[y66]

From Dave Lee at FT:

Quote

A loosely organised campaign originating on the TikTok social network is being credited with greatly inflating expected turnout at Donald Trump’s sparsely attended Saturday night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Teens on the platform for sharing short videos and other social media sites shared posts over the past two weeks calling for people to sign up for a ticket to Mr Trump’s event, but then not show up.

In particular, fans of Korean pop music — K-pop — are thought to have co-ordinated to register en masse. It was the latest act of cunningly effective online political activism from an unlikely source: young K-pop obsessives who have become increasingly adept at harnessing the power of social media to engage in politics.

The K-pop fans were previously credited with disrupting attempts by police in Dallas to solicit pictures and videos of “illegal activity” at protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement. After the police department asked people to download an app to submit material, K-poppers flooded it with “fancam” videos — clips of performances that focus on a single member of the group. The app was later taken offline because of “technical difficulties”, the police said.

Trump campaign chairman Brad Parscale denied the Saturday night rally had been “trolled”, claiming the media had been “duped” by a “lame attempt at hacking”. He said the campaign had discounted “bogus numbers” from the attendance projections.

“The fact is that a week’s worth of the fake news media warning people away from the rally because of Covid and protesters, coupled with recent images of American cities on fire, had a real impact on people bringing their families and children to the rally,” Mr Parscale wrote in a statement on Sunday morning.

Expectations had been high for a bumper turnout at what was Mr Trump’s first rally in months. Ahead of the event, Mr Parscale wrote on Twitter that sign-ups had “just passed 800,000 tickets. Biggest data haul and rally sign-up of all time by 10x.”

Yet it appears that at least some of those sign-ups were prompted by a call to action from TikTok user Mary Jo Laupp. The 51-year-old posts using the hashtag “#TikTokGrandma”.

On June 11, she urged her followers — in a clip that was viewed more than 2m times — to apply for two free tickets to the event, using their mobile phone numbers, and replying “STOP” to the inevitable deluge of text messages that would subsequently be sent by the campaign.

“Go reserve tickets now, leave him standing there alone on the stage,” Ms Laupp wrote.

The plan was quickly embraced by K-pop “Stans” — a catch-all term for diehard fans of pop stars or celebrities, inspired by Stan, a 2000 track by the American rapper Eminem.

On Saturday, pictures taken within the 19,000-capacity BOK Center showed many empty seats and a large amount of floor space in the area in front of the podium. Outside, an “overflow” event, where the president and vice-president Mike Pence were scheduled to address supporters unable to access the arena, was cancelled.

Mr Parscale blamed “radical protesters” for preventing supporters from getting into the event by blocking lines to metal detectors. According to Reuters and other news organisations, disruption to those entering the arena was minor.

“Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign [with] fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID,” wrote Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter, in response to Mr Parscale.

She thanked “K-pop allies” for “contributions in the fight for justice too”.

Dubbing Mr Trump’s speech the “Emptysburgh Address”, former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt wrote on Twitter: “My 16-year-old daughter and her friends in Park City Utah have hundreds of tickets. You have been rolled by America’s teens.”

TikTok, owned by Chinese tech group ByteDance, is increasingly being used for political activity, despite its policies banning official campaign activity or advertising.

Last month, former Disney executive Kevin Mayer was appointed as TikTok’s new chief executive. The move was designed to soften criticism about the network’s Chinese ownership and concerns over the data gathered by the app, which has been downloaded more than 2bn times.

Is that a nice thing to do?

[y66]

From Roberts to Trump: Don’t Take the Supreme Court for Granted by Linda Greenhouse at NYT:

Quote

Suppose there had been a leak from the Supreme Court early Thursday morning: The court was about to issue its long-awaited decision in the DACA case on the fate of nearly 700,000 young immigrants known as Dreamers; the vote was 5 to 4; and the majority opinion was by Chief Justice John Roberts. But the leaker didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, which way the case came out.

