LIBERALLY LOATHING: Eight more letters about Indiana!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2015

Part 3—Assuming the worst about Them: Last Tuesday, David Brooks wrote a column about Indiana’s newly-passed “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

Two days later, the New York Times published eight letters about his column. All eight letters challenged some part of the column. All eight echoed the Times editorial line, which had been stated in this editorial on that same Tuesday morning.

We thought those letters provided intriguing examples of contemporary “liberal” instincts. But first, let’s summarize the basic points in Brooks’ column, with most of which we agree.

As he started, Brooks referred to “a growing consensus that straight, gay and lesbian people deserve full equality with each other. We are to be judged by how we love, not by whom we love.

“If denying gays and lesbians their full civil rights and dignity is not wrong, then nothing is wrong,” Brooks said as he continued his description of this growing consensus. “Gays and lesbians should not only be permitted to marry and live as they want, but be honored for doing so.”

Brooks seemed to agree with that “growing consensus.” A bit later, he seemed to applaud the fact that “the evangelical movement is evolving. Many young evangelicals understand that their faith should not be defined by this issue,” by which he meant same-sex marriage.

Does Brooks support same-sex marriage? It seems that he actually does. He doesn’t seem to have written about the topic much. But in a colloquy with Gail Collins in December 2012, he said this:

“My guess is that the courts will gradually allow gay marriage and gradually forbid affirmative action, at least based strictly on race. Of course I want both those things to happen, so perhaps I'm allowing the wish to be father to the thought.”

We’re going to rule that David Brooks is part of that “growing consensus.” Needless to say, that doesn’t mean that he isn’t a bigot to boot!

Here’s the problem! In that same column last week, Brooks also spoke in general support of “religious tolerance.” He suggested that an ascendant gay rights movement could afford to be respectful toward those whose religious views may reject the concept of same-sex marriage.

(As he noted, it generally has been.)

Does that make Brooks a bigot? To us the modern liberals, almost everything does! In this passage, Brooks made a claim which may cause some modern “liberals” to unsheathe our tribe’s favorite bombs:

BROOKS (3/31/15): On the other hand, this was a nation founded on religious tolerance. The ways of the Lord are mysterious and are understood differently by different traditions. At their best, Americans have always believed that people should have the widest possible latitude to exercise their faith as they see fit or not exercise any faith. While there are many bigots, there are also many wise and deeply humane people whose most deeply held religious beliefs contain heterosexual definitions of marriage. These people are worthy of tolerance, respect and gentle persuasion.

Say what? There are “many wise and deeply humane people whose most deeply held religious beliefs contain heterosexual definitions of marriage?” Can David Brooks say that?

For ourselves, we wouldn’t sign on to that view. We’d be slow to say that there are “many wise and deeply humane people” on the present-day scene at all!

Like Anne Frank, we think most people are good and decent. But we’re slow to assert the vast moral greatness we humans are all too strongly inclined to confer on ourselves.

That said, we agree with a view Brooks later stated. Many people have been raised in religious traditions which don’t accept same-sex marriage!

Naming names, we’d start with Pope Francis, and work our way down from there. Until the last year or so, this list would have included Hillary Clinton. Also a fellow named Obama, to whom we liberals extend a pass because we’ve heard he was lying when he kept stating that view.

Whatever! But if we had to list the potential bigots, we’d start with well-known people. Many modern pseudo-liberals are inclined to a different approach.

They seek out the least among us and start raining their B-bombs on them. They find the “slack-jawed yokels” and “hillbillies” and bomb their pizza joints.

If you don’t support same-sex marriage, some in our tribe are inclined to say that this proves you’re a “bigot.” Especially if you’re from the South!

Can you be a decent person without supporting same-sex marriage? We’re pretty much going to say that you pretty much probably can.

Can you be a decent person while dropping your bombs on the slack-jawed yokels who inhabit your mind? For us, that’s a tougher call.

All last week, the slack-jawed yokels of our own liberal world marauded about in pursuit of “pizza-gate,” the name the geniuses at Salon bestowed on this latest fight.

At Salon, you could see comments from our own yokels. Last Thursday, those eight letters about the David Brooks column provided examples of modern thinking from the top of the liberal deck.

We thought those letters were instructive. In some instances, we thought they helped display the limits of our modern liberal imagination. In the case of the letters from the rabbi and the minister, we thought they showed that we may perhaps have a Dimmesdale or two within our own self-impressed tribe.

The eight letters are here. We’ll assume that they were written by good decent people, though they may perhaps show the small imperfections which may exist in our tribe.

On their face, all eight letters were responses to Brooks. We’d have to say that they often carved out rather narrow complaints.

In our view, the most fair-minded writer was a woman from Indiana. We admire her decency, though we’ll note that she lodges a fairly narrow complaint:

LETTERS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (4/2/15): As a liberal who tries to analyze issues with a mind open to conservative viewpoints, I often find myself agreeing with David Brooks, especially when he sounds pretty liberal, and sometimes even when he does not. Today, though, he lost me with this observation:

“While there are many bigots, there are also many wise and deeply humane people whose most deeply held religious beliefs contain heterosexual definitions of marriage. These people are worthy of tolerance, respect and gentle persuasion.”

How can anyone who is deeply humane define marriage in a way that excludes so many humans? If you are deeply humane, you should be able to fully embrace a belief system that includes heterosexual definitions of marriage while also welcoming those participating in same-sex marriages into your businesses and circle of friends.

In the end, I agree with Mr. Brooks that the people he writes about are worthy of tolerance, respect and gentle persuasion. Just not protection to discriminate under an archaic law.

“How can anyone who is deeply humane define marriage in a way that excludes so many humans?” We’re not sure how to answer that question, which someone should take to the pope!

We’ll only note that the nation’s leading Democratic pols were in that camp just a year ago. So are large numbers of everyday American liberals and Dems, even now.

This writer dropped no major bombs in her letter. On this basis, she stood out from the crowd. Other writers described the “hate” they seem to see all around them. They also sounded historical calls of alarm, as in this passage from a writer in Princeton:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: David Brooks is urging L.G.B.T. Americans to be polite, know their place and patiently wait for acceptance by those whose religious beliefs would condemn them to second-class status. Are we really going back to the lunch-counter days of 1963 Mississippi?

Were there “lunch-counter days” in Mississippi? We don’t much think so, but the point was clear, in this and other letters. If a florist doesn’t want to service a same-sex wedding, we’re back in Mississippi!

It’s 1963 again! We’re back at those lunch counters!

There were quite a few such suggestions. A second reference to the lunch counters came in this letter from an actor in Princeton:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: David Brooks seems to give not only religious organizations a pass on discrimination but also businesses. This goes beyond wedding photographers and bakeries for gay marriages.

What is the difference between denying an L.G.B.T. person a seat at a lunch counter and denying a black person?

As a letter had said two days before, Indiana is Selma!

In fairness, Brooks didn’t really express a view as to what particular conduct should be permitted on grounds of religious tolerance. As far as we know, no one has expressed a desire to deny gays the right to sit at lunch counters, or to eat in restaurants generally.

These letters in the New York Times didn’t deride any “slack-jawed yokels” or “hillbillies.” That is the language one finds at Salon. Such uncouth language isn’t likely to make its way into the Times.

That said, these letters often seemed to assume that people who oppose same-sex marriage must be motivated by hate. Four of the letters evoked the civil rights fights of the 1960s, the ultimate standard of hate-filled bigotry in modern American history.

Is it obvious that this is what’s at issue here? Is it obvious that this kind of framing is decent and fair? On some occasions, are we possibly just a tiny bit “hate-filled” over here in our own liberal tribe? Are we determined to assume the worst about everyone who isn’t narrowly inside our tribe?

We were struck by the confidence of the writer who declared, “I understand those who created this legislation.” Soon, he was saying this:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: ...Make no mistake about it, there are people who would prefer that all gay people be dead. There are people who want their way of life to be the only way of living, for all people.

I have seen many changes over my 60 years. What I am seeing today, in regard to Indiana and now Arkansas, is reminiscent of the hate that existed in the 1960s, when African-Americans began to say “enough” and demanded the equality they deserved. So it is with gays, lesbians and others who are denied their rightful place in society.

This writer was certainly fervent. Does he know that the large majority of African-Americans don’t support same-sex marriage at this time? Does that necessarily have to mean that they’re filled with “the hate that existed in the 1960s?” Do they automatically have the “hateful attitudes” referenced earlier in this letter?

For our money, the real Dimmesdales in the crowd were the rabbi and the minister. Selecting a rather narrow objection, the rabbi told us this:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: David Brooks argues that we should be deeply polite to those who use the excuse of their religious freedoms to refuse service to gays and lesbians. He equates this “deep politeness” to the courtesy extended by a man to an Orthodox Jewish woman who will not shake his hand. But this is a false equivalency.

The Orthodox woman will not shake the hand of a man not her husband because of her own spirituality, her own belief in the need to maintain her modesty. There is no animus directed against the man. The bigoted merchant who denies service to a gay person is expressing hatred of the other and is showing no spiritual humility of his own. The equivalency is false.

It’s clear that this particular rabbi has no plan to be “deeply polite!” He starts by assuming that those with religious objections in this area are merely hiding behind an “excuse.” He ends by declaring such people “bigoted” and saying they’re showing their “hatred.”

Such people show no “spiritual humility,” the rabbi declared. Look who’s talking, one analyst quickly replied.

Up in Rhode Island, a Baptist minister told us this:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: We live in an America where our diversity is in constant dialogue with our fundamental belief in equality. In our heart of hearts, who among us doesn’t believe that this Indiana law isn’t about the struggle of some evangelical Christians to accept a new element of modernity in their cultural environment?

