Supplemental: Do you belong to a race?

MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2014

Letter writer makes good point: On November 30, Michael Eric Dyson wrote a piece in the Sunday New York Times about the Ferguson grand jury.

Dyson started like this:

DYSON (11/29/14): When Ferguson flared up this week after a grand jury failed to indict the white police officer Darren Wilson for killing the unarmed black youth Michael Brown, two realities were illuminated: Black and white people rarely view race in the same way or agree about how to resolve racial conflicts, and black people have furious moral debates among ourselves out of white earshot.

These colliding worlds of racial perception are why many Americans view the world so differently...

Presumably, Dyson meant, in that highlighted passage, that white people rarely “view race in the same way” black people do. Yesterday, a letter in the Times took issue with that formulation.

As best we can tell, we may not agree with the letter writer’s view concerning the killing of Michael Brown. Beyond that, we don’t necessarily agree with his reaction to Dyson’s piece.

We do agree with his general complaint about what he calls “stereotyping.” We think his general complaint is worth reviewing:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (12/7/14): Although well intentioned, Michael Eric Dyson’s article promotes a binary view of race in America. The article emphasizes how “whites” and “blacks” supposedly differ in their perceptions of what happened in Ferguson: Whites were likely to stereotype Michael Brown as a monstrous black culprit and Officer Darren Wilson as justified in his murderous reaction.

I am “white,” so is my wife, so are most of our friends. Not one of us views the events as Mr. Dyson suggests. All of us are horrified by police brutality and the victimization of another young black man. Although a majority of whites may indeed blame the victim, a substantial minority does not.

And that is the point: By stereotyping whites as sharing in the same racial stereotypes, Mr. Dyson inadvertently helps to deepen this country’s racial divide.

R— M—
West Lafayette, Ind., Nov. 30, 2014

We always like it when someone puts scare quotes around “white” and “black!”

We think the writer overstates the extent to which Dyson promoted that “binary view of race in America.” But we also think it’s worth considering the general complaint he makes.

The writer says that he and his friends, who are all white, agree with Dyson’s view. He doesn’t want to get lumped in with people whose views he doesn’t share through racial “stereotyping.”

Good for him! Despite the horrors and the cultural separation enforced by our brutal racial history, we the people have not been turned into two separate-and-different “races.” Reflexively, though, we often stress the differences between the two “races” without noting the overlap and the sameness.

For our money, the “stereotyping” this writer dislikes was much more prevalent in Nicholas Kristof’s recent, condescending column, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5.”

Not only was Kristof’s racial stereotyping strong. He assumed the obnoxious role of the sun god/philosopher king, taking it upon himself to instruct “the whites” about what they should think, know and feel.

The notion that we belong to two “races” was created and forced upon the world by our benighted ancestors. At some point, people might want to do what the letter writer did—they might consider rejecting the sense that they belong to a “race.”

In our view, “black and white together” remains a worthwhile battle cry. Even better would be this cry: “We the people together.”

How do we make that battle cry work? The letter writer’s refusal to submit to over-generalization may be a good place to start.

Kristof seems to believe that white people are white! As a self-appointed, all-knowing sun god, he may want to expand his vision.

THE AGE OF BELIEF: Truly believing at Rolling Stone!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2014

Part 1—Our miraculous brain in action: As Rolling Stone’s folly kept unfolding, we were struck by something we read in the Outlook section of Sunday’s Washington Post.

We refer to a standard description of the greatness of our human brain. The description appeared at the start of a book review by Professor Trefil.

What you see below is a thoroughly standard account of our human greatness. At least in the west, we humans have glorified ourselves in this way since the dawn of time:

TREFIL (12/7/14): The human brain, that marvelous instrument we all carry around in our skulls, evolved for one purpose and one purpose only: to allow our ancestors to survive on the African savannah millions of years ago. Over the millennia, the brain got very good at its task, keeping our ancestors fed and out of the clutches of saber-toothed tigers and their ilk. Yet despite its humble origins, that same brain can understand general relativity, plot the course of distant galaxies and comprehend the working of our very cells. In fact, it is little short of miraculous that no matter where we go in the universe, no matter what new phenomena we investigate, our brain seems to be at home.

As he continued, Professor Trefil described the “one exception” in this overall pageant of human brilliance:

“Since the dawn of the 20th century, when scientists began exploring the inside of the atom, it has become increasingly clear that the brain is simply not designed to be comfortable with what goes on at that level,” he said.

Professor Trefil went on to write a decent book review. Still, the analysts howled at his description of the “marvelous instrument we all carry around in our skulls.”

They’d already spent many hours researching Rolling Stone’s deeply unfortunate folly. In that context, they were struck by the professor’s upbeat account of the marvelous instrument we all have in our heads.

How marvelous, how “miraculous,” is that instrument really? Ritual self-praise of this type may keep us from seeing how poorly our human brains actually function.

Case in point—the unfolding debacle at the Stone, a case which sheds a lot of light on our Age of (True) Belief.

Let’s be clear. We’re writing here about Rolling Stone, not about the college student whose remarkable story the magazine didn’t attempt to fact-check.

By now, it’s abundantly clear that no one knows what actually happened, or didn’t happen, to the student in question. By way of contrast, we think it’s fairly clear what Rolling Stone foolishly did.

To provide a bit of context, consider something Charles Blow says in his latest New York Times column. Writing about our new age of activism, columnist Blow says this:

BLOW (12/8/14): The suspicion of bias, in particular, is what the most recent protests have been about. They are about a most basic question concerning the nature of humanity itself: If we are all created equal, shouldn’t we all be treated equally? Anything less is an affront to our ideals.

Bias in the system often feels like fog in the morning: enveloping, amorphous and immeasurable. But individual cases, like the recent ones, hit us as discrete and concrete, about particular unarmed black men killed by particular policemen—although those particular policemen are representative of structures of power.

These cases make easy focal points for rallying cries, and force us to ask tough questions about the very nature of policing, force and justice.

Certain high-profile incidents “make easy focal points for rallying cries,” Blow correctly says. We’d say there’s a key word in that passage:

That key word is “easy.”

Can we speak in somewhat unflattering terms about Blow’s presentation? Might we paraphrase a bit as we do?

Quite correctly, Blow says it’s relatively hard to make a case about social injustice based upon general claims of bias or misconduct. But he says it’s “easy” to rally the world if we come up with the right “individual cases.”

Trayvon Martin was one such case; so was Michael Brown. So were the heinous events described in Rolling Stone—the startling claims that Rolling Stone didn’t attempt to check.

(So was the story in “Jimmy’s World,” the 1980 journalistic hoax published by the Washington Post, whose editors made no attempt to fact-check Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer-wining report. So were the stories of heinous preschool abuse which sent innocent people to prison in the 1980s.)

It’s an old joke in journalism—some stories are “too good to check.” Often, to make real stories better, bogus facts may be allowed to find their way into the mix.

Michael Brown wasn’t shot in the back. George Zimmerman didn’t fire “a warning shot,” then “a kill shot,” as the New York Times falsely reported. Whatever happened in those cases, those claims turned out to be false.

It now seems fairly clear that Rolling Stone’s story was full of bogus claims—claims the magazine didn’t bother to check.

Despite the miraculous brain we love to discuss, this has been happening in our upper-end journalism for decades now. In the political realm, some of these hoaxes have changed the history of the world—and we liberals still refuse to acknowledge the fact that these hoaxes even occurred!

Rather plainly, Rolling Stone has created a new journalistic debacle. On the brighter side, this debacle helps shed light on the functioning of our highly imperfect brains, and on the role of bogus facts in rallying us to certain types of belief.

We’ll examine various aspects of this episode all week. Spoiler alert:

In point of fact, our human brains often function quite poorly. As a general matter, our academic and journalistic elites still haven’t discovered this fact.

Tomorrow: Do you believe in physics? Rolling Stone and the broken bottle

KRISTOF VILLAGE: Nicholas Kristof, god of the whites!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014

Part 4—Infallibly right like him: This has been a Week That Was in American news.

Gaps of imagination have surfaced in the wake of the decision by the Staten Island grand jury:

In this morning’s New York Times, a letter writer from New York City calls the decision “unfathomable.”

In the letter directly above that letter, another writer, from California, fathoms their decision just fine.

Can you fathom the existence of people whose judgments about such a matter may actually differ from yours? Or do you traffic in the ancient belief that those who differ from you on such matters must be essentially Other?

Questions like these have come to mind in recent weeks as we’ve read Nicholas Kristof’s endless series of columns bearing this headline:

“When Whites Just Don’t Get It.”

Again and again, we’ve been struck by how deeply unwise those columns seem. Briefly, we’ll try to say why.

Last Sunday’s column bore this headline: “When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5.” As Kristof lectured, he suggested that we hold a “national conversation” on race—a conversation which could be led by Bill Clinton and George Bush and of course by Oprah herself.

