You can’t win! As a nurse practitioner who has worked in mental health for low these many years you have the likes of ACLU arguing one’s right to autonomy vs families and communities begging for someone to take the reins of a situation to often leads to very bad outcomes. I stand with the courts, the first responders and the many folks who work day in and day out trying to provider a safe environment and health for everyone. I wonder if his family might speak up?
Recently a guy smashed a bunch of windows on a museum in Seattle’s Chinatown while yelling that the Chinese had ruined his life and he was going to get back at them. The estimated property damage costs were significant but not a single person was hurt. That guy is being charged with a hate crime, as of last reporting; the article did not even *touch* on the idea that mental illness might have motivated him, even though it seems screamingly obvious that lone wolf white supremacists don’t take sledgehammers to museums in broad daylight and then tell the police how the Chinese have always been conspiring against them. It didn’t even suggest that his motive may have been unclear or that more information would be forthcoming. Nope, he got charged with a hate crime, so it must have been pure, rational, logical racism.
I feel like I read a new article on the “mental health crisis” every two days, but journalists are still so goddamn scared to touch severe mental illness with a ten-foot pole.
Twitter has had a really pernicious effect on discussion of these issues. I've seen so many tweets that are like, "My friend has schizophrenia and HE'S NEVER SAID ANYTHING RACIST" *67,000 likes*. This seems like a bizarre way to approach it, instead of the inverse--racism is a sign of malfunctioning hardware.
Seen the same thing with dementia. Sure, half his brain has rotted away and turned to mush, and he thinks he's living in 1978 and driving his firebird on the moon, but that's no excuse for misgendering someone!! Spank grandpa or he won't learn!!
God I hate those kinds of messages. That or 'my autistic son is never inappropriate!'. Congratulations for you, but some people with mental illness or disabilities aren't quite as photogenic and cooperative.
Singal has written about this before. You’ve got it exactly backwards - it’s not “all political differences are mental illness” it’s “political topics are not immune from mental illness”.
Kanye is example one - Twitterati claiming “mental illness is no excuse for racism” as if no one’s mental illness ever resulted in them saying socially unacceptable things that involve race, politics, etc.
Did I say people with different political ideologies from mine are mentally Ill? Do you even know what my ‘political ideology’ is? Did I ‘diagnose’ any specific person? Do you actually read comments before responding to them?
If you say, "You know, we can't dismiss out of hand how much power Jews have on our culture, and it's reasonable to be wary," that's a political opinion. If you say, "The fucking Sorosbergs and Zuckerheims are SCREWING WITH THE WATER SUPPLY AND YOU FUCKING SHEEP WILL ALL DIE WITH THEM, JESUS IS THE LORD ALMIGHTY," then maybe we're just dealing with mental illness.
There are some people whom I am in a perfectly reasonable position to declare as mentally unwell. I think in some of those cases it's obtuse not to do so. "Well you just can't know, you're not a professional." No, dude. That guy is fucking crazy. Avoid him if you can't directly help him.
Same thing with the story a while ago where a homeless guy in a progressive district found his way into a restaurant in the morning before it opened for the day (it seems to have been unlocked). He promptly shat in the corner before wiping himself with what he almost certainly thought was a tablecloth, and then passed out.
Unfortunately for him, he did not receive the sympathy progressives typically believe is due an unhoused person, because rather than a tablecloth, he had in fact wiped his bum with one of their sacred multicolor polyester banners, which couldn't possibly be a drunken mistake - no, it is certain that this rough-sleeping bum Committed Hate Crime by intentionally tending to his soiled bung with said banner in the early-morning dark. Lock him up and throw the key in Mt Doom.
Honestly, moral of the story here is what we have unfortunately seen time and time again, and can apply to multiple other stories: journalists don't actually so any journalism anymore, and the first story is never the correct one as a consequence of the lack of journalisming journalists.
Do these people understand that literally anyone is capable of ripping off other news sources while sitting in a home office? You can coast for a while on presumption of necessity but these people are utterly replaceable by ChatGPT already. We are in desperate need of such a reckoning, so people stop thinking these parrots know anything about anything.
Their employers should require them to spend at least 2 days a week (or something) doing field interviews, stakeouts, or just man-on-the-streets. When you let people sit around the office ruminating & numinating 24/7 they get mentally and physically lazy - and it's even worse when you're allowing them to just rot away in their own homes. They need to Meet The People for more interesting, less-rehashed journalism, and for their own personal grounding.
