It’s maddening that we just went through this with the Georgia spa shooting in 2021. Within what felt like seconds, the narrative of an anti-Asian hate crime was made canon. Nevermind that it quickly became clear the shooter was a disturbed, self-loathing sex addict and the race(s) of his victims were incidental.
I’d say we’ve learned nothing, but that would imply that the media is *trying* to learn something, when it’s increasingly clear they are not interested in learning anything at all.
Correct that we just went through this, but I guarantee you most of my left friends still see the spa event as an Asian hate crime. But that means the media did learn something: their tactics work. And that's a lesson they don't want to unlearn because it's a path to glory
What’s so frustrating to me about things like this is that I *don’t* think left-leaning media actually has a conscious strategy to obscure the reality of these situations. I think most journalists doing this are true believers, just super blinkered and waving away any cognitive dissonance that arises when other motives for violent attacks arise.
I would bet money they just mumble something to themselves about how the perpetrators felt comfortable or compelled to choose marginalized targets based on implicit bias cultivated by White Supremacist Society, therefore they’re still baaaasically correct in their narrative assertions and everyone else listening to the stated motives of the attackers are still bigots.
It’s complicated. It’s true that his main motive was hatred of sex workers. But it’s not random chance that the women who end up working at “happy ending” massage parlors are disproportionately Asian, either. The shooter knew he would be killing mostly Asian women when he went to the spa, and I can’t see that as totally race-neutral.
I'm open to that point. I don't include that in the definition of hate crime, if I have to define it. And the way it was covered in the media was certainly the opposite of that, which is where my comment is coming from, a lesson the media won't learn since they were so richly rewarded for their skewed framing.
I’d consider the killings a hate crime against women, if anything. But yes, I agree that the killer’s motive was flattened in pursuit of an easy “racism bad” angle.
I don't think the evidence really bears this out. When I say incidental, I don't mean coincidental. I agree that he knew who he would be killing (he frequented the place) but it's worth noting that 1) not all his victims were Asian women and 2) he was caught while driving to Florida where he planned to shoot up a business connected to the porn industry. I find it hard to believe that the result here would have been any different if you swapped out his victims with those of any other race. That's what I mean by incidental - it seems irrelevant to his decision-making (again, based on what we know).
Ben Collins might be eclipsing Michael Hobbes as the most annoying person on Twitter. I cannot for the life of me understand these guys who dedicate so much time to reassuring hyper-online liberals that yes, they truly are right about everything, and any opinions not held by blue-check Twitter are hateful misinformation .
Apparently, Ben didn't even do the 30 seconds of Googling needed to figure out that there's another gay bar in Colorado Springs where, presumably, LGBT people feel safe. https://www.instagram.com/icons_colorado/?hl=en
And the “strip mall” inclusion is just baffling. Like if he was trying to be an oblivious big city snob he couldn’t have done better. I guess the implication is that the LGBTQ community there is “relegated” to a strip mall as opposed to some posher district?
Yes my dude, the suburbs have perfectly good bars in strip malls and many people enjoy them every day just fine. Because people (even gay people!) live in the burbs and don’t want to drive all the way downtown for a drink
As far as I am concerned, non-binary people have no more connection to the gay community than straight folks. After all, if enbies are neither men nor women, they cannot be same-sex attracted, which is the raison d'etre of the gay community.
(As you can tell, I've had just about enough of non-binary bullshit for 2022. It's fine if people want to believe in superstition, but I'm tired of being expected to genuflect along with them.)
Yes I have wondered (not that I’ve spent too many brain cells on it) how a non-binary person would describe their sexual orientation. Of course it’s probably one of that ever-expanding set of “pride” flags... “hemisemidemisexual” or something...
As a PhD biologist, you know that 99.98% of human beings are strictly binary. People can claim to be whatever they want, but facts are facts. The vast vast majority of people who claim to be "nonbinary" are, in actual fact, one sex or the other. Let's keep the language alligned with the truth.