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

Among the Dreamers and their supporters, hearts would have been in their throats. This was the chief justice, after all, who two years ago wrote the opinion upholding President Trump’s Muslim travel ban, and who five years before that wrote the opinion dismantling the Voting Rights Act. The vote in both was 5 to 4. Why wouldn’t the conservative chief justice defer to the president’s decision to end a program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that his predecessor had instituted by executive action without even seeking Congress’s approval?

But the president’s allies would have had ample reason to be anxious. Wasn’t this the chief justice who just a year ago wrote the majority opinion that by a vote of 5 to 4 blocked the president’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census? The proposal failed the essential requirement of administrative law for “reasoned decision making,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in that case. He dismissed the administration’s proffered good-government rationale as pretextual; or, as the dictionary puts it, “dubious or spurious.”

Now, of course, we know that it was the Chief Justice Roberts of the census decision, which an enraged President Trump came within inches of defying, who arrived on the scene in time to save the Dreamers. His opinion assured readers that in holding that the administration’s effort to undo DACA was invalid, the court was not endorsing the program. That is conventional administrative law talk — and the case, as the chief justice framed it, was a conventional one about administrative procedure.

The administration’s explanation for why it was terminating DACA — explained in a single sentence by an acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (“Taking into consideration the Supreme Court’s and the Fifth Circuit’s rulings in the ongoing litigation, and the September 4, 2017 letter from the Attorney General, it is clear that the June 15, 2012 DACA program should be terminated”) — was so inadequate as to make the decision “arbitrary and capricious,” Chief Justice Roberts said.

While the department came up with a more elaborate explanation nine months later in response to an unfavorable Federal District Court ruling, the chief justice said that it was a “foundational principle of administrative law” that an agency, once challenged, has to defend its action on the grounds it initially invoked, not on an after-the-fact rationalization, unless it wants to restart from scratch the process of arriving at a decision.

The dry procedural language of the opinion, including its invitation to the Trump administration to start over and find a new way to defend terminating DACA, seems to have lulled many readers into assuming that the victory for the Dreamers is less than complete. No doubt many eyes had glazed over by Page 24, when the chief justice began a crucial discussion of the “reliance interests” in favor of continuing the program that permits DACA recipients to live and work lawfully in the only country that most of them have ever known.

Citing statistics in briefs filed by, among others, a group of 143 businesses, Chief Justice Roberts emphasized that those with a stake in continuing the program included not only the Dreamers themselves but also their families, “including their 200,000 U.S.-citizen children,” “employers who have invested time and money in training them” and state and local governments that would lose tax revenue from DACA recipients’ earnings.

Administrative law requires the agency to take reliance interests into account, Chief Justice Roberts said. “DHS may determine, in the particular context before it, that other interests and policy concerns outweigh any reliance interests,” he said, adding, “Making that difficult decision was the agency’s job, but the agency failed to do it.”

And can the Trump administration do it now? Theoretically yes, under still another acting homeland security secretary, but any newly justified rescission announcement would find the administration back in court within hours, the clock ticking all the while toward Election Day. Although the chief justice nominally left it up to the administration to weigh the reliance interests against its policy goal, his exposition of the strength of those interests sets a very high bar for this or any subsequent administration to clear.

Where was the other Chief Justice Roberts this week, the one of the disastrous Shelby County v. Holder voting rights decision and of the travel ban decision? Was the Chief Justice Roberts who silently joined Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion bringing L.G.B.T.Q. people within the protection of federal anti-discrimination law the same chief justice who wrote a snarky dissenting opinion five years ago when the court upheld the constitutional right to same-sex marriage?

Contemplating this head-snapping week at the Supreme Court, I’m reminded of the amazing 2002-2003 term, when the court under another conservative chief justice, William Rehnquist, seemed to pull its robust conservatism up short. In the space of a few weeks in the spring of 2003, the court upheld affirmative action in higher education; granted constitutional protection to gay men and lesbians for their private sexual lives; and upheld the application of the family-care provision of the Family and Medical Leave Act to state employees.

