Supplemental: New York Times triggers blasphemy rampage!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 28, 2014

How to read newspaper profiles: At the start of the week, the New York Times managed to start an Internet blasphemy rampage.

It did so with a rumination on the existence of angels. Here’s how the rampage was triggered:

On Monday morning, the Times ran profiles of Michael Brown and Darren Wilson side-by-side on the paper’s front page.

Front-page profiles of this type tend to be soft and unhelpful. Routinely, they include second-hand information and musings which may be, in the famous phrase, “more prejudicial than probative.”

The 1400-word profile of Brown was written by John Eligon. He touched off the blasphemy rampage with just his fifth paragraph.

(For an explanation of the term, “blasphemy rampage,” see this earlier post.)

Below, you see the first four paragraphs of Eligon’s profile. The information included there is utterly pointless. But it presented an upbeat portrait, as was perfectly sensible:
ELIGON (8/25/14): It was 1 a.m. and Michael Brown Jr. called his father, his voice trembling. He had seen something overpowering. In the thick gray clouds that lingered from a passing storm this past June, he made out an angel. And he saw Satan chasing the angel and the angel running into the face of God. Mr. Brown was a prankster, so his father and stepmother chuckled at first.

“No, no, Dad! No!” the elder Mr. Brown remembered his son protesting. “I’m serious.”

And the black teenager from this suburb of St. Louis, who had just graduated from high school, sent his father and stepmother a picture of the sky from his cellphone. “Now I believe,” he told them.

In the weeks afterward, until his shooting death by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, on Aug. 9, they detected a change in him as he spoke seriously about religion and the Bible. He was grappling with life’s mysteries.
On its face, that’s utterly pointless. But, by standard reckoning, it’s cheerful and upbeat. In the weeks before his death, Brown was growing philosophical. “He was grappling with life’s mysteries.”

So far, so good! Readers thought they were getting to know what Brown was actually like.

At this point, Eligon slipped. He penned a slightly puzzling paragraph and due to a single turn of phrase, an Internet rampage began:
ELIGON (continuing directly): Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.
Some of that paragraph doesn’t make much sense. The fact that you “live in a community that has rough patches” doesn’t mean that you’re “no angel,” if that’s what it was intended to say.

Meanwhile, had Brown had been involved in one scuffle? Had he dabbled in alcohol? Those don’t seem like hugely significant facts.

On the other hand, Brown had menaced a convenience store clerk just ten minutes before his fatal encounter with Officer Wilson. In that fifth paragraph, Eligon bumped the severity of that behavior down in several ways.

This was classic front-page profile writing. It started with some catchy nonsense, then segued ahead with a turn of phrase built out of Brown’s vision of Satan chasing an angel.

But uh-oh! As he segued out of his opening, Eligon said that Brown “was no angel.” (The young man had “both problems and promise.”)

In some precincts of the “left,” you aren’t allowed to say things like that at this point in time. And so, the rampage started.

We first became aware of the rampage when we read Joanna Rothkopf’s post at Salon. Let’s give credit where credit is due:

Quite correctly, Rothkopf saw that Eligon’s profile “was a generally poignant piece about Michael Brown,” a “generally respectful article.” To read her post, click here.

That said, the new Salon has little respect for its readers or for the truth. For that reason, the site’s famously frenzied editors refashioned what Rothkopf had said, offering these headlines:
Michael Brown was “no angel,” according to outrageously skewed New York Times report
People took to Twitter to express their outrage over the teen's skewed portrayal
To Rothkopf, the profile was “generally respectful.” In Salon's headlines, editors changed that assessment to “outrageously skewed.”

Rothkopf was certainly right about the overall profile. It started in an upbeat way, envisioning Brown as the new Spinoza. As it continued, it put a largely cheerful spin on the events of the young man’s life.

Rothkopf was right about the overall tone. But by the time she composed her post, the blasphemy rampage was underway. Perhaps for that reason, she complained that “the generally respectful article has unwittingly demonstrated the media’s unconscious bias.”