This tired suggestion struck us as insultingly lazy, unthoughtful. In yesterday’s Washington Post, E. J. Dionne seemed to roll his eyes at this familiar can of tripe, suggesting that these “national conversations” on race are tired, formulaic, unhelpful.

Everyone says the same things every time, says Dionne. In the process, nothing changes.

In our view, Kristof’s call for a national conversation is insultingly lazy, uncaring. A 6-year-old could have dreamed that up on his cookie break.

Even more insulting—even more unhelpful—is the way this amazingly pompous man has established himself as the self-appointed philosopher king of the “whites.”

For ourselves, we don’t want to belong to a tribe—or god help us, to a “race”—which has Kristof as a member. After his lazy call for our latest national conversation, this is the way our self-adoring king of the whites proceeded:

KRISTOF (11/30/14): This “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” series is a call for soul-searching. It’s very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human. Three-quarters of whites have only white friends, according to one study, so we are often clueless.

What we whites notice is blacks who have “made it”—including President Obama—so we focus on progress and are oblivious to the daily humiliations that African-Americans endure when treated as second-class citizens.

Kristof knows what “we whites” notice! He knows what “we whites” focus on. He even knows when we’re oblivious.

It’s certainly true that “whites” are often less than godlike in their various understandings and perceptions. Various “whites” will be uninformed, or under-informed, in a wide array of ways concerning a white range of topics.

As the sun god Kristof notes, this is part of being human. Because it’s part of being human, “blacks,” who are also less than godlike, will often fall short of pure perfection in their assessments too!

“Whites” and “blacks,” and everyone else, will always be seeing through glasses darkly. Everyone has something to learn from the perspectives of somebody else.

It’s true! Very often, “whites” don’t get something or other. Often, “blacks” fall short of perfections in such ways too.

But please note:

In the kingdom of Kristof, Nicholas Kristof always gets it.! There is no sign in Kristof’s work that there possibly could be some matter that he himself doesn’t get.

He quickly divides us into our “races,” then lectures one “race” alone. He helps this one race with its “soul searching,” seems to do none of his own.

His failure to note the limited of vision of all us Americans is a terrible, unhelpful thing. But the great god Kristof does it easily, just before he rattles all the tired, memorized statistics all readers have heard before.

We all have something more to learn, starting with the basic fact that we’re all in this together. But so what? Happily dividing the country by race, this great god lectures one “race” on what it doesn’t get.

He skips the possibility that some in the other “race” nay not get it either. Most disgustingly, he fails to ponder the millions of ways he himself, the great sun god, doesn’t get jack squat.

We’ve been increasingly disgusted by this man’s lazy work down through the years. We’ve been especially struck by the lazy ways he has lectured on public schools, a topic he seems to know nothing about.

There’s no reason why he should know something about public schools. But gods like Kristof don’t understand that they themselves “just don’t get it” in the same ways the rest of us struggle for wisdom and insight.

Instead, he repeats cant from “educational experts,” worthless piddle he’s memorized from the latest TED talk. In his latest series, he has taken to lecturing “whites” about all the things “we whites” should know.

We all need much more wisdom this week. Here’s the first act of wisdom we all can accomplish:

We can tell the sun god Kristof that it’s time to descend from his throne and join us rubes down here on the plain. He also might stop reflexively splitting his subjects into “blacks” and “whites.”

Predictable results: In comments to Sunday’s column, you will see many people who felt condescended to by Kristof.

They felt he was being condescending because he plainly was. The result of such condescension is obvious and predictable:

It drives people deeper into their camps, the last thing this nation needs.

That one letter writer will probably love the sun god's tired old lecture. Others will recoil and rebel. Does this lead to progress?

Breaking: Called away from our desks!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2014

Will return tomorrow:: We’ve been called away from our desks. We’ll return to those desks tomorrow.

Supplemental: The kids are all right, the Post reports!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2014

One key improvement omitted: In last Sunday’s Outlook section, the Washington Post ran an upbeat report about these kids today.

Professor Finkelhor wrote the report. This is the way he started, hard-copy headline included:

FINKLEHOR (11/30/14): The kids are all right after all

The news media likes to characterize today’s young people as risk averse, narcissistic, app-dependent, over-scheduled, entitled and “pornified.” Among the culprits are too much praise, not enough challenge, helicopter parents, cellphones and of course, the Internet.

But by many measures, young people are actually showing virtues their elders lacked. They have brought delinquency, truancy, promiscuity, alcohol abuse and suicide down to levels unseen in many cases since the 1950s. Rather than coming up with ever more old-fogey complaints, we should be celebrating young people’s good judgment and self-control—and extolling their parents and teachers.

You’ve probably heard that crime is down. But most of the remarkable facts about crime and delinquency among young people have not been trumpeted enough in a country just 20 years removed from fears that it was facing a generation of young “super-predators.”

Good for Finkelhor! That said, we were struck by several aspects of his report. That includes one major improvement he completely failed to discuss.

Finkelhor discussed the various ways in which today’s kids are better. General crime is down; rape and other sex crimes are down; suicide is less common; school safety has been improving dramatically.

That said, we thought the professor showed a tin ear on one or two occasions. Did he realize the way the highlighted passages might sound to adult ears?

FINKELHOR: Every generation of parents is alarmed by the sexual behavior of the young. But the accusations are more misplaced now than ever. Not only is the rate of teenage pregnancy down to record lows in the United States, but the percentage of ninth-graders who say they have had sexual intercourse has declined from 54 percent in 1991 to 47 percent in 2013. The percentage of high schoolers who say they have had four or more sexual partners also has declined.

Young people are showing a lot more self-control when it comes to substances as well. Binge drinking by 12th-graders is lower than at any time since surveys were started in 1976. The number of teenagers who have been drunk in the past year is at a record low and the drop for eighth-graders is particularly remarkable.

Only 47 percent of ninth-graders say they’ve had intercourse! Fewer eighth-graders got drunk last year!

We’re going to guess that claims like those won’t sound that great to many readers. But as Finkelhor rattled the many improvements, we were struck by the one big improvement he skipped.

Truly, it’s against the law to report the fact that test scores are up on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard of domestic testing! Finkelhor listed many improvements, but took a pass on that.

It’s just as we have always told you. Every researcher and journalist swears by the NAEP, but no one reports what the NAEP scores show! Never has this principle seemed more striking to us.

Finkelhor didn’t report the gain in national test scores. When he listed possible reason for the other improvements, we thought of Kevin Drum:

FINKELHOR: Why these improvements? Social scientists are mostly guessing. For example, over the past generation we have unleashed many new prevention and intervention programs for parents, families and children that use more effective strategies. We also have given psychiatric medication to many children and their parents. Although controversial, such drugs reduce aggression, depression and hyperactivity—which all contribute to conflict and risk-taking. Then there is the Internet, electronic games and related technology that have combined to relieve boredom, one of the chief drivers of adolescent mischief. Cellphones keep kids in touch with their parents and their friends, making it easier to summon help or get advice when they’re in trouble.

It might be the meds or the video games. Or maybe it’s the cellphones! Finkelhor didn’t speculate about the possible role of lead abatement in the many improvements he named.

An array of unpleasant comments were found beneath the article. Meanwhile, the Post proved it was still the Post through an accompanying graphic which we can’t find on line.

This was the headline on the graphic. We’re leaving the typo in:

Youth gone mild
Despite perceptions, today’s young people are less prone to bad behavior than there [sic] elders. For example, take these declines in crime statistics between 2002 and 2011.

Alas! The Post went with “there” instead of “their.” More strikingly, none of the statistics in the graphic spoke to the issue in question!

Are young people less prone to bad behavior than their elders? Probably yes. But none of the data in the graphic spoke to that actual issue.

When these kids today take over the Post, errors like that will cease.

KRISTOF VILLAGE: Condescension alleged!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2014

Part 3—Columnist brings us together: Back in 1968, an eighth-grader held up a sign at a rally for Candidate Nixon.

The sign became famous, so much so that it has its own Wikipedia entry. “Bring us together,” her sign famously said.

That didn’t occur under Nixon. But as of today, it seems that the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof has accomplished this worthwhile task.

Last Sunday, Kristof posted the fifth installment in his endless series, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It.” In this morning’s paper, a letter captures two of our own reactions:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (12/3/14): Does anyone other than me find Nicholas Kristof’s “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” series condescending?

Who made Mr. Kristof the spokesman for blacks’ justified anger toward racism in America? I certainly don’t feel that he speaks for me and the other 40 million-plus black Americans. I think his solutions—“a new commission,” a “national conversation”—are the old bromides that won’t have any real effect on the problem, at least not while the parties in power are not talking to each other.

[...]

