innocent young man was wrongly accused of horrendous acts, and an entire student body was slandered. Millions of people will continue to believe this incident occurred, because debunkings never travel a tenth as far and wide as misinformation does.
It won’t take some radical revolution for journalists to better cover fast-developing, controversial incidents involving race and other hot-button issues. All they have to do is rediscover norms that are already there, embedded in journalistic tradition. The best, oldest-school newspaper editors—a truly dying breed—constantly pester cub reporters to make that one extra call, ask that one extra question, follow that one extra unlikely lead. They do this all in the service of making sure their organization prints the best, most accurate version of the news (and doesn’t get sued). They can adhere to these norms without becoming a shill for the powerful. It’s simply a matter of approaching a story with curiosity and skepticism, of not believing they are the advocate for one side in a conflict—no matter how righteous and obvious the battle lines may seem at first glance.
You should really read the original, it's full of supporting links to other reporting and supporting evidence.
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A more jaundiced view of the same story, hopefully this particular link goes over the paywall:
The Media’s Pathological Commitment to Dividing Americans along Racial Lines
When an opportunity arises to publish a story that might make Americans feel as though they’re living in a country just barely more racially harmonious than South Africa under apartheid, much of the mainstream press have long adhered to a compact: Never investigate, and, once the story is proven to be mistaken, never apologize.
Late last month, Rachel Richardson, a member of the Duke University women’s volleyball team, accused fans of the Brigham Young University squad of hurling racial epithets at her during a match at BYU. She further charged BYU officials with having “failed to take the necessary steps to stop the unacceptable behavior and create a safe environment.”
Everyone — including the administration at BYU, who quickly identified and banned a suspect from campus — was rightly horrified by the prospect of such harassment of a black athlete.
Yet at so many outlets, Richardson’s allegations were treated not as a subject of inquiry, but as gospel truth to immediately be atoned for.
“What does it say about the BYU community and culture that this happened?” CNN’S Alisyn Camerota asked BYU’s athletic director. “A Division I volleyball match at Brigham Young University turned really ugly when black players from Duke University endured racial slurs from at least one fan in the crowd,” explained Brianna Keilar, also of CNN.
The New York Times reported that “Marvin Richardson, the father of the Duke volleyball player, said in an interview late Saturday that a slur was repeatedly yelled from the stands as his daughter was serving, making her fear ‘the raucous crowd’ could grow violent.” The Times tacked on that BYU’s “student population is less than 1 percent Black” and “has struggled with creating an inclusive environment for its students of color,” so that readers could understand that BYU is the type of place where racial harassment takes place.
Mike Freeman, a columnist and USA Today’s race and inequality editor for sports, headlined a column “In the BYU-Duke volleyball story, a racist, a plethora of failures, and a hero,” and led it with the assertion that “what’s certain about one of the uglier stories, in a sea of recent ugly stories, is that so many people failed a young Black woman named Rachel Richardson.”
ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith denounced BYU for its “dereliction of duty,” blasting the university for “not addressing it with a level of quickness and speed that you should’ve addressed this with.” On Outside the Lines, ESPN’s “Emmy Award-winning investigative series [that] examines topical issues off the playing field,” Holly Rowe interviewed Richardson, asking her about how the incident should be responded to without doing an iota of legwork to confirm that the incident had occurred.
And, as it turns out, it didn’t. A BYU investigation that involved a review of the video of the event and interviews reaching out to over 50 eyewitnesses turned up no “evidence to corroborate the allegation that fans engaged in racial heckling or uttered racial slurs at the event.” Richardson had all but assuredly misinterpreted anodyne chants, bellows, and cheers as something more sinister.
The media’s reflexive response to the college sophomore’s accusations was revealing of a well-documented bias. If the details of a particular story make American society appear to be irredeemably racist, the story will be given top billing, regardless of whether the underlying facts can be confirmed.
More troubling is that the pundits and reporters who routinely fall victim to their biases rarely apologize or learn from past mistakes.
In the run-up to the release of the results of the BYU investigation, as it became increasingly clear that there was little evidence to support Richardson’s claims, Freeman, the USA Today editor, called the idea that she had misheard the slurs a “conspiracy theory.”
“The other conspiracy theory is that she [Richardson] misheard the word. That is a word you don’t mishear. You certainly don’t mishear it more than once,” he wrote without further explanation, before smearing BYU as a racist institution.
And the Times responded to BYU’s announcement by suggesting that the university “did not directly address why its findings contradicted the account by Richardson.” The Times also capped its article with a highly suggestive disclaimer.
