Thread for obviously newsworthy stuff

[Dinner]

The last link I posted was in post 4811 and was a link to CNN. Please quote this supposed Buzzfeed article so we can see who posted it, what it says, and what the date was when it was posted.

[Proteus_MST]

I already suspected that it would wake the Kid, when you post CNN links

[rah]

I already susüected that it would wake the Kid, when you post CNN links

Yes, he is so predictable and it's always fun to watch his posts disappear.

[Dauphin]

I see someone shouting at a sports game. What did he shout?

Do you also see the apparent blackface?

[Dinner]

Do you also see the apparent blackface?

I see kids wearing the schools black and white colors. There are both black and white painted faces and the children are dressed in black as is the custom at that school.

It seems certain people are, once again, reading what they want into things to fit their agenda without knowing the facts.

[pchang]

In a bit of wishful thinking, president Trump now says the US recognizes Juan Guaido as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. That and $5 will get you a latte at Starbucks.

[spambot]

So going to the same school as a racist makes you a racist? What happened to those two kids?

Evidently, the school is either a place that failed to teach its students about the historical significance of blackface, or a place where students feel like racism is permissible.

[spambot]

The MAGA Boys Are Racist Brats

In the abstract, innocence is a rather simple idea. A blank slate, unmarked by sin. In the real world, innocence is a stranger concept. For some, it is wholly unattainable. For others, all it takes is a press release. For many Native people, the last few days have been exhausting. After elder Nathan Phillips’s now-famous encounter with a group of tomahawk-chopping, MAGA-hat-wearing Catholic school students made headlines, a surprisingly large number of non-Native people spoke in Phillips’s defense, decrying the behavior of the Covington Catholic High School students. The outpouring of support was striking to many Native people because, while Native people experience bigotry and abuse on a regular basis, we rarely see other Natives experience the kind of public support that Phillips was ever-so-briefly afforded.

We should have seen the revocation of that support coming a mile away.

Even though footage of the MAGA boys taunting Phillips has been viewed countless times, the existence of other footage, in which the boys were crudely insulted by a small group of Black Israelites, was seen as a game-changer. The group of Black Israelites, who, by all accounts, made despicable comments to both Native people and the Covington youth, were quickly cast as the true instigators, as though the boys’ mimicry and taunts of Phillips and his group were somehow justified by the acts of a completely different group of people. By the time Nick Sandmann, the young man who stared Phillips down while the elder sang and drummed, released a statement, many were eager to accept it as fact. The statement itself, which cast Sandmann and his classmates as level-headed angels being menaced by an elder with a small drum, was purported to be Sandmann’s own narration of events, but read like a press release from a PR firm.

As Vice reported, Runswitch PR, the firm the Sandmann family hired, has a history of supporting powerful Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Runswitch PR was founded by CNN contributor Scott Jennings, a former adviser to McConnell and George W. Bush. Jennings currently advises a McConnell super PAC.

Sandmann’s supporters did not seem to contest accusations that the statement was authored by a PR firm, and instead insisted that it was perfectly normal that the boy’s narrative was outsourced to professionals, rather than being told in his own words.

Interestingly, CNN personality Jake Tapper was an early promoter of the new narrative. Jennings is also a frequent guest on Tapper’s show. Since sharing the statement, Tapper has faced questions about why he did not disclose the involvement of Runswitch PR. It has also been revealed that Donald Trump’s top White House attorney is a Covington graduate.

As Cherokee writer and activist Rebecca Nagle told me, “In all of Indian Country, Native people don’t have as much access to media influencers and power as this one white kid. And now, on the ‘Today Show,’ to the president, he gets to say what happened. Like so many white men who came before him, he gets to rewrite history.”

In the new narrative, Sandmann claimed that, upon approaching him, Phillips was aggressively drumming near Sandmann’s face, and that he stood his ground to “diffuse” the situation — an explanation that strains credulity, and one that would not be readily accepted if Sandmann were not white. If a non-white young person claimed, as Sandmann’s PR statement does, that an elder created a standoff by “invading” their personal space while playing a musical instrument, they would be told that they simply should have taken a step back. But because Phillips is Native, Sandmann was allowed to portray an elder engaged in song as threatening. In a heavy-handed PR maneuver, Sandmann’s statement also claims the boy was saying “a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand” during his interaction with Phillips. It was an improbable story tailor-made for a country that assumes the worst of marginalized people, and it was only a matter of time before Trump weighed in. “Nick Sandmann and the students of Covington have become symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday.