Chief Justice Rehnquist himself was in dissent in the first two of those cases, but he surprised nearly everyone by writing the majority opinion in the third, a case that may sound obscure now but that effectively spelled an end to the federalism revolution on which, under the chief justice’s leadership, the court had been embarked.

What could have accounted for that surprising turn of events at the dawn of the new century? Wrestling with that question, I eventually concluded that the court was realigning itself, as it has done historically, with its own sense of what the public wanted and expected from it.

“No great Supreme Court case is only a question of law,” I wrote then. “It is always also an episode in the ongoing dialogue by which the court engages with the society in which it operates and in which the justices live.”

Just so with this week’s cases. Monday’s ruling on the right of gay and transgender people to be free of discrimination in the workplace showed a court that by a refreshing vote of 6 to 3 decided not to stand in the path of a tide of social change. The DACA decision contained a message threaded through its dry language of administrative procedure — a warning to the Trump administration not to assume that it gets a free pass, not to take the Supreme Court for granted.

“This is not the case for cutting corners,” the chief justice wrote. That’s a sentence sure to be echoing in the halls of the solicitor general’s office, where Chief Justice Roberts once worked and where he honed his ability to speak to the Supreme Court. Now, with four colleagues to his left and four to his right, he speaks for the court from a center chair that must often feel like a lonely place.

Given the decisions due in the next few weeks on abortion, religion, the president’s tax returns and the Electoral College, among other cases, it’s too soon to place a label on this pandemic-disrupted Supreme Court term. The justices will issue decisions that will infuriate, reassure, surprise and even break hearts, as they evidently broke Senator Josh Hawley’s on Monday. The Missouri Republican took to the Senate floor to bemoan “the end of the conservative legal movement.”

But as the ambitious young senator, a former law clerk to Chief Justice Roberts, surely knows, there is no end, only a new beginning.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2020-June-22, 05:55, said:

From David Leonhardt at NYT:


The way things are going, Mike Pence's wife will probably tell him to start wearing a mask.

Among other things she says he must wear.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2020-June-22, 08:08, said:

From Roberts to Trump: Don't Take the Supreme Court for Granted by Linda Greenhouse at NYT:

That the SCOTUS responds to changing mores is antithetical to originalism it would seem. On a different note, I think the big issue of the day is "why now" about Berman's firing.

[barmar]

I'm not really sure what to make of the SCOTUS decision on DACA. They explicitly said that they weren't ruling on the merits of DACA, they just said that Trump didn't follow the proper procedure to rescind it. Yes, it's encouraging that they didn't just fall in line behind the President like Republicans in Congress, but this was really just a technical matter. To some extent they may even have given him a roadmap for how to do it right the next time. That's essentially what happened with the Muslim travel ban: he just kept trying again until he dotted and crossed all the I's and T's correctly.

[Winstonm]

This shows the complicity of William Barr in any future attempts to alter election results:

Quote

“This will be the Election disaster of our time,” Trump tweeted, citing an article from right-wing website Breitbart that featured comments Attorney General William Barr made Sunday during an interview with Fox News.

Barr told Fox News that voting by mail “opens the floodgates to fraud.” He warned a foreign country could “print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots” and that it would be difficult to figure out which ballots were valid.

Quote

Barr has not publicly provided any evidence to support his claim. And election administrators in multiple states have disputed this theory, stating it would be virtually impossible for a foreign country to peddle phony ballots undetected.

[awm]

barmar, on 2020-June-22, 09:14, said:

I'm not really sure what to make of the SCOTUS decision on DACA. They explicitly said that they weren't ruling on the merits of DACA, they just said that Trump didn't follow the proper procedure to rescind it. Yes, it's encouraging that they didn't just fall in line behind the President like Republicans in Congress, but this was really just a technical matter. To some extent they may even have given him a roadmap for how to do it right the next time. That's essentially what happened with the Muslim travel ban: he just kept trying again until he dotted and crossed all the I's and T's correctly.

