The Media’s Pathological Commitment to Dividing Americans along Racial Lines By Isaac Schorr & Brittany Bernstein
Signs of Rot and Hope in BYU Volleyball Story
When an opportunity arises to publish a story that might make Americans feel as though they’re living in a country just barely more racially harmonious than South Africa under apartheid, much of the mainstream press have long adhered to a compact: Never investigate, and, once the story is proven to be mistaken, never apologize.
Late last month, Rachel Richardson, a member of the Duke University women’s volleyball team, accused fans of the Brigham Young University squad of hurling racial epithets at her during a match at BYU. She further charged BYU officials with having “failed to take the necessary steps to stop the unacceptable behavior and create a safe environment.”
Everyone — including the administration at BYU, who quickly identified and banned a suspect from campus — was rightly horrified by the prospect of such harassment of a black athlete.
Yet at so many outlets, Richardson’s allegations were treated not as a subject of inquiry, but as gospel truth to immediately be atoned for.
“What does it say about the BYU community and culture that this happened?” CNN’S Alisyn Camerota asked BYU’s athletic director. “A Division I volleyball match at Brigham Young University turned really ugly when black players from Duke University endured racial slurs from at least one fan in the crowd,” explained Brianna Keilar, also of CNN.
The New York Times reported 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.” The Times tacked on that BYU’s “student population is less than 1 percent Black” and “has struggled with creating an inclusive environment for its students of color,” so that readers could understand that BYU is the type of place where racial harassment takes place.
Mike Freeman, a columnist and USA Today’s race and inequality editor for sports, headlined a column “In the BYU-Duke volleyball story, a racist, a plethora of failures, and a hero,” and led it with the assertion that “what’s certain about one of the uglier stories, in a sea of recent ugly stories, is that so many people failed a young Black woman named Rachel Richardson.”
ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith denounced BYU for its “dereliction of duty,” blasting the university for “not addressing it with a level of quickness and speed that you should’ve addressed this with.” On Outside the Lines, ESPN’s “Emmy Award-winning investigative series [that] examines topical issues off the playing field,” Holly Rowe interviewed Richardson, asking her about how the incident should be responded to without doing an iota of legwork to confirm that the incident had occurred.
And, as it turns out, it didn’t. A BYU investigation that involved a review of the video of the event and interviews reaching out to over 50 eyewitnesses turned up no “evidence to corroborate the allegation that fans engaged in racial heckling or uttered racial slurs at the event.” Richardson had all but assuredly misinterpreted anodyne chants, bellows, and cheers as something more sinister.
The media’s reflexive response to the college sophomore’s accusations was revealing of a well-documented bias. If the details of a particular story make American society appear to be irredeemably racist, the story will be given top billing, regardless of whether the underlying facts can be confirmed.
More troubling is that the pundits and reporters who routinely fall victim to their biases rarely apologize or learn from past mistakes.
In the run-up to the release of the results of the BYU investigation, as it became increasingly clear that there was little evidence to support Richardson’s claims, Freeman, the USA Today editor, called the idea that she had misheard the slurs a “conspiracy theory.”
“The other conspiracy theory is that she [Richardson] misheard the word. That is a word you don’t mishear. You certainly don’t mishear it more than once,” he wrote without further explanation, before smearing BYU as a racist institution.
And the Times responded to BYU’s announcement by suggesting that the university “did not directly address why its findings contradicted the account by Richardson.” The Times also capped its article with a highly suggestive disclaimer.
“B.Y.U. is owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The student population is predominantly white and Mormon. Less than one percent of students are Black,” the article reads. “The school has struggled with creating an inclusive environment for its students of color, according to a February 2021 report by a university committee that studied race on campus.”
ESPN took a half-step in the right direction. Stephen A. Smith acknowledged that while “racism and prejudice still exists in this country . . . we’re not doing ourselves any favors if we bring it up and broach it when it doesn’t exist. And that’s the key that we need to focus on.” However, he qualified his comment by saying of Richardson, “I’ll be damned if I’m not giving her the benefit of the doubt.”
Still, it was an enormous step forward from the outlet’s airing of a hagiographic documentary last year about NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, who maintains that a noose was hung in his garage prior to a 2020 race despite a dispositive FBI investigation that found that the object was likely a garage-door pull.
CNN also deserves credit for devoting the first edition of a new segment called Upon Further Review to correcting the record. In it, host John Avlon admitted to a “rush to judgment” caused by a “well-intentioned impulse” to believe Richardson. “But facts always have to come first,” he continued.
This is applause-worthy progress for CNN. Moving forward, though, the standard for good journalism must not be a willingness to apologize afterward but an ability to control impulses, however well-intentioned.
Hunter Biden Laptop Story Goes (More) Mainstream
New York magazine’s Intelligencer vertical emerged Monday as one of the only mainstream media outlets to take a deep dive into the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop. While the New York Times and Washington Post have come around to the story in recent months after initially dismissing it as disinformation, the Intelligencer article explores, at length, the “sordid saga” of the laptop, which it calls a “political scandal Democrats can’t just wish away.”
While the piece at times frames the issue as a battle between Democrats and Republicans rather than a problem that should concern all Americans, it acknowledges the younger Biden’s “sketchy, for sure” business dealings.
Hidden inside the laptop, according to those (almost exclusively on the right) who have reviewed the data or who trust the word of those who claim they have, is a corruption scandal that implicates not just Hunter but other members of the Biden family, including the president. The laptop details Hunter’s involvement with a Ukrainian natural-gas producer that paid him millions of dollars to serve on its board — the relationship at the center of Donald Trump’s first impeachment. It shows how a Chinese energy company directed millions of dollars in consulting fees to Hunter and his uncle. It reveals White House meetings and slush-fund dinners and wheeling and dealing, from Romania to Monte Carlo to Cafe Milano. Most important, these people claim the laptop contains proof that, despite his denials, Joe Biden — allegedly referred to in emails as “the big guy” — was fully aware of, and looking to profit from, his son’s business activities.
The article also calls out President Biden and other Democrats for their silence on the topic.
Without a counterargument from the White House or the Biden family, and with mainstream political reporters only now trying to catch up to the tabloid coverage and the ideologically motivated actors who have been advancing the story, Democrats in Washington simply don’t know what to say. There has been no penalty for silence while they’ve been in power, just the vague assumption that it does seem like there’s something to the story, if only anyone credible would bother to check it out.
Headline Fail of the Week
The Chicago Tribune stumbled upon an accidentally accurate headline on its article “‘One of the biggest problems confronting medicine today’: University of Chicago offers class on misinformation.” They just mistook part of the problem for the solution.
Read on to find that for his class project, one student “debunked” myths about the use of puberty blockers in children struggling with their gender identity, stating, against the consensus of the medical community, that if their use is stopped, “puberty will resume normally as the sex assigned at birth.”
Media Misses
• The New York Times all but attributed criticism of its report on Hasidic education in New York City to its critics’ Jewishness. Oy vey.
• Christiane Amanpour used the occasion of Queen Elizabeth II’s death and King Charles III’s ascension to recommend that the new sovereign consider “reparations” for former colonies of the British Empire.
• MSNBC host Joe Scarborough monologued last Friday that “Jesus never once talked about abortion. Never once. And it was happening back in ancient times, it was happening during his time. Never once mentioned it. For people perverting the gospel of Jesus Christ down to one issue, it’s heresy.” National Review’s own Jack Butler took it upon himself to fisk Scarborough’s typically facile argument.
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