D— G—
New York, Nov. 30, 2014

The letter writer is “black;” we ourselves are “white.” But like the writer, we have found Kristof’s series to be quite condescending.

We agree with the letter writer in a second way. We thought the start of Sunday’s column drowned us in tedious bromides.

This is the way the column began, nagging headline included:

KRISTOF (11/30/14): When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5

We Americans are a nation divided.

We feud about the fires in Ferguson, Mo., and we can agree only that racial divisions remain raw. So let’s borrow a page from South Africa and impanel a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine race in America.

The model should be the 9/11 commission or the Warren Commission on President Kennedy’s assassination, and it should hold televised hearings and issue a report to help us understand ourselves. Perhaps it could be led by the likes of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Oprah Winfrey.

Part 5! Teacher refuses to quit!

A bit later, Kristof pictures this commission conducting a “national conversation,” just as the letter writer said.

Kristof said we’re a nation divided. But as he started his column, he chose a framework which was certain to divide people even more.

He suggested we pattern our national conversation on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Predictably, commenters found this suggestion insulting, offensive. People stopped listening fast.

Kristof imagined the panel could be led by Presidents Clinton and Bush—and by Oprah, of course. From what planet does such piffle emerge?

The last time we saw Oprah, she was asking Lindsay Lohan if she wanted to proceed with a kitschy reality show on Oprah’s cable channel. On Sunday, meanwhile, liberal commenters mocked the thought that a clown like President Bush could possibly lead this commission. And does Kristof think that President Clinton would tackle this task, even as his wife, Hillary Clinton, stages a run for the White House?

We agree with that letter writer! Kristof’s proposal struck us as a tired old bromide, dressed up in a way guaranteed to insult and offend.

Let us suggest the sheer absurdity of a “national conversation” on race—a gigantic topic in our tortured history, a gigantic topic which can’t be addressed in a mere conversation.

(In June 1997, President Clinton appointed an eight-member panel to conduct such a discussion. How many members of that panel can you name today? Can you remember a single thing they said in their final report?)

We agree with that letter writer. To us, a “national conversation” on race seems like a lazy suggestion out of the past, like the ultimate bromide.

That said, we aren’t sure why the writer, who is black, feels that Kristof’s columns have been condescending. Kristof is talking down to “whites” in his series, a group to which he himself no longer quite seems to belong.

Tomorrow, we’ll consider some of the condescension voiced in this endless series. We’ll look at (predictable) comments from readers who complained that they’ve been condescended to.

For today, let’s consider the kind of examples Kristof gave us in Sunday’s fifth installment. For this, we will refer to another letter in this morning’s Times.

What kinds of truths can our Truth Commission offer to clueless whites? The analysts groaned as Kristof cited a study they have reviewed in the past:

KRISTOF (continuing directly): We as a nation need to grapple with race because the evidence is overwhelming that racial bias remains deeply embedded in American life. Two economists, Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers, found that white N.B.A. referees disproportionally call fouls on black players, while black refs call more fouls on white players. “These biases are sufficiently large that they affect the outcome of an appreciable number of games,” Price and Wolfers wrote.

If such racial bias exists among professional referees monitored by huge television audiences, imagine what unfolds when an employer privately weighs whom to hire, or a principal decides whether to expel a disruptive student, or a policeman considers whether to pull over a driver.

Does racial bias remain deeply embedded in American life? In that example, Kristof refers to a 2007 study—a study whose methodology and results are disputed today in a letter from an NBA executive.

The analysts groaned when they saw this citation—not because they know the study to be flawed, but because they knew its findings to be quite minor.

In one way, Kristof seems to misstate those findings. But he never notes the degree to which rates of foul calls in the NBA were found to vary depending on the race of referees.

How “deeply embedded” was race found be in this particular study? According to the study, the rate of fouls seemed to vary by a factor of about four percent.

The authors said the change in the number of fouls mainly affected white players. They said they couldn’t tell if this was because white refs called “too few” calls on white players, or because black refs called too many.

Whatever! If we assume the study was valid, this is a minor distinction. It might be mildly interesting that such effects can be observed in one part of American life. But good God!

Given the sweep of societal problems connected to race and its history, we would be living in paradise if one group had two percent too much while the other had two percent too little. Given the size of our actual problems, that is a very minor bit of embedding.

Rightly or wrongly, that study found a rather minor effect. But like a magician yelling presto, Kristof amazed us with his description, failing to note how minor the observed effect actually was.

We readers were supposed to cower and cringe, ashamed of our fallen natures. This kind of paint-by-the-numbers citation strikes us as lazy and counterproductive.

Alas! There are many topics involving race which deserve careful discussion. That said, there is no point conducting such discussions unless we do so in a way to which different people will listen.

That letter writer from New York said he has found Kristof’s work “condescending.” We don’t know why he feels that way, but that’s been our reaction as well.

At least on this one basic point, Kristof’s columns have brought us together! That said, why have we found his columns condescending?

Tomorrow, we’ll try to explain. And we’ll look at comments from readers who feel condescended to.

Tomorrow: Advice from Olympus

Breaking: International Luxury Conference now underway in Miami!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2014

Also, the latest from T: We rarely see the hard-copy version of the Sunday New York Times. Too expensive!

Two weekends ago, we saw it. We also saw the November 16 edition of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, which the paper publishes fifteen Sundays per year.

We’ll have to admit it—we were surprised by the utter foppishness of the magazine's offerings. Among a wide array of entries, we perused these:

A profile of “England’s most revered interior designer;” a report on the comeback of the adult tricycle; nine wallpaper studies, in which “the artist Leanne Shapton painted wallpaper from museums, stately homes and National Trust houses in England;” and a thought-provoking international probe by Cathy Horyn:

Famine or Feast?
FOOD BY CATHY HORYN
Is it more rewarding to subsist on broth and cold mountain treks at a German clinic for 10 days or to settle into five-course Michelin-starred meals? One writer heads to the Black Forest to weigh the merits of the purge and the binge.

This is our way of offering a belated reminder. Yesterday afternoon, this year’s New York Times International Luxury Conference got started with a cocktail party at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami.

Yes, that’s the actual name of the annual conference, which is hosted by Deborah Needleman, editor of T. This morning, the keynoter spoke:

Keynote: Blurred Lines: Art, Tech and Luxury
Art. Fashion. Technology. Sustainability. What are the points of intersection? How does each discipline inform and improve the other? What have we learned from looking outside luxury’s borders, and where are we headed?

François-Henri Pinault, C.E.O. and chairman, Kering

Interviewed by Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and chief fashion critic, The New York Times

This strange event helps us discern the secret values of our journalistic upper class. To peruse the full list of speakers, you can just click here.

Final question: what is an “international luxury conference?” Truth to tell, after all this time, we still have no real idea!

KRISTOF VILLAGE: Gene Robinson traffics in facts!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2014

Part 2—We didn’t know that was allowed: Increasingly, our journalism is characterized by overreaction.

Also, by single vision—by the refusal to see an event from more than one point of view.

In this morning’s Washington Post, sports columnist Sally Jenkins provides a strong example. Then too, there’s the new slop at Salon.

Jenkins writes about an overreaction—the overreaction of a St. Louis police association to a gesture by five members of the St. Louis Rams.

Whatever you think of the players’ gesture, the police association overreacted in its official statement. The association asked the NFL to “discipline” the players for their gesture, which occurred at the start of Sunday’s game.

In its official statement, the association listed reasons for its reaction to the incident; those reasons are well worth reviewing. That said, the association misstated the nature of the evidence which emerged from the grand jury proceedings. Almost surely, they could have made a better case on their own behalf if they had reacted with more sorrow and a bit less anger.

Playing the role of the modern “journalist,” Jenkins proceeded to overreact to this overreaction. She found “veiled threats” from the police under every bed; that term is used in the Post’s synopsis of the column.

She ended her column as shown below. This strikes us as an example of classic single vision:

JENKINS (12/2/14): Five members of the St. Louis Rams made an edgy gesture on Sunday, and you may not agree with them. But they merely joined a long tradition of athletes using their celebrity for symbolic public protest, and the NFL was right to reject the call to punish them. Punish them for what, after all? For showing an alertness and sensitivity to current events in their community, and holding an opinion on them?

Alas! The police association didn’t say that the players should be disciplined “for showing an alertness and sensitivity to current events in their community, and holding an opinion on them.”

Jenkins skipped the nature of their complaint, which appeared in their official statement. As she did, she engaged in an act of single vision, in which all the merits and concerns involved in some case fall on the scribe’s favored side.

Single vision is everywhere in the current media landscape. Facts are selected and discarded to serve the pundit’s preferred point of view.

It’s painful to read and watch such work. And yes, this type of work is being done by pundits of the pseudo-left and the pseudo-right, despite the latest effort by Salon’s Elias Isquith to insist that this sort of thing is only done by Them.

