www.commonsense.news Open in urlscan Pro
2606:4700:4400::6812:2857  Public Scan

Form analysis
5 forms found in the DOM

<form><input class="subscribe-dialog-publication-email-input" placeholder="Type your email..."><button class="subscribe-dialog-submit-button" type="submit">Subscribe</button></form>

---

POST /api/v1/free?nojs=true

<form class="form " action="/api/v1/free?nojs=true" method="post" novalidate=""><input type="hidden" name="first_url" value="https://www.commonsense.news/p/how-the-media-fell-for-a-racism-sham"><input type="hidden" name="first_referrer"><input
    type="hidden" name="current_url" value="https://www.commonsense.news/p/how-the-media-fell-for-a-racism-sham"><input type="hidden" name="current_referrer"><input type="hidden" name="referral_code"><input type="hidden" name="source"
    value="subscribe-widget"><input type="hidden" name="referring_pub_id"><input type="hidden" name="additional_referring_pub_ids">
  <div class="sideBySideWrap"><input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Type your email…"><button tabindex="0" class="button rightButton  primary subscribe-btn" type="submit"><b class="button-text ">Subscribe</b></button></div>
  <div id="error-container"></div>
  <div class="subtle-help-text below-input"></div>
</form>

---

POST

<form method="post" class="form comment-input" novalidate="">
  <div class="comment-input-head">
    <div class="user-head ">
      <a><div class="profile-img-wrap"><picture><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_66,h_66,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack.com%2Fimg%2Favatars%2Flogged-out.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_66,h_66,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack.com%2Fimg%2Favatars%2Flogged-out.png" sizes="100vw" alt="" srcset="" class="frontend-components-responsive_img-module__img--1l4UG"></picture></div></a>
    </div>
  </div>
  <div class="comment-input-right"><textarea data-gramm="false" data-gramm_editor="false" data-enable-grammarly="false" name="body" placeholder="Write a comment…" style="height: 104px;"></textarea>
    <div id="error-container"></div>
    <div class="comment-button-container"></div>
  </div>
</form>

---

POST /api/v1/user/profile

<form action="/api/v1/user/profile" method="post" class="form " novalidate=""><label for="name">Your name</label><input type="text" placeholder="Your name…" name="name" value="" class="profile-name"><label for="bio">Your bio</label><textarea
    placeholder="Say something about yourself…" name="bio" class="profile-bio"></textarea><input type="email" placeholder="Your email…" name="email" class="profile-email"><label class="profile-signup-checkbox"><input type="checkbox"
      name="free_signup" checked=""> Subscribe to the newsletter</label><input type="hidden" name="photo_url"><input type="hidden" name="user_id" value=""><input type="hidden" name="needs_photo" value="false"><input type="hidden" name="token">
  <div id="error-container"></div>
  <p class="left hidden">0 subscriptions will be displayed on your profile (<a>edit</a>)</p>
  <div class="modal-ctas">
    <p class="skip hidden"><a class="small">Skip for now</a></p><button class="button primary" type="submit" tabindex="0">Save &amp; Post Comment</button>
  </div>
</form>

---

POST /api/v1/free?nojs=true

<form action="/api/v1/free?nojs=true" method="post" class="form " novalidate=""><input type="hidden" name="first_url" value="https://www.commonsense.news/p/how-the-media-fell-for-a-racism-sham"><input type="hidden" name="first_referrer"><input
    type="hidden" name="current_url" value="https://www.commonsense.news/p/how-the-media-fell-for-a-racism-sham"><input type="hidden" name="current_referrer"><input type="hidden" name="referral_code"><input type="hidden" name="source"
    value="subscribe_footer"><input type="hidden" name="referring_pub_id"><input type="hidden" name="additional_referring_pub_ids">
  <div class="sideBySideWrap"><input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Type your email…"><button class="button rightButton  primary subscribe-btn" type="submit" tabindex="0"><b class="button-text ">Subscribe</b></button></div>
  <div id="error-container"></div>
  <div class="subtle-help-text below-input"></div>
</form>

---

Text Content

COMMON SENSE

SubscribeSign in

Share this post
How the Media Fell for A Racism Sham
www.commonsense.news
Copy link

Twitter

Facebook

Email


HOW THE MEDIA FELL FOR A RACISM SHAM


A BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY PAPER SCOOPED THE NEW YORK TIMES. ALL THE STUDENTS
DID WAS PRACTICE BASIC JOURNALISM.