How had Eligon done that? Rothkopf posted the text of his fifth paragraph. Then, she offered this:
ROTHKOPF (8/25/14): In an article that purports to be about the spiritual curiosity of a doomed teen, why is it necessary to hedge the writer’s argument with harmless details of his allegedly fraught youth? Because certain media outlets have aggressively spread certain details of Brown’s life, it seems that every news outlet needs to include details of Brown’s drug use and petty theft (which are normal teenage offenses) in order to remain “objective.” In reality, the inclusion of these details represents the public will to say that maybe, just maybe, Brown’s fate was unavoidable.
Truthfully, none of that makes sense. (On the whole, does the article purport to be about the spiritual curiosity of a doomed teen?)

None of that makes sense. But according to Rothkopf, the profile shouldn’t have mentioned the “harmless details” of Brown’s life, including drug use and “petty theft.” Through some unexplained chain of reasoning, she judged that Eligon’s inclusion of those matters “represents the public will to say that maybe, just maybe, Brown’s fate was unavoidable.”

You’re right! That doesn’t make any sense. But this is the new Salon.

Rothkopf is two years out of Middlebury. She spent her junior year at the Sorbonne, studying literature and cinema.

Her journalistic chops are extremely slight. In a wonderful turn of phrase, the young scribe then offered this:

“Expectedly, people have taken to Twitter to express their outrage at the piece, zeroing in on the phrase ‘was no angel.’ ”

“Expectedly?” Was that the word she meant? According to Rothkopf, it’s now expected that people will voice their outrage over a single turn of phrase in a lengthy profile which is “generally respectful.”

Is that what Rothkopf meant to say? Sadly, what she said is all too true!

As always, the blasphemy outrage was majorly dumb, but that’s what our tribe has become. We used to laugh at Rush’s listeners for this. Today, we’re ditto-heads too.

Can we talk? Eligon’s profile of Michael Brown was largely pointless. But it was also upbeat and cheerful—you might even say respectful. No serious person would think it was some kind of attack on Brown, let alone a statement of “the public will to say that maybe, just maybe, Brown’s fate was unavoidable.”

That last assessment was very dumb, but Rothkopf writes for the new Salon. She posted tweets from outraged scribes, who rose in sacred fury.

You have to be dumb to rampage like that. But on one point, there can be no mistake:

Our team is reflexively dumb now too! There’s no way that this sad turn can really be good for the nation.

46 comments:

  1. The outrage, Bob, was that the right-wing noise machine was in full battle gear, their weapons trained on the character of yet another dead kid.

    And of course, sharp media critic that you are, you miss the larger point, which is this:

    How the heck can any reporter fly into a town, make a few phone calls, talk to a few people, and think they can possibly know enough about a person to "profile" them?

    But our hunger for All the Gossip That's Fit to Print is large. And this goes to the Wilson profile as well. Every juicy tidbit that you can find, including his mother's criminal past.

    And I only read both to try to understand the anger that was boiling up again over yet another dead black kid put on public trial in order to excuse his death.

    Trivial? Pointless? You bet.

    And they have also distracted from the major points that you have already identified, Somerby: How all black kids are thugs who come from a culture of sweaty music, and how all black women have attitude, while white male writes can write anything they want any way they want, and since you can see and understand so clearly what they are trying to say, nobody else has your permission to get upset about it.

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    1. If you think Somerby was calling black music sweaty, you are majorly stupid or dishonest or both. Sane people are tired of the people who come here day after day distorting statements to manufacture complaints. This one is particularly ugly. You should be ashamed of using racial issues to further your hatred of Somerby. How awful it must be to be you!

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    2. "Majorly stupid"? Project much?

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    3. "Sane people are tired of the people who come here day after day distorting statements to manufacture complaints."

      But that's what Bob himself does, on a bigger level, so he can continue whining about poor Al Gore, and battering his various ("left" wing) media pinatas. Because we are all the same, all just ignorant, seething tribalists listening for the drumbeat so we can dance the hate dance. Except Bob, of course. Despite his monomania, HE isn't a tribalist.