This brings us to today’s good news. We recommend much of Gene Robinson’s work in his own column in the Washington Post.

Incredibly, Robinson attempts to traffic in information and facts. In this early part of this column, he discusses the large number of police killings in this country, as compared to the number of killings in other developed nations:

ROBINSON (12/2/14): According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, in 2013 there were 461 “justifiable homicides” by police—defined as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.” In all but three of these reported killings, officers used firearms.

The true number of fatal police shootings is surely much higher, however, because many law enforcement agencies do not report to the FBI database. Attempts by journalists to compile more complete data by collating local news reports have resulted in estimates as high as 1,000 police killings a year. There is no way to know how many victims, like [Michael] Brown, were unarmed.

By contrast, there were no fatal police shootings in Great Britain last year. Not one. In Germany, there have been eight police killings over the past two years. In Canada—a country with its own frontier ethos and no great aversion to firearms—police shootings average about a dozen a year.

Liberals and conservatives alike should be outraged at the frequency with which police in this country use deadly force. There is no greater power that we entrust to the state than the license to take life. To put it mildly, misuse of this power is at odds with any notion of limited government.

We wouldn’t use the term “outraged” ourselves. In part for the reason cited below, we’d use the term “deeply concerned:”

ROBINSON (continuing directly): I realize that the great majority of police officers never fire their weapons in the line of duty. Most cops perform capably and honorably in a stressful, dangerous job; 27 were killed in 2013, according to the FBI. Easy availability of guns means that U.S. police officers—unlike their counterparts in Britain, Japan or other countries where there is appropriate gun control—must keep in mind the possibility that almost any suspect might be packing heat.

The kinds of statistics Robinson cites always seem impossible, shocking. But as he notes, they reflect the “easy availability of guns” within our wider society, and the danger produced by that and other aspects of our national culture.

Police officers didn’t create those dangers, but they have to confront them. We’re always amazed by the certainty with which our headstrong pseudo-liberal youngsters, who have never served in such dangerous work, instruct and lecture American cops about the proper way they should be performing their duty.

How did you handle the danger of your job when you were a policeman? Because we’ve never been a policeman, we ourselves are somewhat slow to lecture those who are.

As far as we know, Robinson has never been a policeman either. He has served as a journalist, including in the 1990s, when he advanced the view of Establishment Washington by sliming Candidate Gore.

Perhaps because he has never served, we would say that Robinson is a bit too quick to blame police, in sweeping ways, for engaging in misconduct. Still and all, he’s presenting information today. This includes the following highlighted fact, which we found a bit surprising:

ROBINSON (continuing directly): But any way you look at it, something is wrong. Perhaps the training given officers is inadequate. Perhaps the procedures they follow are wrong. Perhaps an “us vs. them” mentality estranges some police departments from the communities they are sworn to protect.

Whatever the reason, it is hard to escape the conclusion that police in this country are much too quick to shoot. We’ve seen the heartbreaking results most recently in the fatal shooting of 28-year-old Akai Gurley, an unarmed man who was suspected of no crime, in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project, and the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was waving a toy gun around a park in Cleveland.

Which brings me to the issue of race. USA Today analyzed the FBI’s “justifiable homicide” statistics over several years and found that, of roughly 400 reported police killings annually, an average of 96 involved a white police officer killing a black person.

It’s amazing how stingy we humans can be with the little word “some.” How badly would it have hurt to insert that word in the passage above—to say it’s “hard to escape the conclusion that [some] police in this country are [sometimes] too quick to shoot?”

For want of the simple word “some,” Robinson may seem to attack a whole profession in that passage. Sometimes, as occurred St. Louis, police organizations respond by overreacting to such representations.

We mentioned that highlighted statistic. The available numbers are imprecise, for reasons Robinson describes. But after consuming the highly tribalized work of the past few weeks, we were surprised to be told that fewer than 25 percent of police killings in recent years have involved white officers killing black people.

(Our preference would be that no police officer ever killed anyone.)

Fewer than 25 percent? Given the way facts are currently being sifted, that seemed like a surprisingly low percentage to us. (For our preference, see above.)

But then, everyone’s vision can be skewed when fiery pundits take turn overreacting to everyone else’s overreactions and overstatements, often in service to some tribal or corporate imperative. (Salon is more pleasing when all the facts tilt in one pleasing direction.)

Tomorrow, let’s return to Nicholas Kristof and the case of those NBA refs. Kristof continues to lecture the world.

Will his lectures be helpful?

Tomorrow: A missing statistic

Supplemental: Ruth Marcus starts including some facts!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2014

The way our discourse works: What follows strikes us as very depressing. But it’s a strong example of the way our “public discourse” now works.

Last Monday, the Washington Post published a letter from a reader who was very upset. The reader said she had been in tears as she read a recent column by Ruth Marcus.

Headline included, Marcus' column had started like this:

MARCUS (11/16/14): Cruel and unusual punishment for the autistic

Reginald Latson’s path to solitary confinement began four years ago as he waited for the public library to open in Stafford County, Va.

Latson, known as Neli, has an IQ of 69 and is autistic. Teachers and therapists describe him as generally sweet and eager to please.

He is also a black man, now 22, who on the day in question was wearing a hoodie—which prompted a concerned citizen to call police about a suspicious person loitering outside the library.

The ensuing encounter should have been nothing more than a harassing annoyance. Instead, not surprising given the rigid thinking and “fight or flight” instincts characteristic of those with autism, it escalated after Latson refused to provide his name and was restrained by the police officer when he tried to leave.

For our original post on this topic, click here.

Reginald Latson was 18 years old on the day in question. According to Marcus, his teachers “describe him as generally sweet and eager to please”—but he was wearing a hoodie that day.

For that reason, a concerned citizen called police about a suspicious person loitering outside the library. Or so Marcus said, as she started her column.

Last Monday, a letter writer railed about that citizen’s behavior. We decided to click back through Marcus’ links to see what we could learn about this case.

Alas! The Post first reported this story in July 2010, in a sympathetic profile about the difficulties faced by the parents of young people with autism. In a 1354-word report, Theresa Vargas made no mention of any hoodie being involved in this matter at all.

In March 2011, Vargas reported the matter again, nine days after Latson was found guilty of four charges, including assault of a law enforcement officer and wounding in the commission of a felony. This time, Vargas mentioned the fact that Latson had been wearing a hoodie on the morning in question.

But Vargas said nothing to indicate that the hoodie had occasioned the phone call to police—a phone call which actually came from school authorities, according to the original police report. She also noted that Latson had been convicted for behavior in an unrelated incident:

VARGAS (3/13/11): Last week, prosecutors tried Latson on a breaking-and-entering charge related to an incident in 2009. In that case, prosecutors said, Latson rang the doorbell at a teenager's home. When the teen opened the door, Latson hit him and followed him inside. Latson pleaded guilty to assault last year. On Thursday, he was found guilty of breaking and entering.

"I'm not here to try to paint a pretty story about my son," but he is not the violent individual that Stafford authorities have depicted, said Latson's mother, Lisa Alexander. "Neli is not a danger to society. He doesn't belong in jail. He belongs at home."

Other violent incidents have occurred. Earlier this year, Latson, now 22, was found guilty in another such case.

Marcus may be perfectly right in her overall assessment—in her claim that young people with developmental disorders should be treated differently from other people who break the law. But in our view, her presentation of this matter was truly heinous.

She played the “arrested for wearing a hoodie” card in her first column about this incident. In doing so, she drove at least one reader to tears and spread fear about the heinous conduct directed at black youth.

It’s astounding to us that a major newspaper allows such things to occur.

Yesterday, Marcus wrote about this matter again. This time, she included more information about the various violent incidents in which Latson has been involved.

Even there, we’d have to say she put a heavy spin on these events. But we ask you to consider that original column.

We can’t tell you how Latson should be treated. We’re asking you to think about Marcus’s conduct.

In that original column, Marcus did some of the most egregious picking-and-choosing of information we have ever seen. Making matters much worse, she introduced the inflammatory claim that Latson, a sweet and gentle soul, had been reported to the police because he was wearing a hoodie.

A reader was soon in tears. An editor ran her letter under this headline: “Wearing a hoodie while black.”

People believe what they read in the Post. They should be warned about that.

For the record, levels of violence: In the incident Marcus described, a police officer was injured so badly that he had to retire. In March 2011, Vargas reported this:

“Latson's attorneys didn't dispute what had happened. Instead, they presented an insanity defense in court. They said Latson—in whom intermittent explosive disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder had also been diagnosed—could not control his behavior because of an ‘irresistible impulse.’”

Marcus didn't have room for that in her original column. Plus, it would have harmed her heartwarming theme.

We feel bad for young people with problems. But just compare that passage, from her own link, to the portrait Marcus drew in that original column.