Agreed! I should’ve put scare quotes around “non-binary.” But I do still wonder how people who “identify” as “NB” describe their sexual orientation. (My guess is that they go with the handy alphabet soup catch-all, “queer.”)
Jesse is snarking on Twitter dismissing that phenomenon, but it's very real, spectacular crimes committed by inconvenient demographics drop off the media radar suspiciously quickly compared to when the perpetrator is who the media wants them to be.
Just thinking of examples from Colorado, there's the STEM School shooting from 2019 in Highlands Ranch, which basically vanished from national media coverage within a day when the shooters' backgrounds became apparent.
The entire Collins soliloquy was incoherent. Perhaps it's because I'm not on social media for the most part, but I couldn't even figure out what he was trying to strongarm other journalists into doing, or what he was castigating them for not doing. They are afraid of being the subject of Breitbart? What fucking journalist in liberal circles cares about that? The whole thing felt like gaslighting, like there's some dire fear in liberal journalism against LGBT-friendly coverage. And *this* guy covers "misinformation"? Is that a self-appointed position, or does someone actually trust him to pierce the veil of bullshit covering most stories to find even the facts, let alone some "truth"?
This is SOP for the gun debate, has been as long as I've been following it since the mid to late 90s or so. It's this weird little journalistic carve out where you'll never be fact checked outside of the conservative media ghetto that doesn't matter to these people, so they can be as outlandishly wrong as they want without consequences. I've long thought this practice was a strong contributing factor to conservative distrust of the media, truly blatant lies being reported and never corrected by all of the major media.
The fact that Jesse refuses (on "principle," I guess?) to use they/them pronouns just reveals the Calvinball rules — i.e. non-existent rules — that govern trans and non-binary identification.
Either self-ID is valid, or it is not. Either we respect everyone's stated gender identity, or we do not.
The entire problem with self-ID is that it is capricious and unverifiable. This fact does not change simply because Caitlyn Jenner does not commit horrific crimes and this person did.
In everyday life, it's fine to use preferred pronouns out of politeness, but in areas presumably dedicated to truth-finding, like journalism, let's at least have consistent rules. Otherwise, we cannot really discuss anything at all.
I really struggle with this. If I were to talk about Caitlyn Jenner in the present tense, I would feel like I should say “she” out of politeness and deference to “her” clear intention to live and present “herself” as a woman. But if I was talking about the winner of the 1976 Olympic decathlon (a men’s event!), I don’t think “she” would work for me.
These days when I do talk about people like that, I just try to avoid pronouns altogether. But I do feel like there’s a difference between those people who are truly committed to what used to be called a “sex change” and those who just declare pronouns but do nothing else to “affirm” their new identities. (Which, to be clear, is NOT a statement in support of so-called “gender affirmation” treatment -- especially not for minors! But I digress...)
But on the topic of those who commit horrific crimes: I don’t think I could ever utter the phrase “her penis,” even if it was considered contempt of court (as indeed seems to be the case in some jurisdictions).
Thanks for saying this. I would be beyond irritated if I were gunned down at a gay club anywhere in the United States and some journalist tried to claim it was the only place I felt safe. Like, fuck off? Tons of gay people have felt safe MOST places in any sizeable U.S. city for well over a decade. It’s so infantilizing.
All those tweets are about TRANS, not gay & lesbian. We have same sex marriage in this country. There is no longer an overwhelming anti gay/lesbian sentiment in 2022.
People worried about medically transing minors are not anti LGB. In fact, those minors at risk of being transed are minors who may very well be LGB themselves.
It's infuriating to read that concern about T in women's/girls' sports, men in single-sex spaces, etc, is somehow equivalent to anti gay sentiment. It is not.
This isn’t a gotcha I promise - I’m genuinely surprised by you intentionally misgendering Aldrich? Do you have any reason to disbelieve the filing saying they are NB? It’s not like we have a detailed life story of this person.
And there’s another word I realize has been bugging me: “misgendering.” Probably because -- like so much in the discourse on this topic -- it blurs the distinction between sex (a biological fact) and gender (now an ill-defined psychological construct, though it did once have a useful meaning in linguistics, and maybe still does). Which of course once again brings us to the infamous “what is a woman [or man]” question--should that be defined by sex (spoiler alert: yes!) or “gender”?