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    4. So, why are you here?

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    5. To enjoy the bonfire.

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    6. Ah, yes, commentary here is truly the bonfire of the inanities.

      I'm glad you're having an enjoyable time.

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    7. Well, when the blogger compares a case in Pakistan where a real mob killed real people over internet offense to religious sensibilities to a case where people complain about a newspaper article on Twitter, "bonfire of the inanities" is perhaps as appropriate a term as "musings...on discourse." And that is before getting to the commentary.

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    8. "Ah, yes, commentary here is truly the bonfire of the inanities."

      How incredibly self-revealing.

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  2. Unless the facts stated by Eligon about Brown were untrue, Brown has created his own character. It would be disrespectful to describe the youth you wish he were instead of profiling who he really was.

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    1. And like a true BOBfan, you also miss the larger point.

      Eligon's profile of Brown, as well of the accompanying profile of Wilson, gave you the illusion that you were reading something worthwhile, when you were only being served gossip.

      There is no way you can fly into a town that quick, make a couple of phone calls and interviews, and think you can know the person you are writing about, especially when that person is dead.

      Once upon a long time ago, the old Somerby used to point such things out. Now however, he's in full camo battle fatigues pointing his popguns at people who were outraged that the NYT saw fit to point out the obvious -- he was no angel -- while the right-wing smear campaign was in full gear.

      I have no idea who Brown "really was." The NYT profile of him gave me, really, no information at all about him. And guess what? I am really not the least bit interested in his "character" or that of Officer Wilson, either.

      That's just part of the whole soap opera while we miss the big picture.

      Folks, cops are shooting civilians every day. Most of them are black and male, but some are white, some are Hispanic. Some were violent felons. Some just happened to be in the path of a trigger-happy cop.

      We're better than this. Much better. Whatever it takes. Better training. Better pay. Whatever price, we should pay it.

      This carnage in our streets has got to stop.

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    2. The carnage of citizens killing other citizens is far greater than that of cops killing citizens, guilty or innocent. I suggest we start there.

      I hate the term"trigger happy" because I doubt any cop wants to shoot anyone. Characterizing them that way is unfair.

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    3. Have you considered that maybe it's you who has changed, not Somerby?

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    4. Anyone have the real stats? I heard briefly mentioned the other day that cops kill on average 2 blacks a week (approx 104 a year), and overall over 400 people a year. If this is true African American deaths at the hands of cops is about 25% of all deaths. Given relative violent crime rates, that might not seem all that out of the ordinary. Of course any cop violence should be scrutinized very closely.

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    5. Another deeper question we might ask: Why is life so cheap in the United States that we not only justify killing, but glorify it as the solution instead of the problem?

      Two blacks a week are killed by cops? Sure. They had it coming. Just look at those violent crime rates.

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    6. http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/aug/21/michael-medved/talk-show-host-police-kill-more-whites-blacks/

      Here is a reasonably thorough discussion of the rates of killings for black and white people by cops. The bottom line is that blacks are killed at a higher rate because they commit felonies at a higher rate. When you control for income level, white and black people are killed at the same rate by cops.

      That means racism is a negligible contributor to being killed by a cop. Income (low) and the likelihood of committing a felony are the main contributors. So, yes, those violent crime rates matter when it comes to explaining why blacks are being killed by cops. Race is not the cause.

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    7. I'm confused, What should we control for? Felony rate or income rate?

      And by all means, lets climb aboard our military assault vehicles and invade high crime, low income areas NOW!

      Race will NOT be the cause.

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    8. Control is a statistical term meaning that you use mathematics to remove the variance accounted for by one of your variables to see what the remaining influence is of the other variables on your measure. In this case it means you keep income rate the same (by adjusting mathematically) in order to see how much race contributes to the resulting variability (differences in the number of people killed by cops). If there is very little difference once you have eliminated the effect of income, then it means race doesn't contribute much. You can do the same thing by holding the felony rate constant and seeing the impact of race. The felony rate goes up as income goes down in both the white and black population. The chances of being killed by a cop are the same for white and black people with comparable income levels and felony rates. What affects felony rates is income. So, race is not why these people are being shot. It is because they have low incomes and tend to commit more felonies. For people with higher incomes and lower felonies, white or black, the likelihood of being shot is the same regardless of race and it is less than for poor people, because they are more likely to be felons.

