If you do not investigate the news you are reporting, are you doing anything other than gossiping?

This keeps happening because they choose to keep letting it happen.  From How A Small, Conservative Campus Paper Did A Better Job Covering The BYU Volleyball Incident Than “The New York Times” by Jesse Singal.  The subheading is Another strike against “moral clarity” in journalism.

On August 27, The New York Times ran an article by reporter Vimal Patel headlined “Racial Slur During College Volleyball Game Leads to Fan Suspension.” The end of the story notes that “McKenna Oxenden contributed reporting, and Jack Begg contributed research,” so three Times staffers worked on the piece in total.

It has… not aged well.

The article starts as follows: “A Duke University women’s volleyball player who is Black was called a racial slur during a game Friday night in Utah, prompting Brigham Young University to ban a fan from sporting events and Duke University to change the venue of a tournament game on Saturday.” 

It subsequently came out that the player in question is Rachel Richardson, a sophomore and the team’s only black starter. As NPR notes, “[T]he incident gained attention from a Twitter post by Lesa Pamplin, a Texas-based attorney and Richardson’s godmother, who said Richardson was called a slur ‘every time she served.’” That’s from a tweet that is no longer available, since Pamplin’s entire account was nuked (it used to live here), but as captured by NPR it read: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Duke’s volleyball team. While playing yesterday, she was called a nigger every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”

The Times painted a portrait of a genuinely terrifying situation that felt like it could devolve into a full-blown race riot. Patel writes that “Marvin Richardson, the father of the Duke volleyball player, said in an interview late Saturday that a slur was repeatedly yelled from the stands as his daughter was serving, making her fear ‘the raucous crowd’ could grow violent.” 

Later in the piece:

Mr. Richardson said he instructed his daughter that if she faced a similar situation in the future she should immediately make sure an authority figure was aware. But his daughter, who is 19, told him that she was scared of the crowd and that the safest course would be to keep her head down and continue playing.

She didn’t only “feel the ping of the slurs but also fear of the crowd,” he said. “Because as the crowd got more hyped and the epithets kept coming, she wanted to respond back but she told me she was afraid that, if she did, the raucous crowd could very well turn into a mob mentality.”

Just about every major outlet carried this story, and it kicked off a hasty promulgation of think pieces. There were consequences for BYU athletics, too: The University of South Carolina women’s basketball team canceled a home-and-home series it had scheduled with BYU in protest.

The problem is, it’s now been a week and a half and no evidence has been uncovered that anyone actually called Richardson a racial slur. 

There was the Jussie Smollett incident, brutally mocked by Dave Chappelle.

Double click to enlarge.

Then there was the Oberlin College incident for which they are now on the hook for $36 million for believing with no evidence that a racist incident had occurred.

Then there was the incident in Washington, D.C. when, who, John Lewis?, Nancy Pelosi? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? was crossing a street after an historic vote and racist or misogynistic calls were made.  The trouble being that the calls were not picked up on any of the two dozen news reporter mikes recording the event.  

In the 1980s we had the "Believe the Children" campaign which turned into a legal mess and tragedy.  We had it again in the 2010s with "Believe the Women".  All of them totalitarian in nature.  Of course some children lie.  Of course some women lie.  Anyone having agency and being human will lie on occasion.  To believe otherwise requires being a fool or an ideologue.  A well intentioned ideologue perhaps but foolish none-the-less.

And it apparently it has happened again.  The New York Times took the claim at face value with all the negative consequences to others which followed.  And apparently after ten days, there is still no evidence that the claim of racial slurs was true.  No video, no tapes, no ear-witnesses.  

Why is trust in the media and institutions so low?  Because lying has become so prevalent.  Lying or its near-cousin, willful obliviousness.  

UPDATE I:  B.Y.U. Says It Found No Evidence of Racial Slurs at Volleyball Match by Amanda Holpuch.  