Once the new narrative was launched, a number of media figures and publications took pains to walk back their supportive framing of Phillips, including CNN and the Guardian. There were notable exceptions. In Deadspin, Laura Wagner’s piece, “Don’t Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes,” pointed out that a video touted by some as disproving Phillips’s version of events did not actually contradict Phillips’s story — that he had brought music into the space between the boys and the Black Israelites in order to de-escalate a tense situation. GQ and Rolling Stone also published pieces critical of the narrative reversal, pointing out that the video that showcased the Covington boys’ racist behavior still existed. On Tuesday, a young woman posted a video on Twitter that she says shows the Covington boys harassing her and her friends. In text accompanying the video, the young woman stated, “The Covington Catholic boys harrassed [sic] my friends and I before the incident with Nathan Phillips even happened. I’m tired of reading things saying they were provoked by anyone else other than their own egos and ignorance.”

On Tuesday, Covington’s Holy Cross High School 2018 valedictorian Christian Bales joined the conversation. Holy Cross is overseen by the Diocese of Covington — the same diocese that oversees the Covington Catholic High School. Bales delivered his graduation speech on the school’s lawn using a bullhorn after being told, only hours before graduation, that he would not be allowed to speak. Bales told NBC he was “not surprised at all” that Covington Catholic High School was at the center of a controversy. “It was only a matter of time that something this school community did would blow up to this degree,” Bales said, “and I think they need to be held accountable.”

So why did the public so easily change its tune? White people who harm Native people are often absolved by way of recontextualization. The entire mythology of the United States demands as much. Native people have suffered at the hands of white people since first contact, with the Nazis modeling their attempted extermination of Jewish people after American efforts to wipe out Native populations. For the United States, violence against Native people is foundational, but such violence has never fit the national narrative of a country that claimed its independence with a declaration that “all men are created equal.” Stories of the “founding fathers” are relayed with admiration and sentimentality to American youth, either without mention of the slaves they held or Natives they helped massacre, or with an acknowledgement of those harms that also absolves the “framers” due to the historical period in which they lived.

Native people are not actively supported by most liberals on an ongoing basis, because Native hardships are only periodically made visible by the media. What is true historically is also true of the present: For most people, it’s easier not to think about us. It’s easier not to think about missing and murdered Indigenous women, or about extreme poverty and tainted water, or murders at the hands of police. We are treated as a permanent, monolithic backburner subject, undiscussed until it is convenient to do so (or until a hashtag catches on).

On Saturday, elder Nathan Phillips had utility to those who wanted to use him as a cudgel to attack Trump. Those who announced their sympathy with Phillips, only to walk it back after the press release, were not highlighting Native struggle, nor were they talking about how frequently Native people are harmed by white people in the United States. To them, it was a moment — a moment when they could take our pain and beat an enemy over the head with it.

With a slightly more complex narrative, the public began to treat the MAGA boys as though they had been exonerated.

In the United States, a Black child can be slaughtered without consequence within seconds of a police officer’s arrival. Black and Native children are shuffled through schools that treat them like prisoners and prisons that degrade and destroy them. White innocence remains the default assumption, easily regained if lost. While the footage of the Covington boys behaving badly and brutishly remains publicly available, their innocence has been reinstated. Meanwhile, a Native elder, who offered music in the hopes of creating a bit of peace, is vilified as a liar. In the American imagination, the dough-cheeked Covington boys are not the face of malice, even as they wear symbols of hate as headgear and march for forced birth and the theft of bodily autonomy.

Some in the media have chosen not to insist upon the significance of the MAGA hats the boys were wearing. Mainstream outlets, wary of losing sponsors, will not say what is undeniably true: The MAGA brand is now and has always been about racism. Bigotry is, indeed, the only thing Trump has ever reliably delivered to his followers. As he breaks pledge after pledge, it’s clear Trump’s fandom is only upset when he hedges about a bigoted policy.

At present, it seems unlikely that the corporate press will make another course correction, and the American public remains unable to describe its own moral and political chaos. One can only hope that our society will bear witness to itself and confront the fact that the decent are ground under while their tormentors are made pure.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-maga-boys-are-racist-brats/

[ZEE]

Gribbler is on his rampage again.

[Elok]

Evidently, the school is either a place that failed to teach its students about the historical significance of blackface, or a place where students feel like racism is permissible.

The former, more or less. Snopes indicates that the custom has been controversial for some time, but like many racially-insensitive sports customs, it doesn't want to die easy. And as racially-insensitive sports customs go, it's got the benefit of apparently innocuous intent, unlike, say, "Redskins."

As for your big quote, the long vid makes clear that the "tense situation" was not trending to violence before he showed up with his drum--they're recognizably doing Seven Nation Army minutes before he marches into their group--and is unchanged after he leaves; the black group continue yelling insults and the kids continue arguing with them. In the short vids, one of the drummer's companions can be heard saying that white people need to go back to Europe, or some such, so the peaceable intentions thing is likewise dubious. And why would you try to defuse a tense situation by literally banging a drum in a stranger's face? "These kids have violent intentions; I'm going to go up to them and make unintelligible loud noises at them for several minutes."