Much as I support DACA in principle, it seems hard to believe that President Obama could just create it by executive order, and President Trump (or some future president) cannot then eliminate it by executive order. For the Supreme Court to simply rule that DACA must stay and cannot be abolished by executive order doesn't seem like a reasonable reading of the law.

This case revolved around laws stating that executive orders must have a published rationale (and this rationale cannot be complete arbitrariness, or hinge on discrimination against a protected class). The Trump administration didn't do a good job stating a rationale, so the order is struck down. If they could show a (not obviously racist) reason to prioritize deportation of Dreamers, Trump retains the power to revoke DACA. Nonetheless, he seems unlikely to be able to do this (and make it through the inevitable court challenges) before the November election. So the Dreamers are safe for now, and hopefully a more sane administration will be arriving in January.

[Winstonm]

awm, on 2020-June-22, 10:12, said:

Much as I support DACA in principle, it seems hard to believe that President Obama could just create it by executive order, and President Trump (or some future president) cannot then eliminate it by executive order. For the Supreme Court to simply rule that DACA must stay and cannot be abolished by executive order doesn't seem like a reasonable reading of the law.

This case revolved around laws stating that executive orders must have a published rationale (and this rationale cannot be complete arbitrariness, or hinge on discrimination against a protected class). The Trump administration didn't do a good job stating a rationale, so the order is struck down. If they could show a (not obviously racist) reason to prioritize deportation of Dreamers, Trump retains the power to revoke DACA. Nonetheless, he seems unlikely to be able to do this (and make it through the inevitable court challenges) before the November election. So the Dreamers are safe for now, and hopefully a more sane administration will be arriving in January.

It is just a tad more difficult - the SCOTUS ruled that the initial justification is all that can be brought before the SCOTUS so that any subsequent challenge must start back at the beginnings, which means district court challenges, then appeals court challenges, then the SCOTUS - if the SCOTUS accepts.

Obama could not do anything other than executive order because he was dealing with Mitch McConnell and a Republican Congress at the time. If the Democrats can regain the Senate, hold the House, and regain the presidency in the upcoming elections, then would be the best time to create meaningful legislation for dreamers - and, indeed, all of immigration as well as asylum seekers.

[Winstonm]

Quote

Some legal experts have speculated that Berman's office could charge Trump with crimes relating to the Cohen payoffs after he's out of office.

But Giuliani disagreed.

"I don't see them indicting the president after he's out of office for something personal – it's God d – n personal," he said.

And I suppose to Guiliani, what Jeffrey Epstein did was only "personal"...

[y66]

The Department of Homeland Security's statement on the Supreme Court's decision is moronic:

Quote

Acting Secretary Chad Wolf: “DACA recipients deserve closure and finality surrounding their status here in the U.S. Unfortunately, today’s Supreme Court decision fails to provide that certainty. The DACA program was created out of thin air and implemented illegally. The American people deserve to have the Nation’s laws faithfully executed as written by their representatives in Congress—not based on the arbitrary decisions of a past Administration. This ruling usurps the clear authority of the Executive Branch to end unlawful programs.”

Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli: “The Supreme Court’s decision is an affront to the rule of law and gives Presidents power to extend discretionary policies into future Administrations. No Justice will say that the DACA program is lawful, and that should be enough reason to end it. Justice Clarence Thomas had it right in dissent: ‘Such timidity [by SCOTUS] forsakes the Court’s duty to apply the law according to neutral principles and the ripple effects of the majority’s error will be felt throughout our system of self-government.’”

The SC's ruling does not usurp Trump's authority to end DACA and it is not an affront to the rule of law. It simply says the Executive Branch is required to provide a reasoned explanation for its actions in accordance with the Administrative Procedures Act and that it failed to do so when it made the decision to rescind DACA in September 2017. If you want to rescind, don't mail it in.

