Links - 19th April 2020 (2) (Covington and the Media)

Thread by @jessesingal - "Man I didn't realize the Covington clusterfuck was a year ago. I gotta say that it permanently caused me to revise my trustworthiness-estimate of many media outlets and journalists downward -- sorta a big moment for me in a media-nerdery way.
Covington was also a useful example of how Twitter absolutely radicalizes journalists. Because they are on it, all day every day, watching how their friends respond to every news item in real time -- always emphatically -- that has a profound effect on shaping coverage.
The publication of this, in particular, was a Holy Shit moment. The whole point was to name and shame journos/pundits who acted *correctly* after the long video dropped. (And yes I miss Deadspin dearly and read it daily and want it back -- but still!)"
Comments: "“Binders full of women” was mine, but in a different way. Knowing that our media turned Romney’s deliberate hiring of women for cabinet roles - for which had won awards, outpacing every other gov - was turned into Romney being a sexist was the “media is alternate reality to me.”"
"“Hands Up Don’t Shoot” and Charlottesville are two more good examples."
"Kavanaugh was the turning point for many people and Covington hammered it home."
"The real takeaway from Covington is how little reflection it created among journalists. These are people who constantly use their platform to tell Americans how they need to revise their perspectives on race, sex, America, politics, economics and the world..."
"Sarah Jeong was the tipping point for me, when I realized that as a class journalists were not actually noble people, but were perfectly happy to behave like tribal sociopaths who targeted certain Americans it was safe for them to target."
"The coverage of James Damore and his now infamous memo really changed my perceptions, as well as destroying my faith in NPR, and it made me give up posting on Fark for good. The popular coverage was a caricature of the actual story."
Of course, you're not allowed to criticise the media. Unless it is "right wing" media

Andrew Sullivan: The Abyss of Hate Versus Hate - "One of the advantages of taking Saturdays off the web entirely is that I wasn’t aware of L’Affaire Covington until it was almost over. It’s one of those occasions I’m deeply glad I quit blogging 24/7 four years ago and disengaged from Twitter last month... Eligon actually writes: “Whatever tensions are sparked by Hebrew Israelite teaching, some adherents chalk that up to people being unwilling to accept uncomfortable doctrine.” The Washington Post ran a Style section headline about “the calculated art of making people uncomfortable.” In a news story entirely about the Black Israelites, the Washington Post did not quote a single thing they had said on the tape, gave a respectful account of their theology, and only mentioned their status as a “hate group” in the 24th paragraph, and put the term in scare quotes. Vox managed to write an explainer that also did not include a single example of any of the actual insults hurled at the Covington kids. Countless near-treatises were written parsing the layers of bigotry inside a silent schoolboy’s smirk... They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.How did this grotesque inversion of the truth become the central narrative for what seemed to be the entire class of elite journalists on Twitter? That’s the somewhat terrifying question. Ruth Graham on Slate saw a 16-year-old she’d seen on a tape for a couple of minutes and immediately knew that he was indistinguishable from the “white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s” or other white “high school boys flashing Nazi salutes.” Even after the full context was clear, Graham refused to apologize to the kid, or retract her condemnation: The context didn’t “change the larger story” which, she explained, was bigotry toward Native Americans. She cited Trump’s use of the name “Pocahontas” for Elizabeth Warren as evidence. But using a bullhorn to call Native Americans “savages” and “drunkards at the casino” to their faces a few minutes earlier on the same tape was not worth a mention?... her argument about the fuller context is now the norm in elite media, and it’s the underlying reason for the instant judgment. “Racism” now only means “prejudice plus power,” so what the adult Black Israelites yelled was nowhere near as bad as what a white teenager didn’t say. No empirical evidence could ever deny that underlying truth... There’s a reason why, in the crucial battle for the legitimacy of a free press, Trump is still on the offensive. Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism. My own trust in it is eroding. I’m far from the only one... What was so depressing to me about the Covington incident was how so many liberals felt comfortable taking a random teenager and, purely because of his race and gender, projected onto him all their resentments and hatred of “white men” in general... Liberal democracy is being dismantled before our eyes — by all of us."