EDIT: I feel I should mention that, in saner times, none of this **** would even be newsworthy, even if you take the worst possible spin on all three parties. Poorly supervised teenage boys are vicious to strangers all the time; protesting cultists say terrible things routinely, and this group isn't even as good at it as the WBC; it's not at all unheard of for professional activists to be self-promoting liars. The story here is that this was even a story at all.

[Dinner]

Evidently, the school is either a place that failed to teach its students about the historical significance of blackface, or a place where students feel like racism is permissible.

Face painting in school colors is common at sporting events and the only failure here are you and your fellow hacks who try to force EVERYTHING into your agenda. Try to be objective for a change.

[rah]

As much as I'm not impressed with these youths, I have to remember a few things.
1. Yeah, have to agree that face painting in the school colors is common and shouldn't be used as proof that they're racists.
2. They're teenagers and therefore asshats by definition. I can remember a lot of poor choices in HS also.

[spambot]

Face painting in school colors is common at sporting events and the only failure here are you and your fellow hacks who try to force EVERYTHING into your agenda. Try to be objective for a change.

If painting yourself in your "school colors" looks like blackface maybe you should come up with another way to display "school spirit".

[Berzerker]

Well I apologize to the 2 kids in black face. I should have given more thought to the fact the audience was all in black and they were just in their school colors, not mimicking or mocking black people. I have my school colors - black and gold - on my golf bag.

The MAGA Boys Are Racist Brats

a surprisingly large number of non-Native people spoke in Phillips’s defense, decrying the behavior of the Covington Catholic High School students.

How much of that support was based on a 10-20 second clip followed or preceded by the unrelenting narrative "racist white kids harass poor Indian"? There are a number of Democrats - eg Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jamie Lee Curtis - who've changed their minds after watching more of the video.

The complaints about hiring a PR firm ignore the US media was demonizing the kid, one little PR firm to tell the truth up against 24/7 BS from the Democrats and their media outlets. Thats like repeatedly punching someone and then complaining when they punch back. And my God how hypocritical, the media criticizing someone for hiring a PR firm to push back against the fake media. How dare they! The media tries to ruin your kid's life and the parents are supposed to do nothing about it? This is another example why the Democrats can go suck donkey balls too.

As Cherokee writer and activist Rebecca Nagle told me, “In all of Indian Country, Native people don’t have as much access to media influencers and power as this one white kid. And now, on the ‘Today Show,’ to the president, he gets to say what happened. Like so many white men who came before him, he gets to rewrite history.”

Yeah, dont let the kid speak on TV! Burden him with the white man's sins.

In the new narrative, Sandmann claimed that, upon approaching him, Phillips was aggressively drumming near Sandmann’s face, and that he stood his ground to “diffuse” the situation — an explanation that strains credulity, and one that would not be readily accepted if Sandmann were not white.

Most people would have shoved the drum away from their face or moved away. I would have diffused the situation by the latter, but if Phillips didn't hold his ground and advanced into me again or someone else, that would have made it worse. Eventually he would have found someone who would shove him or his drum away. Now the kid did make a point of not moving whereas backing away from the drum just a couple feet would have ceded Phillips that space, so I think the kid was offended by the intrusion and didn't want to 'surrender'. But in this situation, Sandmann was the Indian and Phillips was the European, the kid was there first and Phillips tried moving him off his 'land'.

During this incident a shorter Indian accompanying the 2 drummers - notice how the 2nd drummer didn't get into anyone's face - was telling the white people to go back to Europe because Indians have been here for millions of years. One of the kids started arguing we all came from Africa and Sandmann heard their argument and turned back at the kid and told him to stop arguing. So yeah, he did more to diffuse the situation than anyone else.

On a sidenote, people were traveling back and forth between Europe and the USA thousands of years ago (look up the Lost Red Paint People). When did the Navajo arrive? A few centuries. The Ute/Paiute have a legend about their ancient ancestors killing off red haired 'giants' in Nevada and the Mandan (among others) had 'white' features.

There are tall Indians and short Indians and they tend to represent at least 2 different populations, the taller ones have more European like features - they were even taller than the Europeans they met - and the shorter ones appear more like the native populations we find in Siberia and Alaska today. They were probably the first people to get here but the ice age actually created 2 'land bridges' into the new world. As the ice sheets grew and sea levels dropped, massive ice shelves ringed the N Atlantic. People were using them to boat alongside the ice hunting marine animals and fish much like how polar bears do now. Archaeologists have found evidence of a shared culture - deep sea fishing technology - in Denmark and Rhode Island. Might explain the funerary practice of placing the dead on wood scaffolds for de-fleshing before burial. Once the ice melted travel between the 2 continents became much more difficult and contact eventually ceased or slowed to a trickle. I'm rambling, back to the article.