[hrothgar]

Looks like the number of Trump advance team members to contract COVID is now up to at least 8

[johnu]

hrothgar, on 2020-June-22, 15:15, said:

Looks like the number of Trump advance team members to contract COVID is now up to at least 8

The Grifter in Chief had it right. If they didn't test the advance team, there would be zero COVID-19 positives and nothing to talk about.

[y66]

From Trump Suspends Visas Allowing Hundreds of Thousands of Foreigners to Work in the U.S. by Michael D. Shear and Miriam Jordan at NYT:

Quote

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday temporarily suspended new work visas and barred hundreds of thousands of foreigners from seeking employment in the United States, part of a broad effort to limit the entry of immigrants into the country.

In a sweeping order, which will be in place at least until the end of the year, Mr. Trump blocked visas for a wide variety of jobs, including those for computer programmers and other skilled workers who enter the country under the H-1B visa, as well as those for seasonal workers in the hospitality industry, students on work-study summer programs and au pairs who arrive under other auspices.

The order also restricts the ability of American companies with global operations and international companies with U.S. branches to transfer foreign executives and other employees to the United States for months or yearslong stints. And it blocks the spouses of foreigners who are employed at companies in the United States.

Officials said the ban on worker visas, combined with extending restrictions on the issuance of new green cards, would keep as many as 525,000 foreign workers out of the country for the rest of the year.

Stephen Miller, the White House aide and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, has pushed for years to limit or eliminate the worker visas, arguing that they harm employment prospects for Americans. And in recent months, Mr. Miller has argued that the economic distress caused by the virus has made it even more important to turn off the spigot.

But the directive, which has been expected for several weeks, is fiercely opposed by business leaders, who say it will block their ability to recruit critically needed workers from countries overseas for jobs that Americans are not willing to do or are not capable of performing.

“This is a full-frontal attack on American innovation and our nation’s ability to benefit from attracting talent from around the world,” said Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, a pro-immigration group supported by technology companies.

“Putting up a ‘not welcome’ sign for engineers, executives, IT experts, doctors, nurses and other workers won’t help our country, it will hold us back,” said Thomas J. Donohue, the chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Restrictive changes to our nation’s immigration system will push investment and economic activity abroad, slow growth and reduce job creation.”

Administration officials said the president’s order would not affect people outside the United States who already have valid visas or seasonal farm workers, whose annual numbers have ranged from a low of about 50,000 to a high of about 250,000 in the past 15 years. There will also be a narrow exception for certain medical workers dealing specifically with coronavirus research, officials said.

And the beat goes on ...

[johnu]

y66, on 2020-June-22, 22:24, said:

From Trump Suspends Visas Allowing Hundreds of Thousands of Foreigners to Work in the U.S. by Michael D. Shear and Miriam Jordan at NYT:


And the beat goes on ...

You say H-1B visas are restricted???

3 Trump properties posted 144 openings for seasonal jobs. Only one went to a US worker.

Quote

The H-2B visa program allows seasonal, non-agricultural employers — like hotels and ski resorts — to hire foreign workers when they can’t find American ones. The Trump administration temporarily expanded this guest-worker program in 2017 while restricting other avenues of legal immigration, including the H-1B program for high-skilled workers.

The Trump Organization is exactly the kind of company that relies on the H-2B visa program for low-skilled workers.

Must have been a typo that H-2B visas somehow escaped restrictions. The Grifter Organization doesn't really need H-2B visa workers because they have all the undocumented labor that they can hire.

REPORT: TRUMP HAPPILY EMPLOYING UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS WHILE ICE ROUNDS THEM UP

Hmm, maybe the Grifter Organization needs those H-2B workers after all

[Winstonm]

Gene Sharp was a political scientist and the founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, dedicated to the study of non-violent action to create change. In 1994 he published From Dictatorship to Democracy . Parallels from that book are showing up in the Trump attempted autocracy as now small areas of resistance are showing up where cooperation is necessary to retain power. The military is speaking out. Lindsey Graham has announced he will follow Senate norms for a replacement for U.S. attorney to SDNY. Some governors are ignoring him with regard to the pandemic. And the more an autocracy relies on force, the weaker it becomes.