Marcus was posing as the journalistic hero in that original column. Most egregiously, she was toying with a popular meme, a meme involving a hoodie.

We think her conduct was very bad, to the point of being heinous. But as everyone knows, this is the way our “discourse” increasingly works.

KRISTOF VILLAGE: Himmler revealed!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2014

Part 1—Our mental and moral powers: We live in a very challenging time.

In part for that reason, we were struck by a letter we read in Saturday morning’s Washington Post.

The letter was written by a man who “was an appellate immigration judge on the Board of Immigration Appeals from 1995 to 2003.” He said that he’d been “deeply offended” by a front-page report in the Post.

The letter writer still works for the Justice Department. We include the headline over his letter. We assume the headline was prepared by the Post:

A profile of an extremist

I was deeply offended that The Post would devote a front-page article to Kris Kobach [“From Kansas, a challenge to the powers of a president,” Nov. 23]. Before he became Kansas secretary of state, Kobach directed legal strategies for groups nurtured by anti-immigration crusader John Tanton, who hopes to preserve white supremacy, and worked on initiatives such as Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s statutes targeting undocumented immigrants; both were ruled unconstitutional by federal courts. In Kansas, he has undertaken many attempts to disenfranchise minority voters.

What’s next? Portraits of Himmler and Pol Pot as German and Cambodian conservative legal experts? After all, they, too, were attempting to remove “foreign” influences from their nations, albeit by extreme measures we fortunately do not tolerate in the United States.

On line, the letter included a link to that front-page report. In referring to Kobach as “an extremist,” some editor went beyond the charges made by the offended reader.

As a general matter, we don’t share Kobach’s views, to the extent that we understand them. We wouldn’t vote for him if we lived in Kansas.

On the other hand, we found nothing especially strange about the Post’s front-page report. It concerned an elected official who has been a significant figure in the news for the past several years.

Especially given his station in life, we found it strange that the letter writer was “deeply offended” by that front-page report. We found it even stranger that the Post printed his letter in the form it did, with its fiery comparison to Himmler and Pol Pot.

By now, pretty much everyone has agreed—it doesn’t make a lot of sense to compare people to Hitler. But so what? Replace the “t” with a double-m and you’re good to go in the Post!

Given the norms of our journalism, the publication of that letter struck us as very strange. But then, such fiery statements are becoming the norm in our fraying discourse.

More examples:

In a separate clump of letters that day, the Post let five readers state their reactions to the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri.

You can review those letters yourself; they state different reactions to the events of the case. For ourselves, we were struck by the certainty with which the various readers announced what they had found as they groped their own part of the elephant, by the way they sometimes filtered facts to make their storylines stronger.

Can the media “get the Ferguson storyline correct?” One reader seemed to feel that they could—and that he knew what that correct “storyline” was.

Another reader felt she knew where “the focus” should be in the case. The focus shouldn’t be on the justice system, she said:

“The focus belongs on the parents of young men such as Michael Brown who failed to teach their son not to steal, not to walk in the street, not to disrespect the reasonable order of a police officer and not to reach for a police officer’s weapon.”

We don’t agree with that at all. In a larger sense, is there only one storyline, only one focus, in a matter like this? So those readers implied.

A third reader had a very different reaction to the case. She seemed to refer to the case as a “murder.” She then voiced a sad lament:

“The sad thing is that, even if the grand jury had indicted this officer, it has been proved over and over again that juries rarely convict police officers. The U.S. public has repeatedly declared that police can gun down anyone, regardless of guilt or race or anything else, and, if the police are brought to trial, they almost always walk. And anyone who guns down a young black man seems to be considered justified as long as he claims he felt threatened.”

Should Darren Wilson have been indicted, then convicted, for “gunning down” Michael Brown? This reader voiced no doubts.

All around the discourse in the past week, we’ve seen a world in which various people are “full of passionate intensity.”

Various players are hunting, and sometimes creating, their Himmlers. Doubts and complexities tend not to get expressed.

So far, we’ve talked about letter writers. Yesterday, the certainty spread to the professional writers in both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

For our money, Nicholas Kristof’s latest column was most instructive of all. Kristof was full of certainty, as he often is, and he offered some silly statistics.

We’re increasingly struck by Kristof’s work, which strikes us as lazy and poor. Tomorrow, we’ll start to look at his claims and suggestions—and at the predictable barrel of comments his latest effort engendered.

Increasingly, Kristof’s work strikes us as lazy, type-by-the-numbers, poor. We aren’t sure it provides the best model for these challenging times.

Tomorrow: Concerning those NBA refs!

SHORT WEEK, SHARP DECLINE: Hillary Clinton’s appalling demands!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2014

Part 3—The Washington Post, then Slate: Paul Krugman still doesn’t get it.

In this morning’s column, Krugman traffics in facts and information. He has been writing such columns ever since 1999, when he tried, three separate times, to explain the way in which Candidate Bush was misstating his own budget plan.

Krugman doesn’t get it! Our society’s modern post-journalism doesn’t deal in information and facts. Our “journalism” deals in the swill which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post.

The Post’s Thanksgiving morning report swallowed most of page A2. It gobbled 1414 words, eating some 32 paragraphs.

Like so much that has come before it, the report was narrative all the way down. It was prepared by Rosalind Helderman (Harvard 2001) and Philip Rucker (Yale 2006), the kinds of beasts who are now being churned, for corporate use, by those failed institutions.

In their deathless “news report,” Helderman and Rucker detailed the many vile demands of public speaker Hillary Clinton. The lengthy piece extended a remarkable series of attacks launched by the Post this summer.

Yesterday, this is the way the deathless report was pimped on the Post’s web site:

A rare glimpse into Hillary Clinton’s lucrative speeches
Rosalind S. Helderman and Philip Rucker
For a $300,000 speech at UCLA, Clinton reps made many demands about the stage and green-room.

Clinton reps made many demands about the stage and the green room! Early on, the intrepid reporters began to detail those demands.

The children relied on e-mails they had obtained through (brace yourselves!) a Freedom of Information request. Warning! Don’t be stampeded by such slippery words as “all-consuming:”

HELDERMAN AND RUCKER (11/27/14): At UCLA, efforts to book Clinton and then prepare for her visit were all-consuming, beginning almost immediately after she left her job as secretary of state on Feb. 1, 2013, until she delivered her Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership speech on March 5, 2014.

The documents show that Clinton’s representatives at the Harry Walker Agency exerted considerable control over her appearance and managed even the smallest details—from requesting lemon wedges and water on stage to a computer, scanner, and a spread of hummus and crudité in the green room backstage.

If we’re reading that correctly, Clinton’s reps even demanded that she be given water! They demanded “a spread of hummus and crudité”—that is to say, a plate of carrot sticks.

The nation is being badly conned when “journalists” behave in these ways. But as they continued, the Ivy League tools continued to list the outrages.

Warning! Don’t be stampeded by such slippery terms as “at length” and “lengthy:”

HELDERMAN AND RUCKER (continuing directly): Top university officials discussed at length the style and color of the executive armchairs Clinton and moderator Lynn Vavreck would sit in as they carried on a question-and-answer session, as well as the kind of pillows to be situated on each chair. Clinton’s representatives requested that the chairs be outfitted with two long, rectangular pillows—and that two cushions be kept backstage in case the chair was too deep and she needed additional back support.

After a lengthy call with a Clinton representative, UCLA administrator Patricia Lippert reported to campus colleagues, “She uses a lavalier [microphone] and will both speak from the audience and walk around stage, TED talk style. We need a teleprompter and 2-3 downstage scrolling monitors [for] her to read from.”

If we’re reading that correctly, Clinton reps demanded the use of a lavalier and a teleprompter! In these modern times, this is roughly as shocking as a demand that lights be turned on in the hall.

(Warning! Did you note what the children didn’t say? They didn’t say that Clinton’s reps engaged “at length” in the discussion of those “executive armchairs.” Did readers possibly get misled by their somewhat slippery construction?)

As they plowed through their endless report, the children listed many other “special accommodations” for Clinton’s UCLA speech. Given what modern press corps children are like, it’s possible that they actually didn’t understand the request we highlight:

HELDERMAN AND RUCKER: It is commonplace for celebrity speakers to request special accommodations—and Clinton was no exception. Her representatives asked for a case of still water, room temperature, to be deposited stage right. They also asked that “a carafe of warm/hot water, coffee cup and saucer, pitcher of room temperature water, water glass, and lemon wedges” be situated both on a table on stage as well as in another room where Clinton would stand for photos with VIPs.

For the green room, Clinton’s representatives requested: “Coffee, tea, room temp sparkling and still water, diet ginger ale, crudité, hummus and sliced fruit.” They also asked for a computer, mouse and printer, as well as a scanner, which the university had to purchase for the occasion.