If a non-white young person claimed, as Sandmann’s PR statement does, that an elder created a standoff by “invading” their personal space while playing a musical instrument, they would be told that they simply should have taken a step back. But because Phillips is Native, Sandmann was allowed to portray an elder engaged in song as threatening.

The video shows what happened, Phillips got so close to the kids head with his drum Sandmann's eyes started blinking as the drumstick passed by his face. Yes American Indians, Europeans are arriving on your shores, simply step back. The song wasn't threatening, banging on a drum inches from a kid's face was the threat.

Once the new narrative was launched, a number of media figures and publications took pains to walk back their supportive framing of Phillips, including CNN and the Guardian.

You mean they didn't double down. The new narrative wasn't launched, people watched more of the video and saw Phillips was the only one posing a threat.

In Deadspin, Laura Wagner’s piece, “Don’t Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes,” pointed out that a video touted by some as disproving Phillips’s version of events did not actually contradict Phillips’s story

Yes, take a look at the photo Laura Wagner used for her piece. Do you see all those angry beasts ready to devour their prey? That was how Phillips described the kids.

GQ and Rolling Stone also published pieces critical of the narrative reversal, pointing out that the video that showcased the Covington boys’ racist behavior still existed. On Tuesday, a young woman posted a video on Twitter that she says shows the Covington boys harassing her and her friends. In text accompanying the video, the young woman stated, “The Covington Catholic boys harrassed [sic] my friends and I before the incident with Nathan Phillips even happened. I’m tired of reading things saying they were provoked by anyone else other than their own egos and ignorance.”

Well, the kids shouldn't have done the Atlanta Braves chop and chant, but they weren't walking into the Indian's celebration to do it. They did that when Phillips et al invaded their space. But all that is irrelevant and a distraction, this is about Phillips and Sandmann. If Sandmann was an Indian teen and a 60+ year old white guy walked up to him banging a drum in his face, the same people condemning Sandmann would be calling the kid a hero for standing up to the racist bigot.

If painting yourself in your "school colors" looks like blackface maybe you should come up with another way to display "school spirit".

Black face was used to portray black people, not express support for the team. That doesn't make them racist, just a little thoughtless.

[spambot]

Without Fox News, Republicans Would Be Toast

How much effect does Fox News have on presidential voting? Here’s a trip down memory lane:

2007: Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan investigate the period between 1996 and 2000, when Fox News was being introduced. By 2000, some cities had it and some didn’t. The distribution was fairly random, and the researchers concluded that Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the places that carried Fox.

2014: Gregory Martin and Ali Yurukoglu investigate the power of Fox News by exploiting the well known fact that channels with lower numbers on cable systems get more viewers than channels with higher numbers. The assignment of numbers is, again, fairly random, and they conclude that Republicans gained about 1.6 percentage points overall in 2000 thanks to the existence of Fox News.

2017: Martin and Yurukoglu are back with a final version of their paper. This one reduces its estimate of the effect of Fox News to 0.46 percentage points in 2000.¹

2019: Martin and Yurukoglu are back yet again with a summary of their 2017 paper. This time they highlight one of their snazzy charts:
The top panel demonstrates how lazy we TV viewers are. By examining the same channels in different cities, M&Y find that, for example, Channel 40 gets about two minutes less viewership than Channel 20. The bottom panel of the chart shows the average position of the three big news channels. Fox News is around 38 while MSNBC is around 45:

Given the position-related changes in Fox News viewership, this implies that every additional minute per week of average viewership in a zip code produced about a 0.15 percentage points increase in the Republican presidential vote share in that zip code.

If I’m reading everything correctly, they estimate that the influence of Fox News on people who aren’t already Republicans is lower now than it was in 2000. However, Fox News is far more widespread than it was in 2000, so its net influence is up from 0.46 percentage points in 2000 to 6.3 percentage points in 2008. That is, if Fox News hadn’t existed, John McCain would have received 6.3 percentage points less of the popular vote. I didn’t buy that when I first reported on this paper, and neither does statistician Andrew Gelman.

The problem is that these numbers depend on extrapolating from a few minutes of watching Fox to an hour of watching Fox, and it’s unlikely that this is a linear effect. So I’d guess that the real effect of Fox News is more likely something in the ballpark of one or two percentage points.

Which is still a lot! Even a one percentage point influence would have been enough to swing both the 2000 and 2016 elections. I think it’s safe to say that the precise quantitative effect is hard to estimate precisely, but it’s still pretty clear that without Fox News the Republican Party would be in a world of hurt. Who knows? It’s even possible that they wouldn’t have won a presidential election since 1992.

¹They also estimate the effect of our leading liberal news channel: “The corresponding effect of watching MSNBC for 2.5 additional minutes per week is an imprecise zero.”

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/01/without-fox-news-republicans-would-be-toast/