“B.Y.U. is owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The student population is predominantly white and Mormon. Less than one percent of students are Black,” the article reads. “The school has struggled with creating an inclusive environment for its students of color, according to a February 2021 report by a university committee that studied race on campus.”
ESPN took a half-step in the right direction. Stephen A. Smith acknowledged that while “racism and prejudice still exists in this country . . . we’re not doing ourselves any favors if we bring it up and broach it when it doesn’t exist. And that’s the key that we need to focus on.” However, he qualified his comment by saying of Richardson, “I’ll be damned if I’m not giving her the benefit of the doubt.”
Still, it was an enormous step forward from the outlet’s airing of a hagiographic documentary last year about NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, who maintains that a noose was hung in his garage prior to a 2020 race despite a dispositive FBI investigation that found that the object was likely a garage-door pull.
CNN also deserves credit for devoting the first edition of a new segment called Upon Further Review to correcting the record. In it, host John Avlon admitted to a “rush to judgment” caused by a “well-intentioned impulse” to believe Richardson. “But facts always have to come first,” he continued.
— New Day (@NewDay) September 12, 2022
This is applause-worthy progress for CNN. Moving forward, though, the standard for good journalism must not be a willingness to apologize afterward but an ability to control impulses, however well-intentioned.
_________________
“The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”
-- Robert Anton Wilson
Last edited by Dox47 on 15 Sep 2022, 10:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
That it's not good, but also not as pervasive or virulent in the US as many people seem to suppose. Why is my opinion the story here?
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Don't be so eager to be offended. The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring kind of conformity.
That's my read as well.
Huh, I always forget about that OT tag, I'll have to add it to my bag of tricks, I'm always looking for better ways to format my posts for readability and clarity.
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The failure to do the most basic due diligence may not be a matter of these journalists and editors actually believing every accusation of racism but fear of publically not believing every accusation of racism. It feels I am loony for writing this but in 2022 accusations of racism are worse for you than accusations of violent crime.
It was correctly noted in the linked article that false accusations could haunt the falsely accused for the rest of their lives. There is another price to be paid. True accusations of racism are assumed to be a hoax, and the actual racism in society is assumed to be hyperbole.
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Are ordinary, run-of-the-mill people going to bring up charges of racism and other forms of abuse just for the H-e-double hockey sticks of it if there wasn't any?
The forces of reaction seem to be more than happy to push against claims of racism in order to pretend it doesn't exist... except against white people.
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Interesting, so according to right wing Americans it was terrible for "woke" people to attack Kyle Rittenhouse because of his tender age but it's alright for the same right wing heavy weights in the media to pile onto one 19 year old girl
I have scoured the internet and have found zero evidence this teenager made up the whole thing. I've watched the video and members of her own Duke girl's volleyball team turned and faced the source of the "alleged" slur at the exact moment the 19 year old claimed she was racially abused. Just because others in the Brigham Young University cheer stand chose to not report the slur does not mean it didn't happen.
In addition to the video showing players turn when the slurs were thrown the other black players also allegedly heard the slur and in addition there's the incident about Rachel Richardson having her life threatened
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/100 ... m-byu-fans
I simply don't trust the Brigham Young University officials conducting their own investigation when (according to Rachel) they refused to take action at the time the incident took place.
Sounds more like sweeping a mess under the carpet and attempting to smear a teenage girl's reputation to cover up a racist incident.
How the Media Fell for A Racism Sham
media is paid by the advertisers, so they go that way - all the way
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-women- when is the sacrifice for status-signalling enough ???
the sacred lies, i prefer a holy cow
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I simply don't trust the Brigham Young University officials conducting their own investigation when (according to Rachel) they refused to take action at the time the incident took place.
Sounds more like sweeping a mess under the carpet and attempting to smear a teenage girl's reputation to cover up a racist incident.
According to the article she claimed she was “inundated” by slurs. People taking a look into the stands indicates something was yelled from the stands, it does not indicate inundation nor does it even indicate it was a racial slur. I would agree it is plausible a slur or two was yelled at her and it was not picked up by the video. Inundation is most likely to be picked up by video.
A lot of people do not understand how sports teams work, they back each up. Remember when most teams staged a one day strike in support of BLM. Do you think all of the white athletes agreed with BLM? I doubt it. They went along with the strike and publicly supported the cause to back up teammates that were hurting.