When university officials decided to award Clinton the UCLA Medal, Clinton’s team asked that it be presented to her in a box rather than draped around her neck. That request was sent to the university’s chancellor, Gene Block.

“Chancellor Block has agreed to accommodate Hillary Clinton’s request to have the medal presented in a box,” Assistant Provost Margaret Leal-Sotelo wrote in one e-mail.

Why did Clinton want her medal presented in a box, rather than draped around her neck?

If you can’t imagine a reason for that, you simply don’t understand the world in which we all live. Meanwhile, note the other special accommodations demanded by Clinton reps:

They wanted water on stage and in her dressing room! They wanted sliced fruit in the green room! They wanted ginger ale!

Why is the Washington Post publishing swill of this type? Not being mind-readers, we can’t precisely tell you.

But if this type of “news report” doesn’t seem familiar to you, you may not understand the world in which we all live. The Post has been publishing such reports for a great many years now.

Yesterday morning, this nonsense jumped to Slate. The report by the hapless Daniel Politi appeared beneath this screaming headline:

“A List of Hillary Clinton’s Demands to Accept $300,000 for a University Speech”

Politi has been at Slate since 2004; he may be the world’s slowest child. Obediently, he listed all the troubling demands, including the demands for water, chairs and carrot sticks.

Predictably, this touched of a wave of low-IQ comments about removing the brown M-n-M’s from the basket—exactly the reaction this whole thing was designed to create.

Let us note one basic way in which Politi went beyond the work of the other children:

In the Post, Helderman and Rucker did perform the bare essentials. At the end of paragraph 10, they fleetingly noted that Clinton’s speaking fee went to the Clinton Foundation.

In paragraph 22, they noted that the fee was “funded through a private endowment and not with tuition or public dollars.”

Politi omitted both points, as was intended by his siblings. This touched off waves of low-IQ comments at Slate about the way Clinton was enriching herself by stealing the children’s tuitions.

Can we talk?

Judged as journalism, that lengthy piece in the Washington Post is about as dumb as “modern dumb” gets. It’s stunning to think that a pair of privileged children would actually file a FOI request so they could thumb through piles of emails to bring us news about the fact that Clinton eats fruit and carrot sticks (disguised as crudité).

That said, this is very familiar work. The Post and the Times have aimed reams of such work at disapproved candidates in the past.

They’ve changed world history in the process. The liberal world has tended to remain very quiet as this happens, and in the long deadly aftermath.

Nothing is likely to change as the Post conducts its newest jihad against a disfavored (potential) candidate. In particular, Rachel won’t breathe a word about this. She writes once a month for the Washington Post. Her branding must be secured.

Clinton demanded water and chairs. The Post thought you should know that.

SHORT WEEK, SHARP DECLINE: The painful discussions of Morning Joe!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2014

Part 2—Harvard professor “explains:” It’s hard to fathom the sheer inanity of our journalistic elites.

Sometimes they call in the Harvard professors; often, this makes matters worse. Consider Dr. Laura McNeal’s performance on today’s Morning Joe.

The gang had already discussed the finding of the grand jury in Ferguson, with Willie Geist Jr. showing, again, that he knows the right things to say but hasn’t done basic homework.

Eventually, Mika summoned the expert. To watch this segment, click here:

BRZEZINSKI (11/26/14): Joining us now from Atlanta, law policy analyst at Harvard Law School and assistant law professor at the University of Louisville, Dr. Laura McNeal.

You’ve worked closely with police departments on how to work with youth in urban communities. First of all, what do you make of the interview with Officer Wilson, and do you feel that he answered to some of the really screaming questions out there in terms of race and how he treated Michael Brown right before his death?

Mika referred to Wilson's interview with George Stephanopoulos. Needless to say, Professor McNeal found the interview “quite disturbing.”

Below, she starts explaining why. Do you notice anything about the way she recounts the basic events which ended in Michael Brown's death?

PROFESSOR MCNEAL (continuing directly): I found Officer Wilson’s interview to be quite disturbing, to be honest. He stated that he could not have done anything differently. But if you consider you have an unarmed teen walking, jay-walking, in the street, with a handful of cigarillos that ends up on the floor in the middle of the street in a pool of blood dead, clearly he could have done something differently.

And so I also found it disturbing that he seems to have such little remorse. I mean, there is a loss of a child’s life and he just seemed very almost stoic with respect to his response.

The professor engaged in a familiar form of story-telling. In her account of what happened that day, an unarmed teen was jay-walking with cigarillos. He then ended up dead in the street.

That account eliminates such parts of the story as may reflect poorly on Brown. As we’ve seen in the past, this is a story-telling technique of the propagandist.

That said, the professor said that Officer Wilson “clearly could have done something differently” that day. In the most obvious sense, that’s plainly true, of course.

But what should Wilson have done that day? For the first of several times, Scarborough chose to take the plunge.

His question led straight to the M-word:

SCARBOROUGH (continuing directly): What could he have done differently that day?

MCNEAL: Well, part of the problem is what the tragic death of Michael Brown represents is the practice of using adult policing practices on youth. Currently here in the United States, very few police departments actually include training on things such as youth developmental competence, meaning how do you de-escalate a situation from jay-walking to keep it from escalating to the point of murder?

Warning! As this segment proceeded, Brown proceeded from a “teen” to a “youth” to a “child.” We’ve also discussed that practice in the past.

At any rate, ninety seconds into the segment, the professor had dropped the M-bomb. Because Wilson hadn’t been trained, he had committed a murder!

No one questioned the professor’s use of that word. That said, Scarborough tried, two more times, to get her to specify what Wilson should have done differently. At the end of the six-minute segment, Geist Jr. also gave it a try.

In our view, those questions for Professor McNeal produced one of the most fatuous segments we’ve seen in some time. Here’s why we say that:

None of these people actually know what happened that day. Did Wilson speak rudely to Brown, or did he speak politely? Did Brown attack Wilson in the way Wilson described, or did something different occur?

The professor has no real idea, but she seemed to have no idea that she has no real idea. She just kept churning her true belief concerning what Wilson should have done.

We suggest you watch that horrible segment and weep for the fate of your nation. One word of warning:

If you watch the segment, you’ll see the professor say that Wilson evinced some “implicit bias,” some “unconscious biases,” during his interview with Stephanopoulos. You’ll see Katty Kay jump in to say that the professor is “absolutely right.”

Our question:

Is it possible that Kay’s reactions to these events are driven by some sort of “unconscious biases?” Such thoughts rarely trouble the spotless minds of upper-class players like Kay.

All around the world, the upper classes have always behaved in these ways. They can always spot the unconscious biases of those in the lower classes.

This panel’s silly, scripted discussions were hard to watch this day. We strongly suggest that you review the professor’s words of advice.

Supplemental: Punished for wearing a hoodie while black!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2014

Post tells familiar story: Yesterday morning’s Washington Post included a fascinating letter.

It came from a reader who became upset while reading a recent column by Ruth Marcus. Marcus’ column started like this:

MARCUS (11/16/14): Reginald Latson’s path to solitary confinement began four years ago as he waited for the public library to open in Stafford County, Va.

Latson, known as Neli, has an IQ of 69 and is autistic. Teachers and therapists describe him as generally sweet and eager to please.

He is also a black man, now 22, who on the day in question was wearing a hoodie—which prompted a concerned citizen to call police about a suspicious person loitering outside the library.

According to Marcus, Reginald Latson, then 18, was wearing a hoodie as he waited for the library to open. His hoodie prompted a concerned citizen to telephone the police.

Four years later, Latson remains in jail, in solitary confinement. Marcus’ column concerns the way people with autism are treated by the law.

As a general matter, Marcus’ column may well make good suggestions. Still, one reader was disturbed by the role the hoodie played in this tale.

She wrote a letter to the Post. Eye-catching headline included, here’s what her letter said:

Punished for wearing hoodie while black

I cried as I read the story of Reginald Latson in Ruth Marcus’s Nov. 16 op-ed column, “Cruel and unusual punishment for the autistic.” This tragedy began with a call to the police by a neighbor who deemed suspicious the sight of a black male wearing a hoodie waiting outside a library. What about this sight raised suspicion?

Was he wandering around the building in an apparent attempt to break in? Was he trying windows and doors? Was he trying to break a window? No. Apparently, a black male standing in front of a building in a hoodie is cause for suspicion.

Mr. Latson’s autism is characterized by rigid thinking and exaggerated fight or flight instincts. He attempted to flee when questioned by the police. He was placed in a choke hold and began to fight. Four years later, he’s incarcerated in solitary confinement—cruel and unusual punishment merely for being autistic.

As a black woman whose son, stepsons, nephews and friends’ children also wear hoodies and who wait in front of buildings, I also feel compelled to point out that one’s physical appearance should not be adequate cause for suspicion. We need to become a society ready to look beyond appearances to specific behavior.