What the New York Times initially accepted as a received fact, it is now acknowledging was an allegation and is now further acknowledging that it is an allegation with no supporting evidence.

Further, what most news outlets either failed to report or were unaware of, the initial reports of the allegation came from a source highly motivated for the allegations to be true.  Richardson's godmother who is running in a tight election and presumably sought some lift to her campaign.  

Media go all-in on apparent volleyball racism hoax at BYU by Zachary Faria

The controversy started when the godmother of Duke’s only black starter, Rachel Richardson, claimed that a BYU fan called her the N-word every time she served. This controversy predictably blew up, and one fan was banned indefinitely from BYU games.

[snip]

And Richardson’s godmother, who started the whole controversy? She locked her Twitter account after people discovered her history of racist tweets directed at white people. She also happens to be running for office in Texas.

Lesa Pamplin initially made the allegation that her goddaughter Rachel Richardson was called the n word, despite not being at the game. She is running for office in Fort Worth and has a history of racist tweets. Her account is now private. @MrAndyNgo pic.twitter.com/2mqKhwkmND

— AidanKearneyTB (@DoctorTurtleboy) August 29, 2022

 

Finally.  How could I have forgotten that Duke, the University and team who insist that the allegation is true, has a history of falling for race hoaxes involving sports teams.  How could I have forgotten the Duke Lacrosse Team, the false rape allegations, and the roles of the university and its faculty in amplifying and sustaining the false allegations.  

Interestingly, the Duke Lacrosse Team became such a national case in part because of the obduracy of the District Attorney who was in a tight reelection campaign and who also had hoped that his position would benefit his campaign.  Instead, he was removed from the case, jailed, disbarred and bankrupted.  

UPDATE II:  Jesse Singal has an update with further details and a better recapitulation of the chain of events.  From How the Media Fell for A Racism Sham by Jesse Singal.  The subheading is A Brigham Young University paper scooped the New York Times. All the students did was practice basic journalism.

Except it didn’t happen. 

There is no evidence that the chain of events described by Richardson and her family members occurred. There isn’t even evidence a single slur was hurled at her and her teammates, let alone a terrifying onslaught of them.

All the journalists who credulously reported on this event were wrong—and it was an embarrassing kind of wrong, because the red flags were large, numerous, and flapping loudly. Richardson and her family members reported that racial slurs had been hurled with abandon, loudly and repeatedly, in a crowded gym filled with more than 5,000 people. But the journalists covering this incident never stopped to notice how odd it was that none of these vile slurs were captured by any of the thousands of little handheld cameras in the gym at the time, nor on the bigger cameras recording the match. Nor did they find it strange that in the days following the incident, not a single other eyewitness came forward—none of Richardson’s black teammates, and none of the players for either team.

Instead of heeding the red flags and slowing down to ask some questions, mainstream journalists simply consumed and regurgitated the story as it had been fed to them by Richardson, her godmother, her father, and a major university’s public relations apparatus (which was in DEFCON 1 mode, doing everything it could to broadcast contrition and contain the growing damage to the university’s reputation).

If any of these journalists had demonstrated an iota of curiosity or skepticism—if they’d practiced journalism as it was meant to be practiced—they could have had a major scoop. Instead they acted as stenographers, with terrible results.

I have long made the observation that some of the criticism of the mainstream media can be traced to the changing economics and business model of the industry.  They can no longer afford the cost of journalists (and especially investigative journalism).  Instead, they practice press release journalism.  

Someone (person, institution, business, advocacy group, etc.) does a report or makes a documented claim and sends it to the mainstream media.  The MSM then amplify it by merely sitting at their desk and adding generic filler around the core of the original press release.

Singal's observation is consistent with an argument that all the race hoax scams are merely a variant of the larger issue of press release journalism as it is now practiced.  Compounded by a culture among junior journalist biased towards Social Justice and Critical Race Theory.  Someone makes a race hoax claim and sends it to the MSM, relying on them to simply amplify it with filler and to not actually investigate the claim.