Some may feel distress about L.G.B.T. equality. But reacting with rejection and negation are not elements of a healing solution. Tolerance requires respect, not agreement.

Evangelical Christians can reach into the spiritual well of their souls and grasp the qualities of humility, kindness and generosity to guide them to a polite, if not compassionate, response to their neighbors.

We don’t disagree with the minister’s view of what those other parties could do. That said, in heavily Catholic Rhode Island, he focused on “evangelical Christians!” He let us Catholics slide!

The New York Times had now published eleven letters on the new Indiana law. All eleven had agreed with the Times editorial posture.

They didn’t use terms like “rednecks” and yokels,” but they did seem to say Indiana is Selma. They were quick to see hatred in The Others, who seemed to be white, evangelical, Southern.

For ourselves, we could almost imagine we saw a tiny bit of the hate in our own self-assured tribe.

In fairness to Brooks, he never really said what should be permitted in deference to “religious tolerance.” He did suggest that it may not be helpful to dump big fines on Christian florists who don’t want to take part in what they may see as a religious event.

Beyond that, he made a larger suggestion. As a general matter, we think this makes sense:

BROOKS: Certain basic truths are inalienable. Discrimination is always wrong. In cases of actual bigotry, the hammer comes down. But as neighbors in a pluralistic society we try to turn philosophic clashes (about right and wrong) into neighborly problems in which different people are given space to have different lanes to lead lives. In cases where people with different values disagree, we seek a creative accommodation.

In the Jewish community, conservative Jews are generally polite toward Orthodox Jews who wouldn’t use their cutlery. Men are generally polite to Orthodox women who would prefer not to shake their hands. In the larger community, this respectful politeness works best.

The movement to champion gay rights is now in a position where it can afford to offer this respect, at a point where steady pressure works better than compulsion.

Wherever this leads in the present instance, we tend to agree with those general views. But within our modern liberal tribe, a contrary impulse exists:

We seem to have a very strong impulse to think the worst of The Others. We love to call The Others “bigots.” We seem inclined to use dog-whistles to target white Southerners. Everyone else gets a pass!

Our favorite letter-writer joined the minister in suggesting what The Others could do. We agree with what they said.

That said, none of the writers followed Brooks in suggesting that We The Liberals could imaginably “reach into the spiritual well of our souls and grasp the qualities of humility, kindness and generosity to guide ourselves to a polite, if not compassionate, response to our neighbors” too!

We seem good at giving moral advice to Them, more slow when it comes to Us.

The truth is, we liberals sometimes love to hate. Our liberal loathing has been active for decades. Quite often, it leads to bad outcomes.

Tomorrow: O’Hehir finds the hate

Supplemental: Rolling Stone sought “sympathetic coverage!”

TUESDAY, APRIL 7, 2015

That seems to be what they got: Yesterday, we suggested that the New York Times published a pair of soft-soap accounts of the Rolling Stone debacle.

We referred to a news report and a “news analysis” which discussed the Columbia School of Journalism’s report on the giant debacle. The Times used soft soap in each report, we flawlessly said.

To peruse that report, click here.

How odd! Yesterday afternoon, the Daily Beast reported that Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s owner, gave the Times early access to the CSJ report. Lloyd Grove mused about Wenner’s possible motive:

GROVE (4/6/15): Wenner, for his part, indicated to The New York Times—to which he provided an early copy of the Columbia report, days ahead of other media outlets, perhaps in the hope of more sympathetic coverage—that Erdely will continue as a contributing editor.

Other reports suggested that Wenner plans no disciplinary measures for Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana, who oversaw the article’s publication; Erdely’s direct editor, Sean Woods; and other staffers involved in the bogus story’s preparation.

Was Wenner seeking soft soap from the Times? We can’t say, but that seems to be what he got.

As we noted yesterday, Ravi Somaiya’s front-page news report consistently underplayed the size of Rolling Stone’s journalistic debacle. Meanwhile, Jonathan Mahler’s “news analysis” played the fool on behalf of the Stone’s presumably noble motives.

Did Wenner seek soft soap from the Times? Below, you see what soft soap looks like. In this passage, Mahler is speculating about the motives of Sabrina Erdely, author of the Rolling Stone debacle:

MAHLER (4/6/15): On the most basic level, the writer of the Rolling Stone article, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was seduced by an untrustworthy source. More specifically, as the report details, she was swept up by the preconceptions that she brought to the article. As much casting director as journalist, she was looking for a single character with an emblematic story that would speak to—in her words—the “pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture” on college campuses.

Journalists are often driven to cover atrocities and personal traumas by the best intentions, chiefly the desire to right wrongs and shed light on injustice—in a word, empathy. It is a noble impulse that animates a lot of important and courageous reporting. But empathy can also be a source of vulnerability for journalists, lowering their defenses against bad information.

Why did Erdely create such a gigantic fail? Because she had such noble motives!

An analyst could create an alternate speculation full of the lousiest possible motives. Mahler didn’t do that, though. In that passage, he was putting the brightest possible face on the possible reason for a gigantic fail.

In his front-page news report, Somaiya kept understating the size of the fail. Yesterday, we examined the soft soap he employed in his opening paragraphs. A bit later, he began systematically understating the size of Rolling Stone's bungles:

SOMAIYA (4/6/15): The first misstep during the reporting process, the Columbia report said, was that Ms. Erdely did not seek to independently contact three of Jackie’s friends, who were quoted in the piece, using pseudonyms, expressing trepidation at the idea of Jackie telling the authorities that she had been assaulted. The quotes came from Jackie’s recollection of the conversation. Those friends later cast doubt on Jackie’s story in interviews with The Washington Post and denied saying the words Rolling Stone had attributed to them. The three told the report’s authors that they would have made the same denials to Rolling Stone if they had been contacted.

The three friends “cast doubt” on Jackie’s story? In fact, they flatly contradicted her story in a series of ways.

They denied that they met Jackie in front of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, as she had told Rolling Stone, on the night of the alleged attack. (They said that they had met her in a different part of the campus.)

They denied that her dress was bloody that night or that she seemed to be injured. They said that she had described a different type of attack from the one described in Rolling Stone. And yes, they denied that they had given the noxious, self-serving advice attributed to them in Rolling Stone.

Beyond that, they provided documentary evidence which suggested that Jackie had invented an imaginary boy friend, “Haven Monahan,” in the weeks before the alleged attack, using him in a scheme to make one of the three friends jealous.

When Somaiya says the three friends “cast doubt on her story,” he massively understates the nature of what occurred. As he continues, so does that pattern:

SOMAIYA (continuing directly): Rolling Stone, the report said, also did not provide the fraternity with enough information to adequately respond to questions from the magazine. Later, when the article had been published, the fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, said it did not host a function on the weekend Jackie had specified.

And the magazine failed to identify Jackie’s attacker, the report said. It was content to give him a pseudonym, Drew, when Jackie resisted Ms. Erdely’s request to help find him. The fraternity, The Post and the police have been unable to find anyone who matches Jackie’s description of Drew.

The fraternity “said” there was no function that night? In fact, the fraternity has presented substantial evidence to that effect, as described in the official press release about the four-month police investigation.

The Post and the police “have been unable to find anyone who matches Jackie’s description of Drew?” In truth, the Post and the police “haven’t been able to find the lifeguard matching Jackie’s description” because it’s fairly clear that no such person exists.

Jackie said Drew was a Phi Kappa Psi member who worked with her at the UVA aquatic center. This is what the CSJ reported:

CSJ REPORT (4/5/15): There was, in fact, an aquatic center lifeguard who had worked at the pool at the same time as Jackie and had the first name she had used freely with Erdely. He was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi, however. The police interviewed him and examined his personal records. They found no evidence to link him to Jackie's assault.

Somaiya kept understating the size of the debacle. Mahler imagined the noble intentions explaining Erdely’s fail.

According to Grove, Wenner gave the Times early access hoping for a bit of soft soap. Maybe it’s all a coincidence, but soft soap is what Wenner got.

LIBERALLY LOATHING: Attacking the slack-jawed yokels among us!

TUESDAY, APRIL 7, 2015

Part 2—In search of our favorite targets: Just for the record, a lot of people in Indiana don’t approve of same-sex marriage, at least not yet.

If we lived in Indiana, that wouldn’t be our position. But a lot of people still disapprove, as can be deduced from Frank Bruni’s latest column.

In this passage, Bruni quotes David Gushee, “an evangelical Christian.” Gushee “openly challenges his faith’s censure of same-sex relationships, to which he no longer subscribes:”

BRUNI (4/5/15): “Conservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people,” Gushee said.

Polls back him up. A majority of Americans support marriage equality, including a majority of Catholics and most Jews. But a 2014 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that while 62 percent of white mainline Protestants favor same-sex marriages, only 38 percent of black Protestants, 35 percent of Hispanic Protestants and 28 percent of white evangelical Protestants do.

As sometimes happens, the link Bruni provides doesn’t lead to the survey he describes. We continued to search. I

At the PRRI site, we found this survey from 2014. In its report on that survey, the PRRI cites figures similar to the ones Bruni published.

According to the PRRI, “only 27% of white evangelical Protestants and 35% of black Protestants support same-sex marriage.”

According to that same report, “Catholics who regularly attend church are in fact divided on the issue (50% favor, 45% oppose).” Across the nation, 39 percent of black Americans approve of same-sex marriage. Overall, 51 percent of people in the Midwest approve.

Based on those figures, we'd guess that a lot of people in Indiana don’t approve of same-sex marriage at this point. We thought Bruni was perhaps a tiny bit slippery in the way he slid past Catholics in that passage, especially since all Catholic officials disapprove of the practice.

Presumably, there isn’t a priest in the state of Indiana who will perform a same-sex marriage at this time. We'll guess that Indiana Catholics are evenly split on the question.