What if the neighbor who made the ill-advised call had learned to look beyond a hoodie and a man’s skin color? The call might never have been made, and this person would instead have seen Mr. Latson peaceably enter the library when it opened. What if the dispatcher who responded to the call had asked more questions to determine whether Mr. Latson’s behavior or actions seemed suspicious? Perhaps the officers might never have been sent—and Mr. Latson would be spending his days at home.

This reader cried as she read about the young man who was “punished for wearing a hoodie while black.” Her letter appeared in yesterday’s Post. Plainly, the letter advances the assumptions Marcus encouraged at the start of her column.

Can people get punished for wearing a hoodie while black? Obviously, this narrative became familiar during the public discussion of the killing of Trayvon Martin. Marcus was ringing familiar bells at the start of her column.

Yesterday’s letter made us curious. What was the fuller story behind this incident, which dates to 2010?

Starting with yesterday’s letter, we began to click back through the reporting which has appeared in the Post. It gave us our latest lesson about an important question:

Where do narratives come from?

You can click back through that material too. Tomorrow, we’ll show you what we found when we did.

SHORT WEEK/SHARP DECLINE: A warning from Blow!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2014

Part 1—Katie McDonough knows all: To her credit, Katie McDonough knows everything.

We were struck by this fact all over again when we turned to Salon this morning.

The youngish McDonough is billed as “Salon's politics writer, focusing on gender, sexuality and reproductive justice.” That said, she also seems to know everything about pretty much everything else.

In this morning’s revelations, she knows what would have been fair and just in the case of Michel Brown—and in the case of Marissa Alexander.

Her descriptions of these cases may seem a bit selective to some, but she knows what would have been fair and just. Not long ago, we marveled at her apparent omniscience concerning NFL personnel issues.

In tribal culture, tribal priests will emerge with these types of omniscience. At the start of yesterday’s column, Charles Blow warned us liberals about the things we must never let ourselves think:

BLOW (11/24/14): Bigger Than Immigration

Don’t let yourself get lost in the weeds. Don’t allow yourself to believe that opposition to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration is only about that issue, the president’s tactics, or his lack of obsequiousness to his detractors.

This hostility and animosity toward this president is, in fact, larger than this president. This is about systems of power and the power of symbols. Particularly, it is about preserving traditional power and destroying emerging symbols that threaten that power. This president is simply the embodiment of the threat, as far as his detractors are concerned, whether they are willing or able to articulate it as such.

According to Blow, Obama’s detractors may not be able to articulate their motives and beliefs. But he started his column by telling us what we mustn’t “allow ourselves to believe.”

According to Blow, we mustn’t allow ourselves to believe “that opposition to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration is only about that issue, the president’s tactics, or his lack of obsequiousness to his detractors.”

In individual cases, are we allowed to wonder about that possibility? No directive was issued by Blow, but we’ll guess that such thoughts are discouraged.

In his rather fuzzy formulations, Blow was saying that we should never trust the good faith of The Others. As he continued, he warned us about who they are:

BLOW (continuing directly): A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last week found that the public “wants immigration policy along the lines of what President Barack Obama seeks but is skeptical of the executive action.” When The Journal looked at some of the people who “say they want to see a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants—which is beyond what Mr. Obama’s executive order would do—but say they disapprove of presidential executive action,” it found that the group was “overwhelmingly white and more likely to be Republican than not” and some said that they simply “don’t like anything associated with the president.”

Those Obama detractors!

They were “overwhelmingly white,” Blow said. And not only that:

They were “more likely to be Republican than not,” we were underwhelmingly told. “Some” detractors said they simply don’t like Obama at all!

Questions: How white is overwhelmingly white? Blow didn’t say.

How likely were the detractors to be Republican? How many of those people was “some?” Those questions went unanswered too.

For those who wish to check Blow’s work, he linked to this underwhelming analysis piece by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal had spoken to seventy-six people “who said they want to see immigration reform happen but don’t like the idea of Mr. Obama acting alone.”

Warning! In the context of polling and surveys, seventy-six is a rather small number. What percentage of those people were white? We weren’t told, whether by Blow or by the Journal itself.

That said, the Journal quoted nine of these detractors—four Republicans, three Democrats and two independents. Truth to tell, you can’t learn a huge amount from Blow’s link.

You can start to learn about Blow as he continues his piece. He quickly gave us a crafty warning about Those Whom We Must Never Trust:

BLOW (continuing directly): Pay attention to the overall response from all sources, particularly the rhetoric in which it is wrapped.

Speaker John Boehner has accused Obama of acting like a “king” and an “emperor.” Representative Louie Gohmert referred to Obama’s “ new royal amnesty decree.”

Pay attention to all sources, Blow advised. The gentleman continued from there, cherry-picking his sources.

Meanwhile, did you notice something Blow left out? His readers were asked to be very afraid about Boehner’s reference to Obama being an “emperor.” Blow forgot to say where that language started—with Obama himself!

Blow’s column is a good example of our descent into tribal culture. Before he was done, he even reminded us (hint, hint) that “most of [the founding fathers] owned slaves at some point.”

Weirdly, he included a graphic derived from the NBC News/WSJ survey in which only 43 percent of Latinos approve of what Obama did. Please don’t allow yourselves to trust the motives of Latinos!

Thanks to Thanksgiving, this will be a short week—a short week in which we’ll explore our journalistic culture’s rather sharp decline.

Tomorrow: A new world record

Blow by the numbers: Blow included only one graphic with his column. It showed that Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to approve of Obama’s plan.

But how odd! Beneath that (rather low) number for Latinos, Blow included this note:

Note from NBC News: “The sample size here is small (just 110 Latino respondents), so the numbers have a high margin of error.”

Why would you choose to highlight a number with a high margin of error? Because our upper-end journalism is imitation? Because it’s essentially faux?

BREAKING: Amtrak does it again!

MONDAY,NOVEMBER 24, 2014

Welcomes entire staff: Later this morning, Amtrak welcomes our entire staff on a southbound run.

It's the consistency we respect. Full services resume tomorrow.

BREAKING: Amtrak welcomes entire staff!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2014

On secret northbound excursion: We're off on a mission of national import. No posts until tomorrow.

BRAVE NEW VOICES: They’re everywhere!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2014

Part 4—Rachel’s latest tale: Brave new voices are everywhere in the rapidly changing media landscape.

The world of American journalism is changing before our eyes. Consider the report in yesterday’s New York Times about the storied New Republic, whose owner says it’s no longer “liberal,” or even a “magazine.”

The New Republic is now one hundred years old. Yesterday, Jennifer Scheussler reported some of the changes which have occurred under Chris Hughes, “the Facebook multimillionaire who bought the magazine in 2012.”

The new owner is 30 years old. The New Republic isn’t going “lowbrow,” he was quick to assert:

SCHUESSLER (11/19/14): Eyebrows were raised last year when Mr. Hughes, a former organizer for Barack Obama, introduced the redesigned magazine with an editor's letter that omitted the words ''liberal'' or ''liberalism.'' These days, while he says he remains committed to print, he is also ready to jettison ''magazine.''

''Twenty years ago, no question, it was a political magazine, full stop,'' Mr. Hughes said in a joint interview with Mr. Vidra in New York. ''Today, I don't call it a magazine at all. I think we're a digital media company.''

Mr. Hughes (who gave up the editor in chief title but remains publisher) and Mr. Vidra dismissed speculation that they wanted to take the magazine in a more lowbrow, BuzzFeed-like direction. But they did say there was room to increase the digital audience to as much as ''tens of millions'' of unique monthly visitors by focusing on a broader range of topics and on new forms of digital storytelling that ''travel well'' on the web.

Hughes doesn’t want to go lowbrow! He just wants “to increase the digital audience…by focusing on a broader range of topics and on new forms of digital storytelling that ‘travel well’ on the web.”

All around the media world, a lot of people are refusing to go lowbrow in precisely this fashion. At the new Salon, they keep adding kid reporters who churn reports of this type:

WEDNESDAY, NOV 19, 2014 10:19 AM EST
The year of the rear: A thorough history of 2014 in butts
From "Anaconda" to Kim Kardashian, a look back at the posteriors that got us to where we are today
ANNA SILMAN

Silman graduated from McGill in 2012. Today, as Salon’s new “deputy entertainment editor,” she’s engaged in that sort of digital storytelling.

A lot of storytelling is being offered as the new media grow. Consider the story Rachel told at the start of last night’s program.

Rachel’s story took us almost seven minutes into her program, depending on when you want to stop counting. The storytelling started like this:

MADDOW (11/19/14): Good evening, Chris. Thank you. Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.

Do you remember a guy named Randy Scheunemann? Randy Scheunemann, he was the top foreign policy adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008. That’s him, the guy with the beard there.

