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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Watch the whole story get memory-holed on the left/mainstream media now that the shooter IDs as enbie
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.
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.
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.
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.