So, there is some good news although it is hard to see.

[y66]

From A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists by Wesley Lowery at NYT:

Quote

It was a brief interaction, during the first weeks of my career. There had been a stabbing, and I’d been dispatched to a block in Roxbury, a predominantly black section of Boston, to snag quotes from anyone who might know anything about what had happened.

“Who are you with?” inquired the first person I had approached, a black man in his 50s. “The Globe?” he exclaimed after hearing my response. “The Globe doesn’t have black reporters. What are you doing over here? You lost? Y’all don’t write about this part of town.”

His complaints and his skepticism were familiar, voiced for decades by black people both outside newsrooms and within them — that most American media organizations do not reflect the diversity of the nation or the communities they cover and too often confine their coverage of black and brown neighborhoods to the crime of the day.

Now, almost a decade later, as protesters are taking to the streets of American cities to decry racism and the unabated police killings of black people across the country, the journalism industry has seemingly reached a breaking point of its own: Black journalists are publicly airing years of accumulated grievances, demanding an overdue reckoning for a profession whose mainstream repeatedly brushes off their concerns; in many newsrooms, writers and editors are now also openly pushing for a paradigm shift in how our outlets define their operations and ideals.

While these two battles may seem superficially separate, in reality, the failure of the mainstream press to accurately cover black communities is intrinsically linked with its failure to employ, retain and listen to black people.

Since American journalism’s pivot many decades ago from an openly partisan press to a model of professed objectivity, the mainstream has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses. And those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers. On opinion pages, the contours of acceptable public debate have largely been determined through the gaze of white editors.

The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral. When black and brown reporters and editors challenge those conventions, it’s not uncommon for them to be pushed out, reprimanded or robbed of new opportunities.

The journalist Alex S. Jones, who served as a longtime director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, wrote in “Losing the News,” his 2009 book, “I define journalistic objectivity as a genuine effort to be an honest broker when it comes to news.” To him, “That means playing it straight without favoring one side when the facts are in dispute, regardless of your own views and preferences.”

But objectivity, Mr. Jones wrote, “also means not trying to create the illusion of fairness by letting advocates pretend in your journalism that there is a debate about the facts when the weight of truth is clear.” He critiqued “he-said/she-said reporting, which just pits one voice against another,” as “the discredited face of objectivity. But that is not authentic objectivity.”

It’s striking to read objectivity defined that way — not because it’s objectionable, but rather because it barely resembles the way the concept is commonly discussed in newsrooms today. Conversations about objectivity, rather than happening in a virtuous vacuum, habitually focus on predicting whether a given sentence, opening paragraph or entire article will appear objective to a theoretical reader, who is invariably assumed to be white. This creates the very illusion of fairness that Mr. Jones, and others, specifically warn against.

Instead of telling hard truths in this polarized environment, America’s newsrooms too often deprive their readers of plainly stated facts that could expose reporters to accusations of partiality or imbalance.

For years, I’ve been among a chorus of mainstream journalists who have called for our industry to abandon the appearance of objectivity as the aspirational journalistic standard, and for reporters instead to focus on being fair and telling the truth, as best as one can, based on the given context and available facts. It’s not a novel argument — scores of journalists across generations, from gonzo reporters like Hunter S. Thompson to more traditional voices like Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel — have advocated this very approach. Mr. Kovach and Mr. Rosenstiel lay it out in detail in their classic text “The Elements of Journalism.”

Those of us advancing this argument know that a fairness-and-truth focus will have different, healthy interpretations. We also know that neutral “objective journalism” is constructed atop a pyramid of subjective decision-making: which stories to cover, how intensely to cover those stories, which sources to seek out and include, which pieces of information are highlighted and which are downplayed. No journalistic process is objective. And no individual journalist is objective, because no human being is.

