Preconceived Notions over Objectivity

Readers don’t won’t objectivity. Instead, all they want is “moral clarity” and “narrative shaping” style of journalism, writes Andrew Sullivan. He cites the recent shootings at 3 Asian massage parlors in Atlanta as an example. The man who did it confessed. The parlors doubled up as places of sexual activity, and the man didn’t approve. Yet he had frequented two of those very places earlier. Huh?

“He took out his angst on the source of what he saw as his temptation, and committed mass murder.”

Twisted, right?

 

Was there any anti-Asian angle to it? The man himself denied it. But of course, he could be lying. His room mates say they’d asked him earlier if he picked the spas for sex because the women were Asian. His response?

“He denied it, saying he thought those spas were just the safest way to have quick sex.”

Again, that’s not proof of anything. But if one is objective, Sullivan says:

“The only piece of evidence about possible anti-Asian bias points away, not toward it.”

 

Yet, says Sullivan, the New York Times ran 9 articles saying that “this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny”. The Washington Post ran 16 such articles. Mass murderers in the US, “if they are motivated by bigotry or hate, tend to let the world know”. This guy not only didn’t do that, he actually denies that’s the reason at all.

 

But who cares? If a white guy did it, and the victims were non-white and/or women, then here’s what one section of America believes must have happened:

“It was almost as if they had a pre-existing script to read, whatever the facts of the case.”

The guy must be a white supremist. He has to be a misogynist.

 

Sullivan also points that yes, crimes against Asians have risen in the last few years. But dig a little deeper and the picture proves to be complicated:

“Of those committing violence against Asians, you discover that 24 percent such attacks are committed by whites; 24 percent are committed by fellow Asians; 7 percent by Hispanics; and 27.5 percent by African-Americans. Do the Kendi math, and you can see why Kendi’s “White Supremacist domestic terror” is not that useful a term for describing anti-Asian violence.”

 

A lot of this sounds familiar to how such “analysis” is done everywhere for a long time now. Of course, it’s not as if only the left does this, the right does it too. And so we have a situation where nobody believes there’s any objective reporting anywhere…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more