Why did Bruni seem to give Catholics a tiny pass in the way he did? We’ll offer a possible guess:

Bruni put the word “bigotry” at the start of his headline, then used it again in his column. And he largely seemed to be targeting white Evangelical Christians, one of the groups we tribal liberals have loathed for a very long time.

Can we talk? Unless you live on the dark side of the moon, you’ll understand a basic fact. The liberal world is frequently driven by loathing for white Southerners.

In our view, we’re frequently driven by dull-witted loathing of this type, as was the case in last week’s explosions about Indiana’s new law.

At this time, a lot of people still don’t approve of same-sex marriage. In a killjoy piece for the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf fleshed that out in greater detail:

FRIEDERSDORF (4/3/15): What do white evangelicals, Muslims, Mormons, blacks, conservative Republicans, and immigrants from Africa, South America, and Central America all have in common? They're less likely to support gay marriage than the average Californian. Over the years, I've patronized restaurants owned by members of all those groups. Today, if I went out into Greater Los Angeles and chatted up owners of mom-and-pop restaurants, I'd sooner or later find one who would decline to cater a gay wedding. The owners might be members of Rick Warren's church in Orange County. Or a family of immigrants in Little Ethiopia or on Olvera Street. Or a single black man or woman in Carson or Inglewood or El Segundo.

Should we destroy their livelihoods?

So many people and groups for us to loathe! But let’s be honest just for once. We will always direct our liberal loathing at white Southerners and evangelicals. Other groups need not apply!

The mainstream press corps tends to play that same demographic game. That’s how it worked in last week’s explosion of our liberal loathing.

You may recall what happened. An intrepid reporter for a South Bend TV station went looking for some restaurateur who might object, on religious grounds, to catering same-sex weddings.

By total happenstance, she stumbled upon a young white woman who identified herself as a “Christian.” No blacks or Muslims or even white Catholics need apply!

The young woman in question, Crystal O’Connor, is part owner of Memories Pizza, a small town pizza joint. She said the restaurant was open to gays, and no one has said different.

That said, O’Connor said she wouldn’t cater a same-sex wedding, presumably because she saw it as some sort of religious event. (As always, the TV reporter didn’t spend a lot of time exploring this young woman’s thinking.)

At CNN, Gary Tuchman made a similar play. He tramped the back roads of Georgia, interviewing southern white florists about their views on this matter. No blacks were approached during Tuchman's search.

Soon, we had the deluge from the “dumb aggressives” who lurk within our own tribe. We liberals simply love to loathe the nation's Christian hillbillies! The dumbest and meanest within our troop began harassing the small town pizza joint with phony orders of pizza. One teacher managed to get herself in trouble with the law for tweeting a threat to burn the pizza joint down.

Elsewhere, we pounded our drums. To see how dumb we can be in our reflexive liberal loathing, consider the heroic work performed by Salon’s Jenny Kutner.

Kutner got her start by writing about her affair with her eighth-grade history teacher. He ended up in prison. She found her way to Salon, where she entertains the kids with thoughtful pieces like this:

Website lets people anonymously ship vaginal cleansing kits to “basic b*tches”
Like "Dicks By Mail," but for vaginas—and (somehow) even cruder!
JENNY KUTNER
MONDAY, MAR 30, 2015 10:42 AM EDT

Whatever! The youngsters are working it out!

Kutner’s reaction to “pizza-gate” (Salon’s actual term!) was perhaps even dumber than that. She was soon posting the dumbest tweets she could find about the pizza-gate conflagration.

Kutner posted a series of brainless tweets which Salon described as “hilarious.” This is the first one she offered:

REPOSTING BY KUTNER (4/1/15): I had the single most horrific experience of my life!

I wanted some pizza after my Klan rally so of course it was Memories Pizza. I know we are supposed to be anonymous and all that but whatever!

I ordered a nice hot and steamy not gay and extra mozzarella cause I only consume white cheese because it is the superior cheese. And resting on top of my pepperoni was a tooth! I was shocked, but relieved it was a white tooth. Apparently it belonged to the girl behind the counter.

I went to return it to her and she was making out with this woman and screaming it was a choice!

It seems to me this restaurant has gone downhill.

I plan to tell my Klan friends about this and we will be eating our white cheese elsewhere!
–Rachel F.

Needless to say, Rachel F had instantly conflated opposition to same-sex marriage with toothless white bigotry. No other possible understanding of this position need apply!

In the next tweet posted by Kutner, a brilliant liberal named Michael N had performed the same conflation. He stressed the Southern theme:

REPOSTING BY KUTNER: This is a transparent attempt to fly the Christian martyr “mean Gays are calling us bigots” flag in the hopes that other mouth-breathers in the area will rally to them and their crappy pizza the way Southerners rallied to Chick Fil-A. Deny them the oxygen of your outrage, and their uninspired fare will put them out of business in due course.
—Michael N.

To Michael N., O’Connor wasn’t a toothless phony martyr. She was a mouth-breather!

When we engage in our liberal loathing, we do love dropping our bombs. To the occasional mouth-breather within our own tribe, it doesn’t seem odd to post comments like these while accusing The Others of hate:

REPOSTED BY KUTNER: They have a great pizza. It’s the intolerance special with toppings of hate, bigotry, stupidity, and old fashioned beliefs.
—Jarrett J.

I came in with my boyfriend a few weeks ago for a couple of slices. They told of us the good word of Jesus’s love. Which was all great until we told them we were engaged to be married, at which point they spit on us and bashed us upon the head and torso with pizza pans. They said it was all in the name of Jesus so I guess it’s not all bad. I choose never to give them my business anymore, because, ya know, that’s my choice.
–T. W.

TW writhed with tribal pleasure, imagining himself spat on.

This sort of thing was observed all over the pseudo-liberal world. It’s hard to overstate the way pseudo-liberals of this type have been able, down through the years, to heighten tribal divides and hold back progress.

At an earlier time, fiery “liberals” of this type helped create a generation of Nixon/Reagan politics. Like 45-year cicadas, they are active again!

We’ll only ask you to notice one thing about this sad display. Like the knuckle-draggers we are, we look for white “Christians” and white Southerners to land on at such times.

We ignore the fact that large chunks of our own coalition are opposed to same-sex marriage. None of our tribe need apply!

In fairness, the Kutner crowd may not know how the demographics work. But when they rampage after their targets, no blacks or Hispanics or even Catholics need apply! Our liberal loathing tells us which neighborhoods to ride through.

We get out our ropes and start dropping our bombs. We kick as far down as we can.

Pope Francis is opposed to same-sex marriage! But we go after the least among us, offering comments like this:

SKANNER (4/6/15): I don't think I've ever seen someone who so completely personified the term “slack-jawed.” You've probably got to work really hard to look that stupid.

She'll never be as brilliant as Skanner! That was our latest comment about the youngish O’Connor, who imaginably may be a Catholic doing what the Pope says.

At Salon, our own knuckle-draggers were conducting our own little pogrom. We savaged the “redneck families” who were donating to “dumb A-holes like the O’Connors.”

Poodleplay ridiculed O’Connor as “that slack-jawed yokel.” Aunt Messy captured the tone of this crowd with a blatantly inaccurate post:

“I have no sympathy for these backwoods morons, but I'm better and smarter than they are.”

Messy, please! No one will ever think that.

The Pope is opposed to same-sex marriage. So is every priest in the state of Indiana. According to the survey Bruni cited, most blacks are opposed to same-sex marriage at this time as well.

We don’t share their view, but we also wouldn’t call them “bigots.” When we liberals get a snootful and start displaying our liberal loathing, we avoid this contradiction by passing over such houses.

We liberals! Because our mental powers are limited, we can only imagine opposition to same-sex marriage as “bigotry” and “hatred.” Meanwhile, it seems we can only spot that opposition within certain parts of the world.

Our liberal loathing is unattractive, stupid, dumb. Politically, it’s often quite harmful.

But our liberal loathing just feels so good! Of course, this kind of loathing has always felt good, for mobs all over the world.

Tomorrow: Eight letters respond to David Brooks

Coming Friday: We play the Dr. King card

Supplemental: The Times smooths the way for Rolling Stone!

MONDAY, APRIL 6, 2015

The guild supporting the guild: At 8 PM on Easter Sunday, under cover of darkness and Opening Day, Rolling Stone released the official report on its journalistic debacle concerning UVA.

The 13,000-word report was prepared by three well-known figures at the Columbia School of Journalism, a major insider entity. For better or worse, this official report was composed deep within the guild.

In some ways, we think the CSJ report is soft on Rolling Stone. But good God! Consider the way the New York Times reported this topic in this morning’s editions.

Ravi Somaiya wrote the 1400-word, front-page report. Unless we’re hallucinating a tad, he seemed intent on keeping readers from grasping the size of this journalistic debacle.

Let’s start with a quick bit of background:

You don’t understand the size of Rolling Stone’s journalistic debacle unless you understand a key point. Hanna Rosen comes close to stating this basic point in her own report at Slate:

“In late March, the Charlottesville, Virginia, police, after a four-month investigation, concluded there was no basis to support Jackie’s account as told in Rolling Stone. It’s pretty clear at this point that Jackie made it up.”

“It’s pretty clear at this point that Jackie made it up!” Speaking more clearly, it’s pretty clear that no attack of the type she described actually happened that night.

Over time, Jackie made a wide array of statements which turned out to be false. Over time, she also made a wide array of contradictory claims.

As a journalistic matter, there’s no obvious reason to believe that Jackie was attacked that night at all. But it seems quite clear that she wasn’t attacked in anything dimly resembling the way described in Rolling Stone.

In truth, there’s no reason to believe any of the claims which appeared in Rolling Stone! There’s no reason to believe that any misconduct occurred on the night in question in the fraternity house which was named in the piece.