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, but given the nebulousness of the concept of “gender” (it’s fluid! no, it’s inherent and immutable!) and of course the fact that it can apparently only be determined by a person’s “innate” sense of oneself, how can we help but “mis-gender” others? We can’t possibly stay on top of how anyone feels about their “gender identity” at any given moment, nor should we have to. But sex really IS immutable; no amount of hormones and/or surgery can switch a human from male to female or vice versa.
The gender identity thing is my hard line over which I shall not pass.
I will not be forced by anyone to speak that which I know is false. Someone standing in front of me who is obviously male will not force me to declare him a her. End of discussion.
I have no interest in checking the plumbing so someone who looks female will be called female. Same for male.
But this lunacy surrounding my supposed obligation to mind read how anyone “identifies” on a given day is the hard line.
Ought I agree with the schizophrenic that the CIA implanted a mind control device? Or the delusional who believes he is a god and I must be obedient?
“Pure speculation” is right, and that’s kind of what I’m poking at with Jesse - he is not a person that is typically insensitive to the self-identification of trans individuals. The fact that he is apparently assuming a bad faith self identification, without apparent additional evidence, here strikes me as unusual. I promised this wasn’t a gotcha so I’ll leave it at that.
To your point though - it might be a good technique but it’s also a very weird technique for Aldrich to be okay with, if their goal is to be an anti-trans terrorist. Diluting the message would be very much counterproductive.
Oh I don’t disagree with that at all. But then, I’m not somebody trying to squeeze this crime into any sort of overarching narrative that makes my political opponents basically murderers.
Jesse commenting on best journalistic practices is like me commenting on best baseball playing: all I know is what I see but much of what I say is naive or wrong, mostly because I don’t play the game, I don’t know how and why baseball players do what they do.
Same with Jesse. One way to tell Jesse is a bogus critic is his attack on a person’s character. In this case Ben Collins. Attacking character is gossip. The only basis for such gossip is that Collins does not act in a way satisfactory to Jesse Singal. That’s it. What other standard is applied? What professional or ethical code did Collins violate? I doubt Singal knows of such codes and how they apply.
I’m confused. Are you implying that Jesse Singal is does not understand the ethical standards of journalism? Whether you love Jesse or hate him, the fact that he is a professional journalist is pretty well established at this point.
Did you read the article? I think he was pretty clear about how Collins journalism was bad. He jumped to conclusions. He made the story about himself and fellow journalists rather than the facts of what happened, and he formed a grand narrative based on preexisting biases rather than reporting out the story. Does that clear it up for you?
Thanks. I did read Singal’s piece. I do not trust Singal to know bad journalism from good. Each fault of Collins you note here I find in Singal’s critique of Collins.
As I finished Singal’s piece I asked myself, “So what?” Was something revealed here that is important, other than Singal’s gripes with Collins’ coverage? I didn’t find anything.
I don't see any of those things in those piece, but you don't need to take Jesse's word for it. Do you think Collins' journalism on this is good? I have read it, I found it laughable.
> So what?
Super confused by this. I think good journalism is an end in itself and bad journalism driven by social media likes deserves to be called out. If we want to live in a society that has less incidents like this, we need people to do the hard work of finding out what actually happened so we can understand and learn from it. People like Collins who pretend to do that (but don't) actively make things worse. They trick people into believing society has easy answers and if you tweet the right hashtag then all our problems will be solved. Reality is messier. That's "so what".
Please don’t waste time being confused. I did not reply to persuade you. I wrote my observations. If you disagree, great. But I’m not writing a rebuttal or attempting a refutation, either of Singal’s essay or of your comments.
My three-plus decades in journalism ended right before social media became a tool journalists could use. I don’t know if you’re a journalist. Bless you, if you are. And I pray you have some standards that guide how you gather news and publish it.
