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Man Has Racist Beliefs, Finds Dog Who Bit Him “Scary”
Here are the first two paragraphs of an AP piece, as printed in the Washington Post this morning:
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — A libertarian author who has been called a white nationalist said college students who protested his guest lecture this week were “scary.”
Middlebury College said a professor was injured by a protester following a demonstration against guest speaker Charles Murray on Thursday.
Putting aside the libelous description of Murray — though wow — let’s consider some basic journalism: Is the proper lede an opinion about Murray followed by a banal observation from him, or the fact that his speech was disrupted and a professor injured (briefly hospitalized, in fact, as we learn several paragraphs later)?
As the answer is obvious, let’s procede to the next two paragraphs:
The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Murray a white nationalist who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.” Protests of Murray’s lecture forced the college to move it to another room.
The college said Murray and professor Allison Stanger were surrounded by a group of protesters who became violent after the talk and a protester pulled Stanger’s hair, twisting her neck. It said the group climbed onto the hood of a car carrying Murray and Stanger and threw a traffic sign in front of it.
Again, the Post not only gave opinions about Murray as much attention as it did descriptions of what transpired, but literally placed those opinions above their treatment of the events.
Compare this with how the same events were described in Addison County Independent:
MIDDLEBURY — Middlebury College Professor Allison Stanger was injured by protesters Thursday evening as she was escorting a controversial speaker from campus. She was treated at Porter Hospital and released.
Charles Murray, a political scientist who has been criticized for his views on race and intelligence, was invited to speak on campus by a student group. He was greeted late Thursday afternoon outside McCullough Student Center by hundreds of protesters, and inside Wilson Hall, students turned their backs to him when he got up to speak.
College officials led Murray to another location and a closed circuit broadcast showed him being interviewed by Stanger, the Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics.
As Stanger, Murray and a college administrator left McCullough Student Center last evening following the event, they were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protestors,” according to Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing.
Much better! Here, we learn that a college protest turned violent and are then provided some (albeit, horribly biased) context as to why the speaker is controversial. In contrast, it’s barely an exaggeration to say that the Post’s treatment discusses the violence in order to provide context for a story about what a racist Charles Murray supposedly is.
Published in Education, Journalism
LOL. No. What happened at Middlebury was a disgrace; those students who attacked Murray’s car and assaulted the faculty member should be expelled. The intolerance on some college campuses today is every bit as dismaying as it was when I was an undergraduate.
Our country’s youth have been indoctrinated by a very dangerous ideology that shuts down free speech and opinion of any kind that is deemed offensive, to the point of physical violence. Whether it’s on the streets or in the classroom, something very dark is happening here. It is how Hitler rose to power and other regimes. There are no safe spaces except our Constitution, which allows for a guest to speak at a college. What isn’t being taught is history, good and bad, where we can have a conversation instead of a battle.
Those college students were “protestors” in the mold of the SA.
As the father of a college-bound high school senior, I have been following this story closely, including Charles Murray’s tweets regarding the incident. (By the way, Murray’s Twitter bio reads: “Husband, father, social scientist, writer, libertarian. Or maybe right-wing ideologue, pseudoscientist, evil. Opinions differ.” It’s amazing that he maintains his sense of humor.)
Here is an account published Mar. 4, from a Middlebury student-run blog, of what occurred. On Twitter, Murray used a barnyard vulgarity to characterize the accuracy of this story. An alert reader will find several elements that strain credulity.
Here is Murray’s account, published Mar. 5.
One interesting element of the “protest” (actually a riot) is that for the so-called protesters it wasn’t enough that they had prevented Murray from giving his lecture – they also wanted to prevent him from leaving peacefully. And the only reason for doing such a thing is to threaten or commit bodily harm and/or harm to property. The rioters were able to do both, sending a professor to the emergency room and, no doubt, doing damage to the vehicle occupied by Murray.
When it became known that the rioters were on their way to disrupt the on-campus dinner Murray was to attend, the invitees fled to an undisclosed restaurant. Once again, Murray displays his gentle humor when he notes the “silver lining” that the original venue was to have served iced tea, whereas the one off-campus “had a full bar.”