There’s no way of knowing why Jackie said the various things she has said in the past several years. But there’s no reason to believe that any of the specific claims in Rolling Stone were actually true—and it seems abundantly clear that many of the claims in the piece were flatly false.

“It’s pretty clear at this point that Jackie made it up.” Three of her friends—real-time eyewitnesses—denied a wide array of Jackie’s statements and claims. During that four-month investigation, local police debunked other claims she had advanced.

Nothing she said was shown to be true. A great deal she said was shown to be false. If you read today’s New York Times, we don’t think you were told that.

This is just one puzzling event, of course. It tells us nothing about the rate of sexual assault on the nation’s campuses.

But you don’t understand the size of Rolling Stone’s journalistic debacle until you understand that key fact. It’s pretty clear that Jackie invented the key events in the story Rolling Stone told.

“It’s pretty clear at this point that Jackie made it up.” It’s also clear that Rolling Stone simply ran with Jackie’s story, failing to perform the most basic fact-checking procedures.

The journalistic malfeasance here rises to the level of crazy. Unless you read the front page of today’s New York Times, where Somaiya starts his report like this:

SOMAIYA (4/6/15): Rolling Stone magazine retracted its article about a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, after the release of a report on Sunday that concluded the widely discredited piece was the result of failures at every stage of the process.

The report, published by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and commissioned by Rolling Stone, said the magazine failed to engage in ''basic, even routine journalistic practice'' to verify details of the ordeal that the magazine's source, identified only as Jackie, described to the article's author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

On Sunday, Ms. Erdely, in her first extensive comments since the article was cast into doubt, apologized to Rolling Stone's readers, her colleagues and ''any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article.''

In an interview discussing Columbia's findings, Jann S. Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, acknowledged the piece's flaws but said that it represented an isolated and unusual episode and that Ms. Erdely would continue to write for the magazine. The problems with the article started with its source, Mr. Wenner said. He described her as ''a really expert fabulist storyteller"...

That’s the text which appears on the Times’ front page, before the report jumps to page B4. Let’s try to understand what a reader might take from that description.

From that account, a reader might get the impression that “a brutal gang rape” really did occur at the fraternity in question that night.

In reality, there’s no reason to believe any such thing. The evidence seems to show that no event occurred at the fraternity that night at all.

From that account, a reader might get the impression that “the magazine’s source” really did undergo an “ordeal” that night, with Rolling Stone merely “failing to verify details of the ordeal.”

A reader might get the further impression that Erdely’s piece has only been “cast into doubt.”

She failed to verify details! A reader might think that the failure to verify details constitutes the “flaws” in the piece which Wenner has now acknowledged. Under this interpretation, Rolling Stone and the CSJ are high-mindedly applying the highest possible journalistic standards to a report which only got “details” wrong.

That would be a crazily inaccurate understanding of this journalistic debacle. But at least one reader came away from Somaiya’s report with that understanding.

He posted this comment last night in response to other commenters who were condemning Jackie and Rolling Stone. His understanding makes perfect sense, given Somaiya’s account:

COMMENTER FROM WESTCHESTER (4/5/15): I'm sorry, but what I read here is that neither the police or Rolling Stone or Columbia were able to conclusively prove that a rape happened, I'm not sure the conclusion that no rape occurred flows from that finding. Rolling Stone and Ms. Erdely were journalistically irresponsible and unethical, and the police could not deliver a triable case to the D.A. But I'm not as willing to say that something very bad didn't happen to Jackie, despite the inconsistencies in her story of an extremely traumatic physical and psychological brutalization.

“The police could not deliver a triable case to the DA?” They “weren’t able to conclusively prove that a rape happened?”

This reader has a seriously flawed understanding of the facts of this case, in which the police showed that Jackie had made a wide array of statements which were demonstrably false. But then, all through his report, Somaiya seems to go out of his way to keep readers from grasping the depth of the flaws with Jackie’s claims, and the corresponding size of Rolling Stone’s journalistic misfeasance.

We’d have to say that Jonathan Mahler works along similar lines in his “news analysis” of the CSJ report in this morning’s Times. Beyond that, we’d have to say that CSJ also uses some rather soft soap in certain parts of its report.

At one point after another, Somaiya seems to disguise the extent to which the Rolling Stone story broke down. Beyond that, he weirdly edits Erdely’s statement of apology, in a way which seems rather hard to explain.

(More on that tomorrow.)

To our eye, Somaiya and Mahler were working with some very soft soap in their pieces today. Then too, we have the rather strange decision by the Times to lead yesterday’s Sunday Review with yet another first-person account of a rape at UVA, this time from 1997.

As if to keep the pogrom going, the Times chips in with another undocumented account which paints UVA as a villain. On the whole, this seems like rather strange journalistic conduct.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at more of Somaiya’s work as he glosses the facts of the case. Before we’re done, we’ll consider the ways Mahler, and the CSJ report itself, were overly kind to the Stone.

For now, we’ll simply pose a question: Is this the guild helping the guild?

If we didn’t know better, we’d think that’s what we were seeing! We’d think we were seeing a lot of soft soap being applied to a huge journalistic mess.

We’d think we were seeing some major insiders looking on the sunniest possible side. We’d think we were seeing the guild mopping up for the guild, putting thumbs on the scale on behalf of embattled colleagues.

We’d also think the Times was using another unverified, unreported story to keep a preferred narrative alive.

Isn’t that the way Rolling Stone created this astonishing mess in the first place? Why would the Times, on this day of all days, head down that same tricky road?

Tomorrow: “Keep on the sunny side!” For the Carter Family version, you should just click here.

LIBERALLY LOATHING: Confronting the bigots!

MONDAY, APRIL 6, 2015

Part 1—Indiana is Selma: By last Tuesday, debate about Indiana’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” had become the focus of the nation’s culture wars—the endless series of division-and-conquest fights which makes the plutocrats glad.

That morning, the New York Times published three letters about the new debate. By happenstance, all three letters voiced the view of the Times editorial board, whose editorial about the topic appeared on the very same page.

(Two days later, the Times published eight more letters on this topic. Extending a pattern, all eight letters agreed with the Times’ editorial view.)

Tuesday’s letters appeared beneath this heading: “Outrage Over an Anti-Gay Law in Indiana.” In our view, all three letters engaged in variants of a practice we’d describe as “liberal loathing”—a practice which was quite widespread last week.

Here at THE HOWLER, we don’t like the practice we call “liberal loathing.” We haven’t liked it for a very long time.

We think the practice tends to be dumb; we think it tends to be counterproductive. We think the practice is mean-spirited. Sometimes, the practice turns ugly.

That said:

Does our tribe’s penchant for “liberal loathing” advance progressive interests? On balance, we’d guess that it doesn’t. But however our alleged loathing may play out in our long-run political battles, we’d have to say that our liberal loathing is quite unattractive.

In fairness, milder forms of our loathing are frequently expressed in ways which are genteel and high-minded. On the other hand, in comments at Salon last week, our loathing was more often expressed in the familiar, undisguised language of the mob.

As we all know within our own tribe, our liberal loathing is built on the noblest intentions. That said, the world’s mobs have always parsed things that way as they’ve rampaged through the streets.

All three letters last Tuesday were built upon noble intentions. That said, we thought each letter displayed some aspect of our liberal loathing, which we view as one of the plutocrats’ most useful tools.

The first letter asked several questions about the new law which were perhaps slightly dumb. “How is...this discriminatory law any different from laws that restricted rights for blacks before the passage of the Civil Rights Act 50 years ago?”

On its face, that question was fairly dumb. It’s strange to think that a newspaper would choose it to lead its letters section that way.

The third letter adopted a dramatic, self-glorying framework. It compared Indiana to Selma as a “defining moment in American history.”

We liberals have often adopted such frameworks in recent years. Like high-minded Walter Mittys, we picture ourselves on the ramparts of history in ways we simply are not.

Whatever happened in Indiana last week, it pretty much wasn’t Selma. On the surface, this is what seemed to be at stake:

As best anyone was able to say, at issue was your ability to get your wedding ceremony catered by the caterer of your choice. That isn’t nothing, of course. Depending on where they live, a gay couple could imaginably have a hard time getting a florist to service their wedding.

That certainly wouldn’t be nothing. On the other hand, this wasn’t exactly Selma, no matter how much we liberals may long to convince ourselves of our vast historical greatness.

Frequently, that was the way we pictured last week’s fight. Then too, there was our frequently horrible execution of the high-minded battle we waged:

Good lord! As we liberals expressed our moral greatness—the sense that we are straight outta Selma—we landed on a small-town pizza joint whose owners had said that they, as Christians, wouldn’t want to cater a gay wedding ceremony, which they apparently regard as a religious event.

Just for the record, they only said this when a TV reporter came to them and asked them about it. They said they have always served everyone in their store, and no one seemed to say different.

They said it was only the ceremony they didn’t want to participate in—and that the issue had never arisen in their nine years in business.

Alas! Asked by a hard-charging reporter, a young woman in a small pizza joint gave this unfortunate answer. Many of us liberals proceeded to behave in heinous ways, leading us back to the second letter which appeared in last Tuesday’s Times.

The letter came from Newton, Mass., one of our finer districts. Its writer spoke with great authority about the claims involved in this matter, as if he’d just come down from the mountain bearing the latest tablets.

As we’ll be noting all this week, we liberals tend to declaim in these ways when we get a snootful or two:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (3/31/15): First, the title of the law—the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—is shameless Orwellian doublespeak. The people of Indiana have not been deprived of their “religious freedom.” Fortunately, the First Amendment to the federal Constitution guarantees that freedom.

And in seeking to defend the new law, Gov. Mike Pence wonders, “The issue here is, you know, is tolerance a two-way street or not?” The governor is confused. Vulnerable minorities, like gays and lesbians, do not have an obligation to tolerate others’ intolerance of them.