Everything that happened here fits into a growing problem in mainstream newsrooms: the injection of political values even into straight reporting, undermining the very purpose of journalism. 

Among activist journalists, the basic idea is that appeals to “objectivity”—meaning that the journalist will seek out crucial information and act as a neutral arbiter—doesn’t advance social justice. Instead, these journalists are making the same errors they decry from the past, but in the opposite direction. Journalists used to ignore accusations of racism? Well, now the default should be to accept them at face value. Prior generations of (mostly male) journalists didn’t take sexual assault seriously? Well, now we should #BelieveWomen, and journalists themselves should proudly tweet #MeToo. Let’s not worry too much about the fact that believing things reflexively, or participating in activist movements, has typically been anathema to old-school journalism. Leave those concerns to the rapidly aging dinosaurs who will soon be departing our newsrooms.

Even as major media outlets were ignoring the red flags surrounding the BYU incident, some of their smaller competitors were busy doing actual journalism—and it’s revealing who didn’t botch this story. On August 30, the local paper, the Salt Lake Tribune, published an article questioning whether the correct perpetrator had been identified and banned: “BYU Police Lt. George Besendorfer said Tuesday that based on an initial review of surveillance footage of the crowd, the individual who was banned wasn’t shouting anything while the Duke player was serving.” Besendorfer issued a plea for someone, anyone, to corroborate Richardson’s story. “So far, Besendorfer also said, no one from the student section or elsewhere at the volleyball match last week has come forward to BYU police to report the individual responsible for the slur. He also said no one has come forward to say they heard the slur being shouted during the match. He implored students who heard the comments to come forward.”

But the best reporting actually came from an even smaller upstart. On August 30, the Cougar Chronicle—a conservative campus paper at BYU—published a story by student journalists Luke Hanson and Thomas Stevenson. They reported that according to a source in the athletic department’s office, the search for any evidence of a slur had, thus far, turned up zilch. Moreover, Hanson and Stevenson reached out to a number of spectators, and they, too, said they heard nothing unusual. 

This is all Journalism 101—but the big guys couldn’t be bothered. What’s more, the Chronicle writers revealed that, according to their source in the athletic department, the man who was fingered as the culprit was not only innocent but “mentally challenged,” and was punished to “appease a mob.”

Singal ends with.

It won’t take some radical revolution for journalists to better cover fast-developing, controversial incidents involving race and other hot-button issues. All they have to do is rediscover norms that are already there, embedded in journalistic tradition. The best, oldest-school newspaper editors—a truly dying breed—constantly pester cub reporters to make that one extra call, ask that one extra question, follow that one extra unlikely lead. They do this all in the service of making sure their organization prints the best, most accurate version of the news (and doesn’t get sued). They can adhere to these norms without becoming a shill for the powerful. It’s simply a matter of approaching a story with curiosity and skepticism, of not believing they are the advocate for one side in a conflict—no matter how righteous and obvious the battle lines may seem at first glance.

You think of virtually any crisis today and the same diagnosis can be made.  If only they had followed the traditional norms all the bad things would have been avoided and the consequent tragedies.

Think about them.  Not just the race hoaxes (practice traditional journalism).  

Covid-19 - practice traditional public health which recommended against virtually every Covid decision made.

Education - practice traditional education by imparting knowledge and skills.

Inflation - practice traditional economics and manage the money supply.

Energy independence (practice traditional energy commerce focusing on cheaper, safer, more reliable.

Freedom - practice traditional First Amendment norms.

Government over-reach and targeting of political opponents - practice traditional Constitutional norms.

Monkey Pox - practice traditional public health for STDs.

 

The list goes on.  The claimed problem is not the problem.  The problem is that the chattering class and government are unwilling to abide by traditional norms which are known to work.  They want to fundamentally transform and to be seen as transgressive and it always ends up making a non-issue and issue and a small issue into a big one.  They are choosing to fail and choosing to make things worse for everyone.