Jesse Singal
Sep 15
1,220
692
Share this post
How the Media Fell for A Racism Sham
www.commonsense.news
Copy link

Twitter

Facebook

Email


(via Facebook)



Last month, Rachel Richardson—the only black starter on the women’s volleyball
team at Duke University—leveled a shocking accusation. She said that during her
team’s August 26 match against Brigham Young University, fans inside the BYU
arena in Provo, Utah inundated her with racist abuse and threats.

After the match, 19-year-old Richardson told her godmother, Lesa Pamplin, about
the incident. Pamplin is a criminal defense attorney running for a county
judgeship in Texas, and was not at the game—but the next day, she published a
tweet that rocketed the story to national attention: “My Goddaughter is the only
black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team. While playing yesterday, she was
called a [n-word] 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 tweet is no longer available, but it racked up 185,000 likes before it was
archived. LeBron James himself responded: “you tell your Goddaughter to stand
tall, be proud and continue to be BLACK!!! We are a brotherhood and sisterhood! 
We have her back. This is not sports.”

Richardson’s story also spread via her father, Marvin Richardson, who is Deputy
Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and who
spoke with multiple outlets on behalf of his daughter. In an August 27 story
about the incident in the New York Times that named him but not his daughter, he
described an alarming, potentially violent scene. Despite an onslaught of slurs,
he told the Times, his daughter thought the safest choice was “to keep her head
down and continue playing.” He said that “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.”

Rachel Richardson posted her own account to Twitter on August 28 (archived
here), viscerally relaying the horror of the evening. She explained that “my
fellow African American teammates and I were targeted and racially heckled
throughout the entirety of the match. The slurs and comments grew into threats
which caused us to feel unsafe.” 

Things got so out of control, she said, that “my teammates and I had to struggle
just to get through the rest of the game.” She accused BYU’s coaches and the
game’s officials of having “failed to take the necessary steps to stop the
unacceptable behavior and create a safe environment.” In an interview with ESPN
that aired just a few days later, Richardson said that as the match progressed,
the “atmosphere of the student section had changed,” growing “more extreme, more
intense.” 

The national response to this heinous allegation was swift and righteous. Utah’s
governor, Spencer Cox, issued a statement on Twitter (now deleted) expressing
his shock and disappointment. “I'm disgusted that this behavior is happening and
deeply saddened if others didn’t step up to stop it,” he wrote. “As a society we
have to do more to create an atmosphere where racist a**holes like this never
feel comfortable attacking others.” For its part, BYU quickly acknowledged that
something horrible had happened in the fieldhouse. The day after the game, it
published an apologetic statement, saying that the fan deemed responsible for
shouting the epithets—who was not a BYU student—had been banned from all
university athletic venues. 

Unsurprisingly, major media outlets were all over this story. The Times’
coverage set the tone, with the Washington Post and CNN and Sports Illustrated
and NPR all publishing similar articles, alongside the predictable think pieces.
The incident also had consequences for BYU sports more generally. The head coach
of women’s basketball at the University of South Carolina canceled its home
opener against BYU. A match between Duke and Rider University’s women’s
volleyball teams—scheduled to be played at the BYU arena—was moved to a nearby
high school gym in order to provide both teams “the safest atmosphere,”
according to Duke’s Director of Athletics, Nina King. 

For millions of people watching this story unfold, this was yet another example
of the ineradicable stain of American racism, of just how little progress we’ve
really made.

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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.”

C
Common Sense
Honest news for sane people brought to you by Bari Weiss.
Subscribe
Already a subscriber? Sign in

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.”

Last Friday, their reporting was validated. 

BYU issued another statement that completely imploded the dominant storyline
about this incident. The university explained that it had conducted a thorough
investigation of the evening’s game, including extensive review of the available
video footage and interviews with more than 50 individuals in attendance, and
had not found evidence of a single fan yelling a single slur. The ban on the
innocent fan had been lifted.

By this point, between the original New York Times story and a tepid followup, a
combined five reporters and researchers had been pantsed by a small student
paper. If all this provoked any soul-searching on the part of the Times, it was
unclear from its report on BYU’s findings.