N— K—
Newton, Mass.

Has anyone in Indiana “been deprived of their religious freedom?” This bearer of tablets simply announced in his epistle that actually no, they have not.

Conflict resolved!

After that, he spoke to the heart of the matter. Unfortunately in our view, this is often the essence of us:

“Vulnerable minorities, like gays and lesbians, do not have an obligation to tolerate others’ intolerance of them.”

Let us translate, perhaps unfairly:

In matters like this, We liberals don’t have to “tolerate” Them. They have to “tolerate” Us!

They are required to “tolerate” Us! Tribal groups have always parsed the world in precisely that manner.

They will have to tolerate Us! We won’t have to tolerate Them! All week long, we’ll consider the wisdom and justice of that approach to this particular dispute. We’ll consider where this attitude takes our plutocrat-friendly national politics.

As the week proceeds, we’ll bring one more note of sadness in. In modern times, we liberals are strongly inclined to parse the world in the way the Times did in its editorial.

The board was speaking loudly last Tuesday, as it so frequently does in the reign of Andrew Rosenthalicus.

Right from the jump, the board employed one of our favorite frameworks. Hard-copy headline included:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (3/31/15): In Indiana, Using Religion as a Cover for Bigotry

Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, who last week signed a religious-freedom law driven by bigotry against gays and lesbians, has been complaining that the law’s opponents—which include top business leaders and civil-rights groups — are spreading “misinformation.”

It is true that the law does not, as some opponents claim, specifically permit businesses to refuse to serve gays and lesbians. Its drafters were too smart to make that explicit. Instead, the law allows individuals or corporations facing discrimination lawsuits to claim that serving gays and lesbians “substantially” burdens their religious freedom.

But nobody is fooled as to the law’s underlying purpose...

The law was “driven by bigotry,” the high-minded board quickly thundered. Luckily, no one’s been fooled about that within our tribe, despite the cleverness of The Others.

Was the Indiana law driven by bigotry? We would be slow to make that claim, but then we aren’t Moses, or the Emperor Rosenthalicus, or even The Amazing Kreskin. In our view, the various emperors in our tribe could stand to quiet down a tiny tad too.

Warning! We won’t be playing our “Dr. King card” until the end of the week! Until that time, we’ll explore a set of questions about the liberal loathing which was on wide display last week.

In the main, we won’t be asking you to examine the merits of the first Indiana law, or of the later amended version. We’ll be asking you to think about the reactions and attitudes which were on wide display within our tribe last week.

In the main, we’ll be asking you to think about Us, not about Them! Every so often, a minor amount of introspection can help dissipate a false spring.

We’ll be asking several questions. Is it possible to view the young woman at that pizza joint except through the lens of “bigotry?”

We’ll even be asking you this:

Is it possible that some consideration might be extended in some way to people whose religious traditions disapprove of same-sex marriage? Is it possible to imagine doing that, even if we think those traditions and views are possibly just a bit dumb?

We’ll ask you to notice who our reporters ran to interview last week. We'll also ask you to notice who our reporters avoided.

At some point, we’ll even ask if we liberals might possibly have a hint of “intolerance” within our own imperfect souls! Though tribal groups have always known how to answer such questions.

Sifting the rubble of last week’s fight, we’ll be asking those questions anyhoo. We’ll start with just one small request:

Try not to answer with claims about Them when we ask you to think about Us.

Tomorrow: The group we love to loathe versus those we pass over

This morning's background reading assignment:: Reread your Rose Of Sharon!

Supplemental: Waiting for Lawrence!

SATURDAY, APRIL 4, 2015

Incomparable report has to wait: We were struck by something Lawrence said on Wednesday evening’s Last Word.

Also by comments on Thursday.

We thought the comments may shed some light on Lawrence’s conduct during Campaign 2000, when the fiery pseudo-liberal kept attacking Candidate Gore as a liar right through October 2000.

The conduct of dead-enders like Lawrence helped send Bush to the White House. From there, it was on to Iraq!

It’s not that our nation’s recent history actually matters at this point. Fairly clearly, our discourse is all about narrative now. It’s narrative all the way down!

That said:

Just in case history makes a comeback, we thought it might be worth recording what Lawrence said this week. But history will have to wait. MSNBC still hasn’t transcribed Lawrence’s programs from Wednesday and Thursday nights.

Why did the anti-Gore dead-enders engage in their dead-end conduct? We thought Lawrence’s comments may have shed light on this historical question.

That said, Lawrence’s “news channel” is rather haphazard in its basic operations. If it ever gets around to posting its transcripts, we’ll offer a possible perspective on our recent history, for those recall what that is.

Meanwhile:

For a wondrously bungled statistical claim by George Will, we recommend this must-see letter in today’s Washington Post.

To see Gail Collins use the wrong statistic, you can just click here. (California and Texas are fairly close on their teenage pregnancy rates.)

The bungle by Will is an absolute classic. More on Collins’ latest lesson in loathing next week.

NO STATISTICS NEED APPLY: Statistics concerning campus assault!

FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2015

Part 5—Unresolved dueling claims: Some of our most important statistics are the ones we never hear.

The American public never hears about black students’ large score gains in reading and math on the NAEP. Some undisclosed “invisible hand” seems to keep those statistics disappeared.

The American public never sees the statistics about per capita health care spending in other developed nations. In part for this reason, no discussion ever breaks out concerning the way Americans of all political stripes are being looted in this major area.

You don’t see those statistics on MSNBC, a corporate liberal “news channel.” A cynic might even say this:

The children on The One True Channel keep us busy with other topics—topics which are safer for the plutocrats who pay them their seven figures.

That’s what a cynic might say! Here’s what a finder of accurate facts would say:

You never hear about black kids’ score gains on The One True Channel. Beyond that, you never hear about the massive problem, and apparent injustice, of black incarceration rates.

Michelle Alexander wrote the book on the subject—“The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness.”

Alexander’s book has been widely praised in progressive circles. But according to Nexis, she has never appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, whose host prefers to discuss the evils of botched executions.

Alexander has appeared on The Last Word just once, in June 2011. She answered exactly two questions from Lawrence at that time.

Needless to say, Alexander has never appeared on Hardball. She has appeared on All In just once, to do a segment in 2013 about a Dream Defenders sit-in in Florida.

On our corporate liberal channel, you never see Michelle Alexander, certainly not in prime time. You never hear the statistics about mass incarceration.

You also never hear the statistics about the score gains achieved by black and Hispanic kids. Instead, they keep us happy with months-long discussions the latest “murdered” black youth. Lawrence swings into action at such times, inventing piles of bogus facts which help create “perfect examples.”

In such ways, the creepy people who host these shows keep themselves in their high-paying jobs while keeping their bosses untroubled.

(Don’t miss the Maddow Show tonight! In the Friday Night News Dump, you’ll see the fiery progressive host presenting her favorite segment, in which she gets to play tape of herself from the week’s previous shows.)

Some of our most important statistics are the ones we never hear! Another important batch of statistics are the ones we constantly hear, even though they’re bogus.

In the old days, such statistics typically came from the right. Today, we liberals have our own favorite bogus statistics. On TV, our corporate stars like to bruit them forward.

Routinely, newspapers like the New York Times can’t seem to handle statistics. Sometimes, this problem may occur because journalists are deferring to preferred elite narratives.

Presumably, this explains the constant refusal to tell readers about the rise in black kids’ test scores. For whatever reason, the nation’s elites love to say that absolutely nothing has worked in the nation’s schools!

(Why doesn’t Rachel tackle this topic? We’d have to say she’s the whitest white liberal we’ve ever seen on earth—a throwback to late 60s white liberalism. In a sign of her throwback moral greatness, she’s opposed to botched executions!)

Sometimes, the New York Times seems to defer to preferred elite narratives. Sometimes, though, papers like the Times just don’t seem to have the chops to handle important statistics.

The paper spends a lot of money marketing itself as smart. Simply put, it isn’t. On the whole, the work performed by the New York Times just isn’t especially sharp.

We’re left with one more type of statistics. We’ll call them dueling statistics.

At present, there are dueling sets of (rather shaky) statistics which concern the frequency of police shootings. Another batch of dueling statistics concerns the frequency of rape and sexual assault on the nation’s campuses.

(No one seems to care a whole lot about the frequency of such crimes off campus. Can anyone figure out why?)

To what extent are young black men being shot by police? To what extent are young black men being “targeted” by police in such instances? Is the rate of such shootings on the rise? What are the real statistics?

The New York Times is unlikely to help you sort such things out. Beyond that, you shouldn’t expect to see these questions explored on The One True Channel.

The truth is, there is no sign that either news org actually cares about those questions. For whatever reason, dueling statistics about police shootings go unexplored, unresolved.

The same is true of the dueling statistics concerning campus sexual assault. There’s no sign that anyone actually cares about the truth in this area, though many people seem to enjoy advancing the various narratives.

To cote one example, are we experiencing an epidemic of campus rape? We don’t have the slightest idea! In large part, that’s because we read the nation’s leading newspapers.

Are we experiencing an epidemic of campus rape? In recent months, the ludicrous people at Rolling Stone invented a “perfect example” to illustrate the alleged epidemic, which may or may not exist. The nation then watched as their “perfect example” fell apart.

This embarrassment tells us nothing about the actual rates of assault, of course. But what are the actual rates of rape and assault? And are they on the rise?

Dueling statistics seem to abound. News orgs like the New York Times aren’t likely to puzzle them out.