I’m not a fan of journalists expressing personal views about subjects they’re covering. That said, I am not aware of the expectations placed on Collins by his bosses. I don’t know if his outlet has rules governing how he can engage on social media or how free he is to express his personal views. Before I crap in his hat, I would need to know if and how such facts and circumstances apply to the work of Collins and his colleagues.
Much has been published about the shooting and the aftermath. Does Collins’s work prevent anyone from learning the details of what happened and why?
As far as journalists bringing a lesson the readers, I am aware of at least two seriously conflicting views: those the LGBTQ community and those of anti-LGBTQ community. (Yes, this is a gross oversimplification.) Each community is going to take away its own lessons.
In my career, most journalists I knew realized nothing in life is simple. There are no simple answers to bigotry and to gun control. There is almost no way of preventing what happened. Despite the great efforts undertaken to show that to readers, many, maybe most, readers think simple answers exist.
If anyone ought to know how messy reality is, journalists ought to be first in line, right behind law enforcement and first responders. I doubt seriously Collins was trying to trick anyone. Most often, the bias readers think they find in journalists is really a reverse image of their own biases. There’s a name for it: confirmation bias. People accept as true news reporting that appeals to their biases. And they reject or recoil from news that appears to be in conflict with their points of view.
It’s maddening that we just went through this with the Georgia spa shooting in 2021. Within what felt like seconds, the narrative of an anti-Asian hate crime was made canon. Nevermind that it quickly became clear the shooter was a disturbed, self-loathing sex addict and the race(s) of his victims were incidental.
I’d say we’ve learned nothing, but that would imply that the media is *trying* to learn something, when it’s increasingly clear they are not interested in learning anything at all.
Correct that we just went through this, but I guarantee you most of my left friends still see the spa event as an Asian hate crime. But that means the media did learn something: their tactics work. And that's a lesson they don't want to unlearn because it's a path to glory
What’s so frustrating to me about things like this is that I *don’t* think left-leaning media actually has a conscious strategy to obscure the reality of these situations. I think most journalists doing this are true believers, just super blinkered and waving away any cognitive dissonance that arises when other motives for violent attacks arise.
I would bet money they just mumble something to themselves about how the perpetrators felt comfortable or compelled to choose marginalized targets based on implicit bias cultivated by White Supremacist Society, therefore they’re still baaaasically correct in their narrative assertions and everyone else listening to the stated motives of the attackers are still bigots.
It’s complicated. It’s true that his main motive was hatred of sex workers. But it’s not random chance that the women who end up working at “happy ending” massage parlors are disproportionately Asian, either. The shooter knew he would be killing mostly Asian women when he went to the spa, and I can’t see that as totally race-neutral.
I'm open to that point. I don't include that in the definition of hate crime, if I have to define it. And the way it was covered in the media was certainly the opposite of that, which is where my comment is coming from, a lesson the media won't learn since they were so richly rewarded for their skewed framing.
I’d consider the killings a hate crime against women, if anything. But yes, I agree that the killer’s motive was flattened in pursuit of an easy “racism bad” angle.
I don't think the evidence really bears this out. When I say incidental, I don't mean coincidental. I agree that he knew who he would be killing (he frequented the place) but it's worth noting that 1) not all his victims were Asian women and 2) he was caught while driving to Florida where he planned to shoot up a business connected to the porn industry. I find it hard to believe that the result here would have been any different if you swapped out his victims with those of any other race. That's what I mean by incidental - it seems irrelevant to his decision-making (again, based on what we know).
Ben Collins might be eclipsing Michael Hobbes as the most annoying person on Twitter. I cannot for the life of me understand these guys who dedicate so much time to reassuring hyper-online liberals that yes, they truly are right about everything, and any opinions not held by blue-check Twitter are hateful misinformation .
Bold words there, but I'll just take your word for it. I have no intention on comparing the two side-by-side to find out.