Remarkably, their most recent story treated the events as unresolved: “B.Y.U.
did not directly address why its findings contradicted the account by
Richardson, and the statements by both universities left questions unanswered.”
It also included a statement from Duke’s athletic director saying the university
stood by the volleyball team. The story ends with a reminder that at the
overwhelmingly Mormon school, less than 1 percent of students are black, and
that a recent report highlighted the university’s diversity issues. It’s unclear
exactly why this is relevant; the point seems to be for the Times to advertise
that it understands racism is a serious problem at BYU, and that even if the
school were not guilty of it this time, everyone knows the university’s soul is
not entirely spotless.  

The BYU non-brouhaha brouhaha is part of a growing problem. From the outright
criminal fraud of Jussie Smollett—in which some of the most prominent
journalists in the world accepted a storyline that never really made much
sense—to the unwarranted piling on of the Covington Catholic High School kids,
there’s an established pattern of journalists being far too credulous when these
incidents first burst onto the scene.

There are real-world consequences to this sort of shoddy reporting, not just for
newspapers’ reputations and their pocketbooks (Nicholas Sandmann, the face of
the Covington controversy, sued and settled with CNN, the Washington Post, and
NBC), but for those caught in the crossfire. In this case, a vulnerable,
innocent young man was wrongly accused of horrendous acts, and an entire student
body was slandered. Millions of people will continue to believe this incident
occurred, because debunkings never travel a tenth as far and wide as
misinformation does.

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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A version of this story first appeared in Jesse’s Substack. 

Subscribe




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




1,220 likes
1,220
692
Share this post
How the Media Fell for A Racism Sham
www.commonsense.news
Copy link

Twitter

Facebook

Email
A guest post by
Jesse Singal
I wrote a book called "The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social
Ills" and I cohost a podcast called "Blocked and Reported" and I write this
"newsletter" called "Singal-Minded." I am "cool."
Subscribe to Jesse

692 Comments



CREATE YOUR PROFILE


Your nameYour bio Subscribe to the newsletter


0 subscriptions will be displayed on your profile (edit)

Skip for now

Save & Post Comment


ONLY PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN COMMENT ON THIS POST

Subscribe
Already a paid subscriber? Sign in

CHECK YOUR EMAIL

For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.

Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.

Mel
Writes Thoughts from the VCL Sep 15

The demand for white supremacists far outweighs the supply. And since there are
literally ZERO consequences for making stories like this up we can expect BS
like this to continue.

Expand full comment

480ReplyCollapse

106 replies

Peter Sachon
Sep 15

I don’t mean to exaggerate, but my opinion is that New York Times in particular
has not practiced “real” journalism for many years now. As such, it’s difficult
for me to be surprised that they once again have presented only what they would
like the news to be. I know many writers here and around have friends and
colleagues there, and you hope for the best, but the truth is, there’s no there
there anymore. It’s been reduced to a mere mouthpiece of the crazy left.

Expand full comment

176ReplyCollapse

49 replies

690 more comments…
TopNewCommunity
Yesterday I Was Levi’s Brand President. I Quit So I Could Be Free.I turned down
$1 million severance in exchange for my voice.
Jennifer Sey
Feb 14
3,243
849
Share this post
Yesterday I Was Levi’s Brand President. I Quit So I Could Be Free.
www.commonsense.news
Copy link

Twitter

Facebook

Email
He Was a World-Renowned Cancer Researcher. Now He's Collecting
Unemployment.Behind the fall of David Sabatini, 'one of the greatest scientists'
of his generation.
Suzy Weiss
May 19
1,823
1,015
Share this post
He Was a World-Renowned Cancer Researcher. Now He's Collecting Unemployment.
www.commonsense.news
Copy link

Twitter

Facebook

Email
I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are IndoctrinatedChildren are afraid to
challenge the repressive ideology that rules our school. That’s why I am.
Paul Rossi
Apr 13, 2021
1,539
373
Share this post
I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated
www.commonsense.news
Copy link

Twitter

Facebook

Email
See all



READY FOR MORE?

Subscribe



© 2022 Bari Weiss
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Publish on Substack Get the app
Substack is the home for great writing



OUR USE OF COOKIES

We use necessary cookies to make our site work. We also set performance and
functionality cookies that help us make improvements by measuring traffic on our
site. For more detailed information about the cookies we use, please see our
privacy policy. ✖
This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or
unblock scripts