Some of the most dramatic claims in this area are coming from the “left.” In last Sunday’s New York Times, a professor extended some familiar portraits as she challenged this earlier piece by Judith Shulevitz:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (3/29/15): I am dismayed by Judith Shulevitz’s belittling response to student trauma. I teach an undergraduate class on “Sexualities and Race.” We discuss challenging issues like campus rape, human trafficking, pornography and sex work. “Scary ideas” certainly. Tragically, for some students these ideas are also scary realities. My students engage these issues with intellectual rigor and great courage. Yes, I give trigger warnings, and try to make my class a safe space.

Five students in my class were recently raped. One sits at the back so she has walls behind her, close to the door in case panic overwhelms her. I wonder how Ms. Shulevitz would deal with a student triggered into a major panic attack. Or a student whose friend was murdered by a cop. Making cheap jibes at a safe room with “cookies” and “Play-Doh” infantilizes the real-life traumas these students face too young, and belittles their right to face these intellectual and personal challenges in safe ways.

ANNE McCLINTOCK
Madison, Wis.

The writer is a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

We thought Shulevitz was a bit snarky about some of these matters too. That said, were five students in that class (apparently out of 36 students in all) “recently raped?”

We have no way of knowing. That said, this anecdotal claim advances the notion that an “epidemic” is taking place on the nation’s campuses.

In her letter, this professor also paints a picture of students being “murdered” by “cops.” It hasn’t been long since our latest “perfect example” of this alleged behavior basically fell apart.

Is an epidemic of sexual assault occurring on the nation’s campuses? You’d think news orgs would want to explore such important claims, but the New York Times doesn’t seem to want to be bothered—and neither does The One True Liberal Channel!

On The One True Liberal Channel, one time capsule host from the late 1960s is worried about botched executions—but she hasn’t examined the dueling statistics concerning that other topic. Is there any chance “network” doesn’t want such downbeat fare discussed?

Is a rape epidemic occurring on campus? Like you, we have no idea. In December, Emily Yoffe discussed the dueling sets of statistics in this lengthy piece at Slate. (Scroll down to Part 4.) In Yoffe’s view, “the studies suggesting this epidemic don’t hold up to scrutiny.”

That may or may not be an accurate judgment. In this earlier piece at Slate, Emily Bazelon challenges the methodology of one of the surveys Yoffe cites, a survey which has found a relatively low rate of assault.

That said, the gaps seem to be extremely large between the dueling sets of statistics concerning this important topic. But so what? Despite this widely-noted paradox, our major news orgs make little effort to analyze these important statistical claims.

Given the way our major news orgs stumble and fumble around with statistics, that may be a blessing of sorts.

The New York Times had a rough time with statistics last week. On Tuesday, the paper did a truly terrible job examining a new study of the gender income gap. One day later, the paper did a peculiar job with a Justice Department report which apparently found that Philadelphia police do not disproportionately “target” blacks when they use their guns.

The paper had its usual tough time handling some basic statistics. We’ll close with a couple of thoughts:

Our public discourse routinely turns on bogus statistics—bogus statistics designed to drive some preferred narrative. In many areas, if it weren’t for bogus or selective statistics, we’d have no statistics at all!

All in all, facts play an increasingly minor role in our clownish public discourse. Again and again, we end up debating anecdotal events designed to showcase some alleged problem—anecdotal events in which basic facts have been disappeared or invented.

More and more, we spend our days thrashing “perfect examples” of some alleged problem. As soon as one such case falls apart, we go out and invent another.

For liberals, it should be embarrassing to see the extent to which our tribe now plays this game.

It should be embarrassing, but it isn’t. Our perfect examples keep falling apart. Long live our perfect examples!

Coming tomorrow: What Lawrence said this past Wednesday night!

This week’s perfect examples: For this week’s perfect examples of evil, once again, just click here.

Supplemental: They get letters about Indiana!

THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 2015

Times goes eight for eight: We’ll admit it. We’re fascinated by this group of letters in today’s New York Times.

In theory, the letters were written in reaction to David Brooks’ most recent column, “Religious Liberty and Equality.”

In reality, it seems to us that the letters concern a different, more ancient subject. We’d almost be inclined to call it, “The rather plain superiority of Us as compared to Them.”

All eight letters take the same line. We expect to discuss them next week. Each writer is trying to be high-minded. How well do you think they succeed?

We aren’t suggesting that these are bad people—although, for our money, you could take the rabbi and the minister and you could pretty much shove them.

We aren’t suggesting that these are bad people. We feel perfectly sure that they aren’t. Our reaction was different from that. What do you think of those letters, which all seem to take the same view?

For those who prefer this newspaper’s coverage of the campaign which hasn’t exactly started yet, we recommend yesterday’s front-page report about Candidate Walker’s allergy to dogs and the possible political ramifications of same.

On March 21, the Times explored this same candidate’s accent and argot. Yesterday, our brightest newspaper considered the way he gets the sniffles from pets.

Back in 1993, we used to do a bit about President Clinton’s attempt to serve in the White House with a cat as a pet. In fairness to us, we did this at the Improv.

It can’t be done, we sagely implied—and even then, we were getting results! At the start of his second term, the president got him a dog.

Good solid thought-provoking sound analytical stuff: At one point, Jason Horowitz says this about presidential canines in the course of fleshing out the candidate’s obvious pickle:

HOROWITZ (4/1/15): Warren G. Harding’s Airedale, Laddie Boy, had his own chair at cabinet meetings. Republicans accused F.D.R. of sending a destroyer to the Aleutian Islands to pick up Fala, who had his own secretary. Richard M. Nixon may have saved his spot on the Eisenhower ticket in 1952 with his televised speech focusing on his daughters’ cocker spaniel, Checkers. And Lyndon B. Johnson appalled reporters by lifting his beagles, Him and Her, by their ears.

Candidates would be unwise to try that. It was often noted in 2012 that Mitt Romney once drove from Boston to Canada with the family Irish setter, Seamus, on the roof of the car.

Seamus survived. But presidential dogs have met their ends in poignant ways...

We don’t get it! “It was often noted that Romney once drove from Boston to Canada with the family Irish setter on the roof of the car?”

We don’t get it! How in the world could he have done that? And who would have written about it?

Yesterday was April Fools Day. Did that explain this latest hard-hitting front-page campaign report?

NO STATISTICS NEED APPLY: Half the statistics disappear!

THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 2015

Part 4—“Reporting” the nation's schools: Just as a brief aside, eleven “educators” are in prison today in Atlanta after a six-month trial

A six-month trial!

Don’t get us wrong! The conduct is which these teachers engaged was ludicrous, inane and baldly dishonest.

That said, we think this prosecution was giant overkill. In this Lenten season, you might even say that these teachers have died for the New York Times’ (statistical) sins.

These teachers were convicted of ludicrous cheating on Georgia’s statewide standardized tests. They even played the erasure game, systematically changing wrong answers to right after test sessions were over.

This is deeply ludicrous conduct, but it had been going on for decades by the time these teachers got caught. In large part, the practice had continued apace because of the incompetence (and/or the dishonesty) of the national “press corps.”

We have a personal history here. Quickly, let’s review it:

We first reported outright cheating to the Baltimore Sun in the early 1970s. In 1981, we published this op-ed column on the subject in the Baltimore Evening Sun.

By that time that column appeared, we had learned something which we found startling at the time:

Even back then, publishers of the big standardized tests would, for an extra fee, electronically scan a school system’s answer sheets looking for the erasure patterns which indicate widespread cheating.

More than thirty years ago, this phenomenon was well understood! (We were told about this practice by a high official at one of the large test batteries, but it wasn't a secret.)

It wasn’t just the fact that the big test publishers were providing that remarkable service. On a basic statistical basis, the scoring patterns at certain schools were clownishly obvious. Except to the nation’s “press corps,” which kept failing to report this ongoing phenomenon.

Inside the press corps, statistics are hard! Also, preferred narratives are powerful.

A bit more personal history:

In the late 1980s, we consulted with Dr. John Cannell about this general topic. He achieved ten minutes of fame by suggesting, through reference to his humorous Lake Wobegon Effect, that this sort of cheating may have been widespread at that time.

Cannell’s suggestions were widely reported, for roughly ten minutes. The topic was then completely abandoned—but wait, there’s more:

In 2006, we discovered a clownish statistical scam which was elevating “passing rates” at schools all over the state of Virginia. Quite forthrightly, the chairman of the state board acknowledged to us, in an on the record interview, that this remarkable conduct actually had occurred.

For background, just click here, with a link to earlier reports.

The Washington Post, and other Virginia newspapers, failed to report this news. A rather remarkable statewide scam went almost wholly unreported.

One more bit of personal history:

In 2007, a little-known person named Michelle Rhee was selected to become the head of the Washington D.C. schools. She arrived in Washington trailing dramatic claims about the sensational test scores she had produced in her three years as a Baltimore second and third grade teacher.

As we noted in real time, the test scores Rhee said her students recorded seemed absurd on their face. The Washington Post averted its gaze. A few years later, a cheating scandal matching Atlanta’s surfaced in D.C.’s schools.

Let’s give credit where credit is due! In this morning’s New York Times, Alan Blinder wrote the full-length news report about the Atlanta convictions.

In the hard-copy Times, Blinder’s report leads the National section. He offers this bit of history about the Atlanta case:

BLINDER (4/2/15): In 2009, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution started publishing a series of articles that sowed suspicion about the veracity of the test scores, and Gov. Sonny Perdue ultimately ordered an investigation.

The inquiry, which was completed in 2011, led to findings that were startling and unsparing: Investigators concluded that cheating had occurred in at least 44 schools and that the district had been troubled by “organized and systemic misconduct.” Nearly 180 employees, including 38 principals, were accused of wrongdoing as part of an effort to inflate test scores and misrepresent the achievement of Atlanta’s students and schools.

Decades after this basic problem was obvious and widely known, reporters at the Journal-Constitution actually did some reporting!