Journalism is being eaten alive by opinion - "despite the profound structural emergency engulfing my field, I’d like to victim-blame just a little. My desire to do so stems from the fact that we just passed the first anniversary of the Covington Catholic High School debacle in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. It was genuinely one of the worst, most embarrassing recent moments in professional journalism, and there was never any real reckoning among those who screwed it up. Would such a reckoning save the industry? Of course not. But if we don’t grapple with what the Covington debacle revealed about where journalism is right now, we won’t have much worth saving, anyway... While acknowledging that those activists hadn’t been entirely blameless, Phillips presented himself as a de-escalator trying to prevent the white kids from getting out of hand.“They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals,” Phillips said of the teens. “There was that moment when I realised I’ve put myself between beast and prey. These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that.”This was the narrative that took hold: white predators and black and Native prey. Immediately, online outrage exploded... Phillips doesn’t, as he claimed, place himself between the Covington kids and the Black Hebrew Israelites mid-confrontation — he works his way right to the edge of into the closed Covington circle, until he is noticed on account of his drumming.This is completely incompatible with Phillips’ version of what happened, but to acknowledge this would  have toppled a viral narrative that was carried far and wide on the wings of morally satisfying good-guys-versus-bad-guys outrage.So while some conservative and centrist and even liberal journalists did revise their accounts, apologise on Twitter and so on, and while the Kentucky diocese publicly apologised for its initial condemnation, the more common response was to simply either pretend this video didn’t show what it clearly showed, retreat to a different claim — Phillips caused himself to be surrounded by a circle of Covington kids, but was horribly mistreated by them once he was — or both... the single most important article one needs to read to understand the ridiculous, embarrassing extent to which journalists doubled down after the release of that video came a couple days later — written by Laura Wagner, then of Deadspin.“Don’t Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes,” was the headline of her 21 January piece, which racked up more than a million views as my fellow left-of-center journalists eagerly passed it around to prove to one another, and themselves, that they’d done nothing wrong.Posted a day after that video went online, Wagner criticised those who had backtracked from their earlier condemnation of the Covington kids, deriding them for “doing the work of the gibbering masturbators who had risen up in defense of the MAGA teens”. Bizarrely, it continues to take Phillips’ account as accurate, simply ignoring the evidence to the contrary... Once the outrage has set in, there’s very little incentive to let it go, because it feels unsatisfying and ego-threatening to admit such strong, morally charged feelings were unwarranted, that one’s own tribe was in error.More than anything else, it sums up the increasingly potent belief among journalists that we must always be on guard about public instances of wrongspeak, that it’s potentially career suicide to be seen as falling on the wrong side of a given day’s most white-hot controversy (and, of course, every such controversy always has two sides and two sides only: a right one and a wrong one). I call this the difference between rightside norms and accuracy norms. This is an oversimplified model, of course, but within a given community, accuracy norms incentivise people to seek out and state out loud the truth — to be the insufferable nerd who watches the video frame by frame, and who relies on that and only that if that’s what needs to be done — while rightside norms encourage people to loudly broadcast that they are on the right side of the issue, even if that requires twisting the evidence: Video be damned, I am not siding with those MAGA sickos!... As social media has carved out a bigger and bigger part of the daily existence of progressive journalists, and as mainstream outlets have shuttered, shed their older, more traditionally journalistic staffers  — with the new blood flowing into the industry being generally younger, more privileged, more partisan, and less interested in or well-trained to do what is seen as “old-school” journalism — rightside norms have begun infecting mainstream journalism and spreading within it like a plague. That’s my diagnosis, at least. But if you disagree, just go on Twitter, which is where just about every left-of-center journalist 40 and under spends a big chunk of each and every working day. Over and over and over, you will see people whose job is to report the truth responding with strong half-baked opinions, or retweeting their friends’ and colleagues’ strong half-baked opinions, in response to breaking-news events about which very little is known so far... if you call yourself a journalist, there needs to be some distance, somewhere, between your tribal allegiances and the way you do your job"