Apparently, Ben didn't even do the 30 seconds of Googling needed to figure out that there's another gay bar in Colorado Springs where, presumably, LGBT people feel safe. https://www.instagram.com/icons_colorado/?hl=en
Of course this ignores there are other places that are LGBT friendly, even if the LGBT community isn't even their primary target. There's a Methodist church https://www.fumcprairie.org/lgbtq-inclusion , Unitarian Church https://asuuc.net/about-uus/ , a bunch of counseling services https://lgbtqcolorado.org/resources/ , etc. etc.
And the “strip mall” inclusion is just baffling. Like if he was trying to be an oblivious big city snob he couldn’t have done better. I guess the implication is that the LGBTQ community there is “relegated” to a strip mall as opposed to some posher district?
Yes my dude, the suburbs have perfectly good bars in strip malls and many people enjoy them every day just fine. Because people (even gay people!) live in the burbs and don’t want to drive all the way downtown for a drink
Watch the whole story get memory-holed on the left/mainstream media now that the shooter IDs as enbie
As far as I am concerned, non-binary people have no more connection to the gay community than straight folks. After all, if enbies are neither men nor women, they cannot be same-sex attracted, which is the raison d'etre of the gay community.
(As you can tell, I've had just about enough of non-binary bullshit for 2022. It's fine if people want to believe in superstition, but I'm tired of being expected to genuflect along with them.)
Yes I have wondered (not that I’ve spent too many brain cells on it) how a non-binary person would describe their sexual orientation. Of course it’s probably one of that ever-expanding set of “pride” flags... “hemisemidemisexual” or something...
As a PhD biologist, you know that 99.98% of human beings are strictly binary. People can claim to be whatever they want, but facts are facts. The vast vast majority of people who claim to be "nonbinary" are, in actual fact, one sex or the other. Let's keep the language alligned with the truth.
Agreed! I should’ve put scare quotes around “non-binary.” But I do still wonder how people who “identify” as “NB” describe their sexual orientation. (My guess is that they go with the handy alphabet soup catch-all, “queer.”)
Jesse is snarking on Twitter dismissing that phenomenon, but it's very real, spectacular crimes committed by inconvenient demographics drop off the media radar suspiciously quickly compared to when the perpetrator is who the media wants them to be.
Just thinking of examples from Colorado, there's the STEM School shooting from 2019 in Highlands Ranch, which basically vanished from national media coverage within a day when the shooters' backgrounds became apparent.
Or the recent UVA shooting.
The entire Collins soliloquy was incoherent. Perhaps it's because I'm not on social media for the most part, but I couldn't even figure out what he was trying to strongarm other journalists into doing, or what he was castigating them for not doing. They are afraid of being the subject of Breitbart? What fucking journalist in liberal circles cares about that? The whole thing felt like gaslighting, like there's some dire fear in liberal journalism against LGBT-friendly coverage. And *this* guy covers "misinformation"? Is that a self-appointed position, or does someone actually trust him to pierce the veil of bullshit covering most stories to find even the facts, let alone some "truth"?
This is SOP for the gun debate, has been as long as I've been following it since the mid to late 90s or so. It's this weird little journalistic carve out where you'll never be fact checked outside of the conservative media ghetto that doesn't matter to these people, so they can be as outlandishly wrong as they want without consequences. I've long thought this practice was a strong contributing factor to conservative distrust of the media, truly blatant lies being reported and never corrected by all of the major media.
Thank you.
I am s beyond disgusted by “reporters” who prefer activism to actual journalism. Collins and his ilk are the reason I don’t trust mainstream news.
The fact that Jesse refuses (on "principle," I guess?) to use they/them pronouns just reveals the Calvinball rules — i.e. non-existent rules — that govern trans and non-binary identification.
Either self-ID is valid, or it is not. Either we respect everyone's stated gender identity, or we do not.
The entire problem with self-ID is that it is capricious and unverifiable. This fact does not change simply because Caitlyn Jenner does not commit horrific crimes and this person did.
In everyday life, it's fine to use preferred pronouns out of politeness, but in areas presumably dedicated to truth-finding, like journalism, let's at least have consistent rules. Otherwise, we cannot really discuss anything at all.