And so, instead of promising our readers that we will never, on any platform, betray a single personal bias — submitting ourselves to a life sentence of public thoughtlessness — a better pledge would be an assurance that we will devote ourselves to accuracy, that we will diligently seek out the perspectives of those with whom we personally may be inclined to disagree and that we will be just as sure to ask hard questions of those with whom we’re inclined to agree.

The best of our profession already does this. But we need to be honest about the gulf that lies between the best and the bulk.

It’s possible to build journalism self-aware enough to bridge that gap. But it will take moral clarity, which will require both editors and reporters to stop doing things like reflexively hiding behind euphemisms that obfuscate the truth, simply because we’ve always done it that way. Deference to precedent is a poor excuse for continuing to make decisions that potentially let powerful bad actors off the hook and harm the public we serve.

Neutral objectivity trips over itself to find ways to avoid telling the truth. Neutral objectivity insists we use clunky euphemisms like “officer-involved shooting.” Moral clarity, and a faithful adherence to grammar and syntax, would demand we use words that most precisely mean the thing we’re trying to communicate: “the police shot someone.”

In coverage of policing, adherents to the neutral objectivity model create journalism so deferential to the police that entire articles are rendered meaningless. True fairness would, in fact, go as far as requiring that editors seriously consider not publishing any significant account of a police shooting until the staff has tracked down the perspective — the “side” — of the person the police had shot. That way beat reporters aren’t left simply rewriting a law enforcement news release.

Moral clarity would insist that politicians who traffic in racist stereotypes and tropes — however cleverly — be labeled such with clear language and unburied evidence. Racism, as we know, is not about what lies in the depths of a human’s heart. It is about word and deed. And a more aggressive commitment to truth from the press would empower our industry to finally admit that.

The failures of neutral objective journalism across several beats in the news media are countless. And these shortcomings have real consequences for the readers we are sworn to serve — particularly black readers, who we know are more likely to have interactions with the criminal justice system (whose leaders we court), more likely to be the targets of white supremacists (whom we commonly indulge) and more likely to have lives made more difficult by racist politicians and implicitly racist policies that we repeatedly refuse to call out.

Black journalists are speaking out because one of the nation’s major political parties and the current presidential administration are providing refuge to white supremacist rhetoric and policies, and our industry’s gatekeepers are preoccupied with seeming balanced, even ordering up glossy profiles of complicit actors. All the while, black and brown lives and livelihoods remain imperiled.

Ideally, the group of journalists given the power to decide what and who to give a platform in this moment would both understand this era’s gravity and reflect the diversity of the country. Unfortunately, too often that is not the case.

Perhaps the most recent controversy to erupt because of such thoughtlessness and lack of inclusion was provided by The New York Times Opinion section, when it published an essay by Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, calling for, among other things, an “overwhelming show of force” by the American military in order to quell civil unrest at protests that, while at times violent, have largely been made up of peaceful demonstrations.

A method of moral clarity would have required that leadership think very hard before providing the section’s deeply influential platform to any elected official — allowing him or her to opine, without the buffer of a reporter’s follow-up questions, using inflammatory rhetoric. It would require, at the very least, that such an Op-Ed not contain several overstatements and unsubstantiated assertions.

“We find the publication of this essay to be an irresponsible choice,” the NewsGuild of New York, a union that represents many Times staffers, said in a statement. “Its lack of context, inadequate vetting by editorial management, spread of misinformation, and the timing of its call to arms gravely undermine the work we do every day.”

Let’s take a moment to be honest about what actually happened in this case: An op-ed page accepted an essay from a firebrand senator. It published that column without adequate line or conceptual editing. Then it got called out for it, leading to the resignation of one man in top leadership and the reassignment of another.