      You can argue that police focus too much on the poor and as a result their felony rate is higher, but you cannot say that police focus too much on black people, because that is not supported by the numbers.

      I know it is confusing to consider what the facts say instead of believing what people have been shouting for so many years. It seems like the shouts must be true because so many black people are being killed, a disproportionate number, but that is because black people are more likely to be poor and to be felons, not because they are being targeted for their blackness.

      So address the cause -- poverty and high crime. If racism contributes to poverty by all means attack it there, in employment and education, in the factors that contribute, in companies and personnel departments, in schools. It isn't happening because cops are especially racist and shoot blacks for no reason besides their race.

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  4. Seeing an angel being attacked in the sky by a demon and running to the face of god is called a delusion and is a symptom of mental illness..

    Stealing a box of cigars is a crime. Pushing someone who catches you is a violent crime.

    Liberals are, as usual, flying into a rage over information that confuses the purity of their precious narrative of hateful white cop shooting innocent black teenager for no apparent reason other than his awful male whiteness and hatred of black people.

    Frankly, I don't know what the hell happened in Ferguson and am ready to believe whatever it is the facts ultimately seem to show. However, I do know this: The average black person is five to six times ore likely to be murdered in his or her lifetime than the average white person and 94% of those doing the murdering are other black people. The solution, obviously, is to ignore that and only get outraged about white lacrosse players, a half-white watch volunteer and a cop in Ferguson who may or may not guilty of acting in a reckless manner because that's what it takes to help black people. If you really think about this well, the really important thing is to preserve the high self esteem of liberals by stoking their self-righteous fury as much as possible. The actual ongoing carnage in the black community is, by comparison, just so much applesauce.

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    1. Preserving liberal high self-esteem is the only benefit to anyone where these incidents are concerned. Liberals enjoy destroying any impulse a black kid might have toward success by informing them, "See, you'll never make it in America because you can't even buy Skittles or Jaywalk without getting shot. But I get it, man, because I'm compassionate." They enjoy compassionately telling the negligent parents of these same kids "We won't judge you, we know you had to produce kids you can't support and abandon them once produced because slavery and Jim Crow." It's a miracle every black kid doesn't end up like Brown, but there still doesn't seem to be enough tragic outcomes for libs' appetites.

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    2. Well put, Lionel.

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    3. "The actual ongoing carnage in the black community is, by comparison, just so much applesauce."

      Looks like someone left the door to the monkey cage open again.

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    4. I hope you understand that I was mocking liberals attitudes towards the death of blacks at the hands of other blacks, right? I mean you do get that, don't you? Because your post looks like a classic case of quote mining.

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    5. Thanks braintree. I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thought the god stuff could indicate some kind of mental disorder. I actually had a friend who went psychotic from bipolar, and something like that seems like a real possibility, given everything that's happened.

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    6. Yes, well done with the remote psychiatry. I imagine you all are well qualified.

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    7. Y'all ain't suggesting that a cruel racist cop killed a young, mentally ill black man. Tell me y'all ain't.

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    8. I think he's suggesting that a writer tried to make a dim 18 year old sound deep and instead made him sound crazy.

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    9. I get that HB and other ZDT members come out of the woodwork whenever the blogger waves his bloody shirt.

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  5. In most communities, people who commit violent felonious robbery and attack police officers are beyond not being angels, they're thugs. They're recognized as such, and as something worse than the typical teen who might "dabble in alcohol."

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    1. Drugs and petty theft may be frequent teen behavior but not normal. The % of teens using drugs has been decreasing. Maybe normal for his peer group but it seems wrong to generalize that to all teens or all black teens. I object to Eligon normalizing bad behavior to make Brown seem like less of a troubled kid.