I really struggle with this. If I were to talk about Caitlyn Jenner in the present tense, I would feel like I should say “she” out of politeness and deference to “her” clear intention to live and present “herself” as a woman. But if I was talking about the winner of the 1976 Olympic decathlon (a men’s event!), I don’t think “she” would work for me.
These days when I do talk about people like that, I just try to avoid pronouns altogether. But I do feel like there’s a difference between those people who are truly committed to what used to be called a “sex change” and those who just declare pronouns but do nothing else to “affirm” their new identities. (Which, to be clear, is NOT a statement in support of so-called “gender affirmation” treatment -- especially not for minors! But I digress...)
But on the topic of those who commit horrific crimes: I don’t think I could ever utter the phrase “her penis,” even if it was considered contempt of court (as indeed seems to be the case in some jurisdictions).
Thanks for saying this. I would be beyond irritated if I were gunned down at a gay club anywhere in the United States and some journalist tried to claim it was the only place I felt safe. Like, fuck off? Tons of gay people have felt safe MOST places in any sizeable U.S. city for well over a decade. It’s so infantilizing.
All those tweets are about TRANS, not gay & lesbian. We have same sex marriage in this country. There is no longer an overwhelming anti gay/lesbian sentiment in 2022.
People worried about medically transing minors are not anti LGB. In fact, those minors at risk of being transed are minors who may very well be LGB themselves.
It's infuriating to read that concern about T in women's/girls' sports, men in single-sex spaces, etc, is somehow equivalent to anti gay sentiment. It is not.
I read exactly one article about this shooting and gave up.
I went to a gay bar in Old Colorado City in the late 80s because it was the only bar in the area that didn’t care about ID.
That line about “the only place” was so absurdly false I immediately dismissed everything else as politically driven nonsense.
If they can’t get basic facts right what’s the point?
It's deeply weird to me how quickly these narratives harden into "fact." And scary. And frustrating.
Would it kill Millennial writers and commentators like Collins to learn the word "differently"?
Thank you.
This isn’t a gotcha I promise - I’m genuinely surprised by you intentionally misgendering Aldrich? Do you have any reason to disbelieve the filing saying they are NB? It’s not like we have a detailed life story of this person.
Aldritch is a man. Saying he is anything else is the true "misgendering".
And there’s another word I realize has been bugging me: “misgendering.” Probably because -- like so much in the discourse on this topic -- it blurs the distinction between sex (a biological fact) and gender (now an ill-defined psychological construct, though it did once have a useful meaning in linguistics, and maybe still does). Which of course once again brings us to the infamous “what is a woman [or man]” question--should that be defined by sex (spoiler alert: yes!) or “gender”?
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, but given the nebulousness of the concept of “gender” (it’s fluid! no, it’s inherent and immutable!) and of course the fact that it can apparently only be determined by a person’s “innate” sense of oneself, how can we help but “mis-gender” others? We can’t possibly stay on top of how anyone feels about their “gender identity” at any given moment, nor should we have to. But sex really IS immutable; no amount of hormones and/or surgery can switch a human from male to female or vice versa.
The gender identity thing is my hard line over which I shall not pass.
I will not be forced by anyone to speak that which I know is false. Someone standing in front of me who is obviously male will not force me to declare him a her. End of discussion.
I have no interest in checking the plumbing so someone who looks female will be called female. Same for male.
But this lunacy surrounding my supposed obligation to mind read how anyone “identifies” on a given day is the hard line.
Ought I agree with the schizophrenic that the CIA implanted a mind control device? Or the delusional who believes he is a god and I must be obedient?
No?
Same idea for trans.
Well that’s an interesting question of course. Jesse seems to be assuming off-hand that Aldrich identifying as NB is insincere, and I’m curious why.
Pure speculation here but his lawyer probably thought it a good defense technique.
“Pure speculation” is right, and that’s kind of what I’m poking at with Jesse - he is not a person that is typically insensitive to the self-identification of trans individuals. The fact that he is apparently assuming a bad faith self identification, without apparent additional evidence, here strikes me as unusual. I promised this wasn’t a gotcha so I’ll leave it at that.
