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…