That paper deserves a lot of credit for its work. So does USA Today, which did the basic reporting on D.C.’s testing debacle.

Those newspapers deserve full credit for some belated work. But by the time of the Journal-Constitution’s reports, its findings could only seem “startling” to completely clueless reporters like the world-class stumblebums who work for the New York Times.

How is it possible? How could big newspapers like the Post and the Times remain so clueless about this matter for so long? Before considering last week’s work on the nation's schools, we’ll offer two possibilities:

Basic incompetence: Many “journalists” at these newspapers are almost completely incompetent. They lack even the most basic skills for processing even the simplest statistics. Last week’s report about the gender income gap among nurses represents a crowning example of a phenomenon which is widespread.

Devotion to narrative: These newspapers also tend to defer to the narratives which shape so much of our news. They’ve always loved ridiculous stories about miraculous test scores at low-income schools. These types of stories maintained preferred beliefs about the educational challenges we face and the reasons for the nation’s “achievement gaps.” At the same time, they never seemed to have a taste for reporting which may have undermined traditional, Dick-and-Jane era faith in the inerrant probity of teachers.

By today, preferred elite narratives about public schools are different, and so is the press corps’ clowning. Consider several events last week which had our youthful analysts gnashing what’s left of their teeth.

First, a small appetizer. On Sunday, March 22, Martin and Bosman authored a front-page report in the New York Times about Chicago’s mayoral race. Will anything ever stop our scribes from typing variants of the highlighted standard statement?

MARTIN AND BOSMAN (3/22/15): Another challenge for hard-line progressives is that Mr. Emanuel, while heavily funded by business interests and some wealthy Republicans, has a record of accomplishment that covers many liberal priorities. He may have angered the teachers union and many black residents by closing 50 failing schools in mostly minority neighborhoods. But he passed full-day kindergarten, a move similar to Mr. de Blasio’s expansion of prekindergarten. Mr. Emanuel also added free community college for high-achieving public school graduates...

The highlighted statement can be defended as “technically accurate.” Emanuel did close fifty schools; this did anger some residents. It’s also true that the schools in question were mostly in minority neighborhoods or, in a softer formulation, were “in mostly minority neighborhoods.”

That said, Chicago’s student population is 90 percent black and Hispanic. There's no way to close underutilized schools in Chicago without closing schools “in mostly minority neighborhoods.”

This situation obtains in urban systems all over the country. But at various major newspapers, reporters insist on feigning surprise at the fact that underutilized schools are getting closed in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

These ace reporters seem immune to the simplest statistical observations. That silly script-read in the Times was just the latest example.

That was a minor if nagging example. Last Sunday, March 29, Fareed Zakaria swung from the heels in the featured front-page piece in the Washington Post’s Outlook section.

Zakaria painted a Mandated Thoroughly Standard Press Portrait of the state of the nation’s schools. “Every month, it seems, we hear about our children’s bad test scores in math and science,” he said as he started, understating the ubiquity of this mandated portrait.

As he continued, he made no attempt to challenge this gloomy portrait. Indeed, referring to scores attained by American students on international tests, he reinforced the mandated picture:

“My point is not that it’s good that American students fare poorly on these tests. It isn’t,” the serial plagiarist said.

(For the record, there’s no obvious way for anyone to cheat on these international tests, nor is there any apparent motive.)

As he continued, Zakaria reacted to his gloomy portrait in a surprising way. He said it doesn’t hugely matter if American kids score poorly on international tests.

You can read his piece to evaluate his reasoning. Here’s what had our youthful analysts gnashing their teeth:

Like everyone else is America’s press corps, Zakaria engaged in a bit of statistical sleight-of-hand. As everyone except our “reporters” knows, there are two major international test batteries in which most developed nations participate—the somewhat newer PISA, on which American kids score somewhat less well, and the somewhat older TIMSS/PIRLS, on which American kids score somewhat better.

Like everyone else in America’s “press corps,” Zakaria only cited scores from the PISA. Quite literally, he discarded half the data in reaching his Mandated Thoroughly Standard Gloomy Press Corps Portrait of These Kids Today!

Who except American “journalists” function this way? Who else conducts an analysis by ignoring half the data?

In the modern context, powerful figures seem to want this topic reported in the gloomiest possible way. Within the upper-end press, almost everyone does.

In truth, they’re all serial plagiarists! For reasons only they can explain, they’re typing the insider line, in which American kids are a pitiful mess thanks to the sloth of their unionized teachers.

Down in Atlanta, eleven teachers are in prison today. They died for the sins of the New York Times, which spent decades failing to report the fact that cheating was going on in some parts of the casino.

Today, our journalists keep disappearing the TIMSS. When it comes to test scores on the NAEP, they report the gaps but disappear the large gains, as we’ve explained a million times by now.

They keep discarding half the news! It’s how these life forms roll.

Tomorrow: The latest statistics on campus

Supplemental: Police shootings are an important topic!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1, 2015

A widely bruited statistic: Have police been shooting young black men more frequently in recent years, or does it just seem that way?

Do police “target” young black men? If so, to what extent?

According to the New York Times’ Matt Apuzzo, the Justice Department found that Philadelphia police have not been “targeting” blacks when they engage in shootings. This is said to be true in spite of some striking statistics:

Philadelphia was roughly 44 percent black during the period in question. But 80 percent of police shootings during that period involved blacks.

Readers of Apuzzo’s news report weren’t struck by that disparity. He failed to include that first statistic in his front-page report. At the very end of his report, he did include this:

APUZZO (3/24/15): Both Commissioner Ramsey and [Mayor] Nutter, who are black, said they welcomed the Justice Department’s conclusions and would quickly begin acting on the recommendations. But they reminded people of the violence plaguing the city.

“Folks need to quit killing each other,” Commissioner Ramsey said, noting that about 85 percent of victims and perpetrators in Philadelphia are black. He said he was not proud of that figure. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m black myself.”

Mr. Nutter added: “People want good police officers. Police officers need good citizens.”

According to that passage, 85 percent of people involved in killings in Philadelphia are black. This may put that earlier statistic about police shootings into some sort of perspective.

Apuzzo didn’t say that the Justice Department formed its judgment on this basis. But he did report that the Justice Department found that Philly police have not been “targeting” blacks.

We don’t know if that assessment is accurate, in part for an obvious reason—we read major American papers and watch cable “news” channels. A person is unlikely to get much information from such sources, even about an important topic like this.

Are police shootings on the rise? To what extent are young black men inappropriately “targeted?” In one of his most astute observations, Apuzzo offered this:

APUZZO: The statistics [about police shootings in Philadelphia] were laid out in a Justice Department report on Monday, which does not allege racial discrimination but offers an unusually deep look at the use of lethal force inside a major city police department, including information on the race of officers and suspects. It is the kind of data that has been nearly absent from the debate over police tactics that began last summer with a deadly shooting in Ferguson, Mo.

So true! As has been widely noted, there aren’t a lot of sound data about police shootings in the United States. Instead, we tend to “discuss” the topic through the use of anecdotal incidents, concerning which we the liberals tend to invent bogus facts.

The data are extremely limited, and some of the data may not be real good. Consider the pleasing claim in which it was widely said that young black men were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.

The statistic came from ProPublica, which is generally considered to be a reliable source.

That statistic was widely bruited in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death. The statistic seemed a bit hard to reconcile with the other slivers of data which seem to exist. But it got a lot of play from us on the pseudo-left.

Uh-oh! We didn’t know this until last week, but serious questions seem to exist concerning that pleasing statistic. At St. Louis Public Radio, William Freivogel wrote this back in December:

FREIVOGEL (12/10/14): An article of faith among those protesting Brown’s death and among much of the media writing about the protests is that young African-American men are far more likely to be shot by police than young white men.

Much of the national media—The New York Times, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, Daily Kos, Daily Beast and Vox among others—have quoted an October ProPublica study of FBI data showing that between 2010 and 2012, black males 15 to 19 years old were 21 times more likely than white males that age to be killed by police.

What hasn’t gotten attention is that leading criminologists criticize the ProPublica findings as exaggerated. It’s true that black youths are killed more often than white youths, the critics agree, but the disparity over the past 15 years is much lower than the three-year period featured by ProPublica. The longer period is more statistically accurate, they say.

[David] Klinger doesn’t mince words: “The ProPublica thing needs to be shut down. They cherry picked the three years that had the worst disparity instead of being honest about the whole picture.

"The ProPublica analysis is absolute garbage because it is based on the FBI’s supplemental homicide reports. I told them, don't do it because the stats are horseshit.”

When ProPublica went ahead with the report and then quoted Klinger, the criminologist demanded that the news organization remove his name from the story, but it refused.

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer and now criminology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice called the ProPublica study “substantially wrong.” In his “Cop in the Hood” blog, Moskos wrote that the 21:1 ratio is the result of the way ProPublica parsed the data...

For ourselves, we can’t settle this question; there’s more information in that report.

Warning! At one point, Moskos offers a peculiar thought, saying this: “it's important to base opinions and public policy on fact.”

ProPublica stands by its work. Back in December, it appended this “update” to its original report:

PROPUBLICA (12/23/14): ProPublica shared its findings and methodology with Prof. David Klinger before this story appeared. In two interviews with reporters, he noted that the FBI data has serious shortcomings. But he also said the disparity ProPublica had found between black and white victims was so large, it was unlikely to have resulted solely from omissions in the FBI statistics. After the story appeared, Klinger said flaws in the FBI data made it unusable. ProPublica contacted Klinger and asked him to elaborate, but he declined to comment further. We stand by the analysis. A full response to the arguments Klinger and another critic have raised is here.

The disparity “was unlikely to have resulted solely from omissions in the FBI statistics?” On its face, that’s a weak defense. To read ProPublica’s fuller response, you can just click this.