To your point though - it might be a good technique but it’s also a very weird technique for Aldrich to be okay with, if their goal is to be an anti-trans terrorist. Diluting the message would be very much counterproductive.
I learned a long time ago that attempting to understand the innately irrational is a futile endeavor.
I don’t care what the excuse may be. The facts are sufficient to warrant harsh punishment.
Oh I don’t disagree with that at all. But then, I’m not somebody trying to squeeze this crime into any sort of overarching narrative that makes my political opponents basically murderers.
Jesse commenting on best journalistic practices is like me commenting on best baseball playing: all I know is what I see but much of what I say is naive or wrong, mostly because I don’t play the game, I don’t know how and why baseball players do what they do.
Same with Jesse. One way to tell Jesse is a bogus critic is his attack on a person’s character. In this case Ben Collins. Attacking character is gossip. The only basis for such gossip is that Collins does not act in a way satisfactory to Jesse Singal. That’s it. What other standard is applied? What professional or ethical code did Collins violate? I doubt Singal knows of such codes and how they apply.
Too bad people take him seriously.
I’m confused. Are you implying that Jesse Singal is does not understand the ethical standards of journalism? Whether you love Jesse or hate him, the fact that he is a professional journalist is pretty well established at this point.
Did you read the article? I think he was pretty clear about how Collins journalism was bad. He jumped to conclusions. He made the story about himself and fellow journalists rather than the facts of what happened, and he formed a grand narrative based on preexisting biases rather than reporting out the story. Does that clear it up for you?
Thanks. I did read Singal’s piece. I do not trust Singal to know bad journalism from good. Each fault of Collins you note here I find in Singal’s critique of Collins.
As I finished Singal’s piece I asked myself, “So what?” Was something revealed here that is important, other than Singal’s gripes with Collins’ coverage? I didn’t find anything.
I don't see any of those things in those piece, but you don't need to take Jesse's word for it. Do you think Collins' journalism on this is good? I have read it, I found it laughable.
> So what?
Super confused by this. I think good journalism is an end in itself and bad journalism driven by social media likes deserves to be called out. If we want to live in a society that has less incidents like this, we need people to do the hard work of finding out what actually happened so we can understand and learn from it. People like Collins who pretend to do that (but don't) actively make things worse. They trick people into believing society has easy answers and if you tweet the right hashtag then all our problems will be solved. Reality is messier. That's "so what".
Thanks for the reply.
Please don’t waste time being confused. I did not reply to persuade you. I wrote my observations. If you disagree, great. But I’m not writing a rebuttal or attempting a refutation, either of Singal’s essay or of your comments.
My three-plus decades in journalism ended right before social media became a tool journalists could use. I don’t know if you’re a journalist. Bless you, if you are. And I pray you have some standards that guide how you gather news and publish it.
I’m not a fan of journalists expressing personal views about subjects they’re covering. That said, I am not aware of the expectations placed on Collins by his bosses. I don’t know if his outlet has rules governing how he can engage on social media or how free he is to express his personal views. Before I crap in his hat, I would need to know if and how such facts and circumstances apply to the work of Collins and his colleagues.
Much has been published about the shooting and the aftermath. Does Collins’s work prevent anyone from learning the details of what happened and why?
As far as journalists bringing a lesson the readers, I am aware of at least two seriously conflicting views: those the LGBTQ community and those of anti-LGBTQ community. (Yes, this is a gross oversimplification.) Each community is going to take away its own lessons.
In my career, most journalists I knew realized nothing in life is simple. There are no simple answers to bigotry and to gun control. There is almost no way of preventing what happened. Despite the great efforts undertaken to show that to readers, many, maybe most, readers think simple answers exist.
If anyone ought to know how messy reality is, journalists ought to be first in line, right behind law enforcement and first responders. I doubt seriously Collins was trying to trick anyone. Most often, the bias readers think they find in journalists is really a reverse image of their own biases. There’s a name for it: confirmation bias. People accept as true news reporting that appeals to their biases. And they reject or recoil from news that appears to be in conflict with their points of view.
God bless.