It was a rare case of accountability, yet it remains to be seen if the changes at The Times will include aggressively tackling a culture that leaves its own staff members so internally powerless that they have to battle their own publication in public.

Despite the suggestions of an increasingly hysterical set of pundits, this fallout was not an attack on the very concept of public debate. It’s the story of a group of Times staffers concluding that a specific piece of content and the process by which it was published was beneath the standards they are asked themselves to uphold — then having the audacity to say so.

The journalists — the black journalists — who pushed back most forcefully on the Cotton Op-Ed essay were not calling for an end to public discourse or the censorship of opinions they dislike. They were responding to the particularly poor handling of a particularly outlandish case during a particularly sensitive moment. The turmoil at The Times and the simultaneous eruptions inside other newsrooms across the country are the predictable results of the mainstream media’s labored refusal to racially integrate.

It’s been more than 50 years since the first black journalists appeared in mainstream American newsrooms. For all of that time, black journalists have made meager demands: Please hire some more of us. Please pay us the way you do our colleagues. Please allow us to ascend to leadership roles. Please consider our opinions about how accurate and fair coverage of all communities, especially our own, can be achieved.

Collectively, the industry has responded to generations of black journalists with indifference at best and open hostility at its frequent worst.

Black journalists are hired and told — sometimes explicitly — that we can thrive only if we don’t dare to be our full selves. Frequently, when we speak out about coverage that is inaccurate or otherwise lacking, we are driven from newsrooms — which results in fewer experienced black candidates in the room when it comes time to hire for senior editorships. That, in turn, results in coverage that continues to miss the mark, which leaves the now dwindling ranks of black journalists both ostracized and fighting to speak out. Similarly negative experiences have been shared by Hispanic, Asian, Native, immigrant (both documented and undocumented), Muslim, gay and lesbian, transgender and gender-nonconforming journalists, too.

What’s different now, in this moment, is that the editors no longer hold a monopoly on publishing power. Individual reporters now have followings of our own on social media platforms, granting us the ability to speak directly to the public. It is, then, no coincidence that after decades of pleading with management, black journalists are now making demands on Twitter.

If recent years have taught black journalists anything, it’s that public embarrassment appears to make our bosses better hear us. But humility and attentiveness don’t have to be isolated to crises. Instead of consistently attempting to censor the crucial personnel of color on their own staffs — who consistently deliver the best of their journalism — the leaders of America’s newsrooms could consider truly listening to them.

As I stood on that street corner in Roxbury as a cub reporter all those years ago, the man I’d approached told me that years earlier a family member had been wrongfully arrested. He said the paper printed his relative’s full criminal history, as well as a mug shot from an unrelated incident. There had been no follow-up when his loved one was later cleared of the crime.

I told him that I understood why he was still upset and that it did sound pretty messed up, before tucking my notebook into my back pocket and turning to leave.

“Hey, kid! What was it you wanted to know about?” he asked. “The stabbing?”

For years, he’d waited for the chance to tell off a Globe reporter. And now that he had, and had been heard, he wanted to help me tell the story, and get it right.

[Zelandakh]

y66, on 2020-June-23, 08:00, said:

Since American journalism’s pivot many decades ago from an openly partisan press to a model of professed objectivity

[Winstonm]

https://www.theonion...s-mi-1843908110

Quote

WASHINGTON—In response to continued unrest in the devastated region, Republican leaders reportedly claimed Thursday that New Yorkers would greet the United States military as liberators. “We have every reason to believe that the people of New York will welcome the American military as saviors,” said senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), noting there is evidence to suggest that New Yorkers will rise up in droves to fight alongside the U.S. armed forces to topple the oppressive Cuomo regime.

[Zelandakh]

Winstonm, on 2020-June-23, 21:29, said:

https://www.theonion...s-mi-1843908110

More from The Onion...?

[Winstonm]

Zelandakh, on 2020-June-24, 09:10, said:

More from The Onion...?

There is not much to do about this situation until November so might as well satirize the hell out of them.