What are the actual facts about police shootings? We can’t tell you that. But we can assure you of this:

Over the past thirty years, our public debates have rarely turned on actual facts. Our debates tend to turn on phony statistics and pleasing anecdotes—anecdotes which have often been embellished by one of our tribes to drive a preapproved narrative.

We liberals now play this game with great joy, just as Rush and Sean have traditionally done. That said, the question of police shootings is important. We’d like to know what is true.

According to Apuzzo, the Justice Department found that Philly’s police force hasn’t been “targeting” blacks in its police shootings. That finding seems to fly in the face of widely held current assumptions.

We don’t know if that finding is accurate. But neither do the creepy professors and cable stars who now propagandize us the liberal rubes in much the same way Rush and Sean have always done with their suggestible brood.

Despite their skills as moral showboats, we’ve come to dislike these lower life-forms. Until your lizard brain tells you to stop, you might consider it too.

NO STATISTICS NEED APPLY: Who gets shot by Philly police?

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1, 2015

Part 3—Narrative conquers all: Last Wednesday, the New York Times did a horrible terrible job with a full-length report on the gender wage/income gap.

The analysts were gnashing their teeth by the time they finished their reading. “Can’t anyone at the Times handle statistics?” one youngster even asked.

We felt the analysts’ pain. One day earlier, the Times had presented a full-length, front-page report about police shootings in Philadelphia.

The topic is very important and also very current. There too, we thought the Times struggled with some basic, important statistics about an important topic.

In our judgment, Matt Apuzzo didn’t do a terrible horrible job with his front-page report. We would say that his reporting was weak in some basic respects.

As he started, Apuzzo sketched a very familiar portrait of big-city police. He discussed a report by the Justice Department. Hard-copy headline included:

APUZZO (3/24/15): Report Details Deadly Forced Used by Police

Roughly once a week, 390 times over the past eight years, Philadelphia police officers opened fire at a suspect. The shootings involved 454 officers, most of them on patrol. Almost always, the suspects were black. Often, the officers were, too.

Fifty-nine suspects were unarmed. Officers frequently said they thought the men—and they were almost always men—were reaching for a weapon, when they were actually doing something like holding a cellphone.

The framework there is very familiar and very current:

In Philadelphia, police frequently “opened fire” on suspects. “Almost always, the suspects were black.”

Since the shooting of Michael Brown, this has been an extremely familiar framework in our public discourse. As Apuzzo opened his report, there it was again.

To state the obvious, Apuzzo was discussing a very important topic. Beyond that, he was discussing the findings of a Justice Department investigation—an investigation requested by Philadelphia’s police commissioner two years ago.

Apuzzo’s front-page report appeared in the Times last Tuesday. In the eight days which have passed, you haven’t heard squat about it.

Almost surely, that's because the Justice Department report on which it was based involved a bunch of actual facts. By way of contrast, our nation’s discourse tends to turn on bogus statistics, anecdotal incidents and highly familiar narratives.

Eight days later, let’s discuss Apuzzo’s report. If you read all the way to the end, we think it tends to contradict some widely-held impressions.

In the past few years, certain impressions about police shootings have taken strong hold. People have received the impression that police shootings are on the rise. Many questions have been raised about the frequency with which young black men are the target of these shootings.

We were intrigued by Apuzzo’s report because he was drawing on actual facts from an actual investigation. This may explain why you’ve heard nothing about his report in the past eight days.

Apuzzo started by painting a very familiar portrait. Much later in his report, he seemed to discard that portrait.

All too often, this is the way it tends to go when Times reporters work with statistics. Before we look at Apuzzo’s reversal, let’s consider several facts from his intriguing report.

In just his fourth paragraph, Apuzzo presents a striking statistic. He has already noted that the Justice Department report included “the kind of data that has been nearly absent from the debate over police tactics that began last summer with a deadly shooting in Ferguson, Mo.”

Then, he offers a striking comparison between the police departments in two of our biggest cities. New York City comes off rather well:

APUZZO: Only a handful of major departments regularly publish statistics on police shootings, and those that do are not always consistent. That makes comparing the records of police departments difficult. But even with such spotty figures, Philadelphia stands out when compared with the public data in other cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In many years, Philadelphia saw more police shootings than New York, a city with five times the number of residents and officers.

New York is five times Philadelphia’s size. But in some years, New York has seen fewer police shootings!

Especially given the publicity surrounding such shootings in New York, that struck us as a startling statistic. Needless to say, it disappeared into the ether surrounding Apuzzo’s report.

What explains the high rate of police shootings in Philadelphia? As Apuzzo continued, he frustrated the analysts with several statistical claims.

He said Chief Ramsey requested the DOJ study “after a philly.com article in 2013 revealed that while crime was down, the number of officers firing at suspects was on the rise.” We’ll admit that we wondered how large that rise had been.

Later, Apuzzo said that Philadelphia “is the nation’s fifth-largest city but maintains the only police department that has more than 1,000 officers and does not offer a field training program for new officers.” We’ll admit we wondered if Philadelphia is the only such department out of three, or possibly out of 300.

(Near the end of his report, Apuzzo made a throw-away reference to “the violence plaguing the city.” Why did we feel certain that this plague has been on the decline?)

Those were minor points. Very late in his full-length report, we encountered a major claim.

Very late in his report, Apuzzo seems to contradict the familiar portrait found in his opening paragraphs. As he does, he offers a statistical assessment which struck us as somewhat odd.

You had to read all the way to paragraph 17 (out of 21). If you did, you encountered this striking assessment:

APUZZO: Over all, despite some high-profile cases of the police shooting African-American suspects, the report did not find a pattern of racial targeting. While blacks accounted for 80 percent of police shooting victims, whites who were shot by the police were more likely than blacks to be unarmed, the Justice Department concluded. When federal investigators looked at the race of the officers and the suspects, they found no statistically significant difference in the outcomes.

“The report did not find a pattern of racial targeting?” Given the general shape of the discourse, we thought that assessment was striking.

We also thought it was somewhat odd.

The report didn’t find a pattern of racial targeting? That almost seems to contradict the familiar portrait with which Apuzzo opened his front-page report! On a somewhat brighter note, it seems to contradict a general picture of police conduct which has dominated public discourse in the past few years.

All around the national discourse, the impression has been given that police are targeting blacks, especially young black men. At least in Philly, the Justice Department seems to have reached a different conclusion.

We don’t know if that’s the case. This is why we found that assessment somewhat odd:

To us, it seemed odd to be told that there was no “pattern of racial targeting” even though “eighty percent of police shooting victims” were black. To us, that seemed like a high percentage.

This being the Times, Apuzzo didn’t say what percentage of Philadelphia residents are black. Incomparably, we decided to look it up.

According to the leading authority, Philadelphia was 44 percent black as of 2012. This basic statistic never appeared in Apuzzo’s full-length report. We’d say it adds a twist to the Justice Department assessment, which may be perfectly valid.

Philadelphia was 44 percent black—but 80 percent of police shooting victims were black! Despite those figures, the DOJ “did not find a pattern of racial targeting.”

According to Apuzzo, this benign assessment was based on the percentage of police shooting victims found to be unarmed. The benign assessment may be correct, but we’d make two points about it:

Again, that benign assessment flies in the face of a dominant narrative about police shootings. Indeed, Apuzzo seemed to advance that familiar narrative in his own opening paragraphs, the ones which appeared above the fold on the front page of the Times.

According to Apuzzo, the Justice Department found that Philadelphia police had not been behaving in that stereotypical way. But so what? At the Times, this finding was only available for people who read all the way to paragraph 17 on page A15, inside the hard-copy paper.

Let’s state a second point. In recent discussions of Ferguson, statistical disparities like these were taken as prima facie evidence of police misconduct. At pseudo-conservative news sites, people were told that such statistics can’t be taken at face value as evidence of police wrongdoing.

We pseudo-liberals received no such warnings from our own news orgs.

Ih Philadelphia, the Justice Department apparently found that a disproportionate pattern of shootings didn’t indicate targeting. But New York Times readers didn’t see a discussion of that, in part because Apuzzo omitted a key statistic—the percentage of Philadelphians who are black.

To what extent have police in Ferguson been targeting blacks in various kinds of police actions? We don’t know, but the Philadelphia example reminds us that surface disparities in these statistics may not always mean what they seem.

We don’t mean to suggest that Ferguson police haven’t been targeting blacks. It’s possible that Ferguson police have been targeting blacks to a greater extent than statistics seem to suggest.

We mean something different. We mean to say that our big news orgs should be examining statistics from places like Ferguson to gain a clearer idea of the way such cities work.

That will never happen, of course, given the nature of our journalism and our public discourse. Our discourse runs on narrative and on bogus statistics—and on exciting anecdotal events where the facts have often been massaged to generate “perfect examples.”

If Apuzzo’s report is correct, New York City police seem to fire their guns much less often that Philadelphia police. If his report is correct, Philadelphia police tend to shoot up the joint, but they apparently don’t target blacks.

Each finding flies in the face of widely-bruited perceptions. But you’ll never hear these findings discussed in our public square.

In the American public square, you’ll hear a lot of bogus statistics. Charles Blow will provide the latest anecdote—the latest perfect example.

You’ll also hear familiar narratives. Apuzzo seemed to open with one, then later seemed to reject it.

Philly police don’t target blacks? Apuzzo buried a striking assessment.

That said, the assessment flew in the face of a dominant narrative. And to the extent that we have a discourse, it very strongly tends to be narrative—narrative all the way down.

This afternoon: A much-bruited statistic about police shootings

Tomorrow: If it weren’t for misleading test scores, we’d have no test scores at all!

Friday: Dueling statistics on campus rape, and the narratives we liberals love