He doesn’t have that memorable a face. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just mean, he doesn’t— You don’t see him and instantly know who he is.

He also has a name that is kind of hard to pronounce, definitely hard to spell. Honestly, Randy Scheunemann has never been a super famous guy in politics.

Randy Scheunemann’s name is hard to pronounce. It’s definitely hard to spell!

He doesn’t have that memorable a face. With that, we were off to the fair.

To watch the whole segment, click here.

As noted, Maddow’s story wound on for a rather long time. Soon, she was discussing the story of the ski lift fight which, she said, The Daily Beast had broken this very week:

MADDOW: John McCain did not win the presidency and Randy Scheunemann went back to being a standard Washington foreign policy guy. And you don’t hear much about him anymore.

You haven’t heard much about him since then. Until this week.

Until this week, a really, really weird story about Randy Scheunemann was broken by The Daily Beast. It turns out Randy Scheunemann belongs to a private skiing club in Montana.

I did not know there was such a thing as a private skiing club. I thought like, you know, you buy a lift ticket, then you go ski on a mountain with other people who are skiing on the mountain and that’s skiing! I—

Apparently, there are places you can do it privately, without the riff-raff. And Randy Scheunemann apparently belongs to one of those.

And on the ski lift, at his private skiing club, The Daily Beast and a number of other outlets now report that Randy Scheunemann got into a fight.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Maddow’s chronology was already wrong.

In fact, The Daily Beast didn’t break this story this week, a claim Maddow kept repeating. Maddow’s web site didn’t provide the link, but you can read the Daily Beast report here.

It’s dated October 18, 2014. That was a month ago.

In truth, that doesn’t enormously matter. But as Maddow continued to entertain us with her thoughts about private ski clubs, her storytelling continued to struggle and flail.

Her first six or seven minutes were devoted to this dreck. With apologies, here’s how her story continued:

MADDOW (continuing directly): And on the ski lift, at his private skiing club, The Daily Beast and a number of other outlets now report that Randy Scheunemann got into a fight. He got into a fight on the ski lift with a white supremacist, specifically with this guy, who is sort of America’s foremost white supremacist.

This is a guy named Richard Spencer. He was recently forcibly deported from Budapest when he tried to organize an international white supremacist conference and the nation of Hungary caught him trying to sneak into their country even though they had banned him. He calls for the creation of a white homeland. He runs an organization called the National Policy Institute, to try to advance the goal of a white homeland. His group is based in Whitefish, Montana.

He’s also founded a few online white supremacist magazines and Web sites, including this one, which is called Alternative Right.

And apparently, making a career as a white supremacist leader these days is a pretty remunerative thing. At least the dude is making enough money to belong to the same private ski club that Randy Scheunemann does in Montana.

Who even knew there were private ski clubs? Anyway, there are! And apparently, the two of them got into a fight on the ski lift.

Insults were exchanged. Punches were threatened. And the reason it all broke out in the news this week is because that private ski club in Montana, it’s called the Big Mountain Club, they apparently at some point in this fight between two of their members felt they had to decide between them, which of these two guys was going to be allowed to stay as a member of their private ski club:

Randy Scheunemann, Washington policy adviser guy, adviser to John McCain? Or the Aryan Nation white supremacist guy who’s trying to build a homeland for the endangered white race from his home base in Montana?

The Big Mountain Club in Whitefish, Montana, decided they’d go with the white supremacist. They kicked Randy Scheunemann out and kept the Ku Klux other guy! Yeah!

And so now, in the wake of that, you have Whitefish, Montana city council meetings that have suddenly gotten very crowded. They look like this, totally packed with local residents who apparently now realize they have the leader of a white nationalist movement living in their town, getting in fights on their ski lifts.

A local anti-racist effort has sprung up in Whitefish. They’re trying to figure out basically some way to force this guy out or at least maybe pass an anti-discrimination ordinance of some kind that maybe would annoy the guy enough that he might leave on his own.

It’s turning into this big to-do in Montana.

That’s enjoyable storytelling. It’s also largely inaccurate.

According to the Daily Beast, the incident which kicked this thing off occurred “in early 2013.” That was almost two years ago.

According to Scheunemann, it involved a brief argument as he and Spencer got off the ski lift. There never was a fight.

According to The Daily Beast, the story jumps ahead to the ski club’s annual Christmas party last year, in December 2013. According to Scheunemann, he and Spencer briefly argued again that night. According to Scheunemann, he told the leaders of the club that Spencer had to leave the club or that he, Scheunemann, would.

Spencer didn’t leave the club. For that reason, Scheunemann did, almost a year ago.

This story didn’t break “this week.” That’s clear from The Daily Beast report, to which Maddow provided no link.

Maddow did link to a recent news report about that city council meeting in Whitefish. According to the news report, the jam-packed meeting had nothing to do with any “ski lift fight,” or with the ski club at all.

Back to the Daily Beast:

In the (month old) Beast report, Spencer is quoted saying that Scheunemann’s account of the incidents in question involves “a gross mischaracterization of events.” Leaders of the club refused to comment to the Daily Beast.

Last night, there was no sign that Maddow or anyone on her staff had tried to speak with anyone concerning what actually happened in the two-year-old “ski lift fight.” She simply embellished Scheunemann’s account, jumbling her chronology in major ways as she did.

Increasingly, that's how Maddow performs storytelling of a weekday night.

Maddow’s is a Brave New Voice. As with Hughes’ version of The New Republic, she’s deeply involved in “storytelling.” On the other hand, she’s partisan to the point of being a propagandist.

Why did Maddow waste everyone’s time with last night’s embellished, inaccurate story? Largely, because it set up a scary framework with which she was shouting boo at her viewers.

That said, Maddow’s entire program last night was a tribute to propaganda. There are numerous ways to dumb the world down. Maddow is working on hers.

Much of Maddow’s propaganda involves the omission of facts. Persistently, she simplifies the world to make you feel politically scared and morally extra good.

Last night, she clowned her way through a denunciation of the “schizophrenic” American public, based on responses to a recent NBC poll. She then feigned ignorance concerning decisions by the broadcast networks to avoid televising presidential speeches.

To be clear, we assume she was feigning ignorance. With Maddow, it’s increasingly hard to tell.

Our media are changing before our eyes. Increasingly, Maddow is getting wealthy and famous by dumbing the world way down.

To our ear, her Brave New Voice sounds a lot like Sean’s. It's hard to believe that a modern nation can actually function this way.

Supplemental: What you can read in the New York Times!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2014

Maddow versus the world: You can read things in the New York Times you won’t likely see on TV.

Yesterday morning, on the front page, a news report carried this headline: “Immigration Has President Altering Stand.”

Michael Spear reported the various times in recent years when Obama has said that he can’t legally go where he now seems to be going on immigration.

What are the merits of this case? We aren’t sure—and you won’t likely see that explored on The One True Liberal Channel.

That was yesterday’s New York Times. In this morning’s New York Times, Ashley Parker performs a twofer.

On page A15, she offers a lengthy report under this headline: “In Immigration Fight, Republicans Explore Alternatives to a Shutdown.”

Parker quotes a string of Republican office-holder and machers who are arguing against a government shutdown in response to Obama’s upcoming moves on immigration. In Liberal Land, we’re still being told, in various ways, that the Fox News Channel is beating the drum in search of a quickie impeachment.

Out on page A1, Parker goes a bit further. She co-authors a lengthy report about yesterday’s vote on the Keystone pipeline.

This is where Maddow comes in.

Last night, for at least the third time, Maddow opened her program with a shrieking segment about the lunacy of allowing yesterday’s vote on the pipeline. She continued to wail and moan about the way the Democrats aren’t going to rush the nomination of Loretta Lynch through the lame-duck session.

Maddow’s angst was exhaustive last night, as was her isolation from the rest of the world. To all appearances, she had interviewed no one about these matters; she had spoken to no one. She gave no indication that anyone on her staff had spoken to anyone about the matters under review.

Instead, Our Own Rhodes Scholar just wailed away, damning the Democrats all to Hell for their wayward conduct.

We would have quoted from this meltdown, except MSNBC hasn’t gotten around to transcribing it yet. Other news channel transcribe in good time. The One True Liberal Channel does nothing in regular fashion.

If you can stand it, go ahead: watch Maddow’s opening segment last night. After that, read Parker’s front-page report.

(Warning! Maddow’s segment has been broken into three parts, the better to make you watch three commercials with. The videotape starts here.)

Increasingly, the Maddow show is a solipsistic banshee scream from a hyperbaric chamber. Increasingly, “the liberal world” is a veil of tears, much as the world of the Fox News Channel has been for these many years.

Increasingly, it’s tribal narrative all the way down; it’s a culture of bumper stickers. We liberals put Maddow on each night to learn the words to ours.