Lets make the horrible assumption that her BYU teammates, the coaching staff, the administration, and the BYU fans are covering up one of the players on their team being inundated with racial abuse. Putting aside that this assumption is rank anti Mormon prejudice why would BYU’s opponents go along with that coverup?. It strains credulity they would not have heard it, they were just on the other side of the net.
Your assumption is that all of players, staff from both teams, reporters, and fans are engaged in a cover up.
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https://bleacherreport.com/articles/100 ... m-byu-fans
I simply don't trust the Brigham Young University officials conducting their own investigation when (according to Rachel) they refused to take action at the time the incident took place.
Sounds more like sweeping a mess under the carpet and attempting to smear a teenage girl's reputation to cover up a racist incident.
According to the article she claimed she was “inundated” by slurs. People taking a look into the stands indicates something was yelled from the stands, it does not indicate inundation nor does it even indicate it was a racial slur. I would agree it is plausible a slur or two was yelled at her and it was not picked up by the video. Inundation is most likely to be picked up by video.
A lot of people do not understand how sports teams work, they back each up. Remember when most teams staged a one day strike in support of BLM. Do you think all of the white athletes agreed with BLM? I doubt it. They went along with the strike and publicly supported the cause to back up teammates that were hurting.
Lets make the horrible assumption that her BYU teammates, the coaching staff, the administration, and the BYU fans are covering up one of the players on their team being inundated with racial abuse. Putting aside that this assumption is rank anti Mormon prejudice why would BYU’s opponents go along with that coverup?. It strains credulity they would not have heard it, they were just on the other side of the net.
Your assumption is that all of players, staff from both teams, reporters, and fans are engaged in a cover up.
Why wouldn't the white players have felt the same way about BLM as the black players did?
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https://bleacherreport.com/articles/100 ... m-byu-fans
I simply don't trust the Brigham Young University officials conducting their own investigation when (according to Rachel) they refused to take action at the time the incident took place.
Sounds more like sweeping a mess under the carpet and attempting to smear a teenage girl's reputation to cover up a racist incident.
According to the article she claimed she was “inundated” by slurs. People taking a look into the stands indicates something was yelled from the stands, it does not indicate inundation nor does it even indicate it was a racial slur. I would agree it is plausible a slur or two was yelled at her and it was not picked up by the video. Inundation is most likely to be picked up by video.
A lot of people do not understand how sports teams work, they back each up. Remember when most teams staged a one day strike in support of BLM. Do you think all of the white athletes agreed with BLM? I doubt it. They went along with the strike and publicly supported the cause to back up teammates that were hurting.
Lets make the horrible assumption that her BYU teammates, the coaching staff, the administration, and the BYU fans are covering up one of the players on their team being inundated with racial abuse. Putting aside that this assumption is rank anti Mormon prejudice why would BYU’s opponents go along with that coverup?. It strains credulity they would not have heard it, they were just on the other side of the net.
Your assumption is that all of players, staff from both teams, reporters, and fans are engaged in a cover up.
Before jumping to conclusions we need to first establish whether Richardson is lying. Just because nobody has come forward from Brigham Young to corroborate her claim doesn't automatically mean she was lying.
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https://bleacherreport.com/articles/100 ... m-byu-fans
I simply don't trust the Brigham Young University officials conducting their own investigation when (according to Rachel) they refused to take action at the time the incident took place.
Sounds more like sweeping a mess under the carpet and attempting to smear a teenage girl's reputation to cover up a racist incident.
According to the article she claimed she was “inundated” by slurs. People taking a look into the stands indicates something was yelled from the stands, it does not indicate inundation nor does it even indicate it was a racial slur. I would agree it is plausible a slur or two was yelled at her and it was not picked up by the video. Inundation is most likely to be picked up by video.
A lot of people do not understand how sports teams work, they back each up. Remember when most teams staged a one day strike in support of BLM. Do you think all of the white athletes agreed with BLM? I doubt it. They went along with the strike and publicly supported the cause to back up teammates that were hurting.
Lets make the horrible assumption that her BYU teammates, the coaching staff, the administration, and the BYU fans are covering up one of the players on their team being inundated with racial abuse. Putting aside that this assumption is rank anti Mormon prejudice why would BYU’s opponents go along with that coverup?. It strains credulity they would not have heard it, they were just on the other side of the net.
Your assumption is that all of players, staff from both teams, reporters, and fans are engaged in a cover up.
Why wouldn't the white players have felt the same way about BLM as the black players did?
I am sure a lot did, but it was not unanimous as it appeared publically. Athletic culture traditionally has been pretty conservative, players come from Red States etc.
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