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    2. You fellas didn't know that mr. Eligon is a black man.

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    3. It doesn't matter whether he is black or not, but I did know he was black. The NY Times could not assign such a story to a white reporter, given current racial politics.

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    4. They COULD assign whomever they want. The problem, as it's continually being impressed upon me, is that white people simply do not understand what it's like to live in a place like Ferguson, have no real insight into the culture, and so blunder about like arrogant clods. Or, like Bob, having no personal stake in the issue, use it as a bat to whack away at their targets, instead of actually reporting it. Current racial politics... Jesus. Current racial ignorance.

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    5. Like you're not batting away at Somerby with this comment, using race as your excuse.

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    6. Poor Bob! Always being victimized. And I'm battering away at Bob because he's become a monomaniacal loon. Race is just one facet of his looniness.

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    7. I wonder when Bob actually read Joe Klein's piece. Before or after he trolled Harris-Perry's Saturday morning show for material for his blog.

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    8. Monomaniacal? He hasn't mentioned test scores all week.

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    9. If only Michael Brown's mother would have moved to Paris and talked to him more when he was a baby.

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    10. If only she (or his dad) had told him it is wrong to push other people around just because you are bigger than they are.

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  6. Michael Brown's community's culture and the political left that created, supports, and defends it caused his suicide-by-cop.

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    1. Liberals caused the disproportionate poverty among African Americans? How, exactly.

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    2. No offense, 1139, but that's like asking a porcupine for directions to the airport.

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    3. Only someone with divine inspiration, like Noah, can ask a porcupine to do anything. I do wish their entrance to the Ark was as prominently featured in children's literature as that of the giraffe. It would do much to underscore God's committment to equity in Creation.

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  7. i will love to share my testimony to you all the people in world i got married to my husband about 2 year ago we start having problems at home like we stop sleeping on the same bed,fighting about little things he always comes home late at night,drinking too much and sleeping with other women out side i have never love any man in my life except him. he is the father of my child and i don't want to loose him because we have worked so hard together to become what we are and have today .few month ago he now decided to live me and the kid,being a single mother can be hard sometimes and so i have nobody to turn to and i was heart broken.i called my mom and explain every thing to her,my mother told me about DR. LALA how he helped her solve the problem between her and my dad i was surprise about it because they have been without each other for three and a half years and it was like a miracle how they came back to each other. i was directed to DR. LALA on his email:lalapumena@gmail.com and explain everything to him,so he promise me not to worry that he will cast a spell and make things come back to how we where so much in love again and that it was another female spirit that was controlling my husband he told me that my problem will be solved within two days if i believe i said OK So he cast a spell for me and after two days my love came back asking me to forgive him i Am so happy now. so that why i decided to share my experience with every body that have such problem contact Dr LALA the great spell caster on his email addresses lalapumena@gmail.com or call +2349038017278

    ReplyDelete
  8. i will love to share my testimony to you all the people in world i got married to my husband about 2 year ago we start having problems at home like we stop sleeping on the same bed,fighting about little things he always comes home late at night,drinking too much and sleeping with other women out side i have never love any man in my life except him. he is the father of my child and i don't want to loose him because we have worked so hard together to become what we are and have today .few month ago he now decided to live me and the kid,being a single mother can be hard sometimes and so i have nobody to turn to and i was heart broken.i called my mom and explain every thing to her,my mother told me about DR. LALA how he helped her solve the problem between her and my dad i was surprise about it because they have been without each other for three and a half years and it was like a miracle how they came back to each other. i was directed to DR. LALA on his email:lalapumena@gmail.com and explain everything to him,so he promise me not to worry that he will cast a spell and make things come back to how we where so much in love again and that it was another female spirit that was controlling my husband he told me that my problem will be solved within two days if i believe i said OK So he cast a spell for me and after two days my love came back asking me to forgive him i Am so happy now. so that why i decided to share my experience with every body that have such problem contact Dr LALA the great spell caster on his email addresses lalapumena@gmail.com or call +2349038017278

    ReplyDelete