It is heartbreaking watching this kind of story happen over and over again. Like with Britney Spears, mental illness is not an issue that is helped by public input.
Back when I was a newspaper editor, we treated stories like this or suicides (or, frankly, allegations of sexual assault) with a bias toward not reporting anything rather than reporting things that could make things worse for anyone involved.
It feels to me like in the post-metoo journalism landscape, news outlets are much too eager to overreport this kind of story.
This is largely my takeaway. I don't expect a lot from ESPN on reporting on somebody's potential mental illness... because that's not really their job.
The "news" here in the ESPN context is "Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Chandler Jones is unavailable indefinitely". Saying anything much more than that is veering away from "news" and towards "this is a thing that happened"--there is obviously broad overlap between these two categories, but they are not synonymous. In much the same way that some random one-off terrible thing that happened three states over may legitimately be a real thing that happened, and might even be reported on in an evenhanded and careful way, but for me it is not "news" per se. It's news for the locals. (statistics on random one-off terrible things might cross over back to "news")
This is distinct from me lazily saying "stick to sprots", which is commonly used when the speaker actually means "stop injecting nuance or making me feel uncomfortable".
Jesse, any plans to review the color blindness meta-analysis references in the Coleman Hughes FP post? Would love to get your take on it considering the conflicting interpretations.
Yeah, it'll depend how the next week goes but my rough plan is to do a quick diatribe about it first, and then, if I have time, a more substantive look at that dispute. [EDIT: quick, not quite!]
My impression, from having spent time as a patient in psych units and having been in therapy groups with mentally ill people, is that people who aren’t closely familiar with mental illness are terrible at recognizing when something might be a symptom of mental illness. Sure, they’ll probably recognize there’s a mental health issue when some homeless guy is talking to himself. A regular seeming employed guy or celebrity posting amped up semi-incoherent nonsense on Instagram or having some weird sort of public meltdown? The average person seems way less likely to think there might be mental illness involved. Explanations like “he just gets a little worked up sometimes, he’s a dumbass, he’s just an out of touch celebrity, I can’t believe they would send him to the hospital like that,” etc. etc. get tossed around. Obviously, not every case of weird behavior, strange Instagram posting, or public meltdown is caused by mental illness. But given the reactions I’ve seen to this type of stuff, whether celebrities or people I’ve known personally, I think the most people have a very poor understanding of how something like a manic episode or schizophrenia can cause someone to act. These kind of news stories that don’t put things in context do a huge disservice to readers and contribute to public’s misunderstandings about mental illness.
The responses to Jones’ tweet https://twitter.com/chanjones55/status/1706484455614103957 are actually a lot better than I expected, plenty of stuff like “listen to your loved ones” or “praying for you” but there are also quite a few people who seem to think The Raiders are responsible or that Jones should file a lawsuit about the matter. These kinds of news stories deserve some of the blame for the kind of reactions.
Journalists not doing their job seems to be the norm these days. It's a great time to be making one's living pointing out all the ways that journalism sucks.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that a self-interested party with enough clout could orchestrate an unwarranted involuntary commitment (maybe I've seen too many movies with this plot point). But if you're going to allege that this is what happened, you'd better have at least a reasonable hypothesis as to why someone would do this.
Credulous fanboys (and -girls, though I can't imagine there are many) will stand up for the most ludicrous accusations and assertions from their heroes ... who typically are people they've never met, and therefore have no good reason to so vigorously support. Exhibit A: Donald Trump.
People who know little about mental illness should read up on "anosognosia," an extremely common attribute of people with mental illness or dementia:
"Anosognosia is a neurological condition in which the patient is unaware of their neurological deficit or psychiatric condition. It is associated with mental illness, dementia, and structural brain lesion, as is seen in right hemisphere stroke patients. It can affect the patient’s conscious awareness of deficits involving judgment, emotions, memory, executive function, language skills, and motor ability."
Yes, there are instances of fraudulent or malicious detainment of people who are not, in fact, experiencing a mental-health crisis. But they are exceedingly rare compared to the rate of anosognosia in people with mental illness or dementia.
In medicine, the saying is, "If you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras." If you have a football player acting erratically, think traumatic brain injury, not elaborate conspiracy.
Right now, we lack even the baseline shared understanding that zebras are less common than horses.
In today’s media environment, given the wildly disproportionate and sensational coverage, many average Joe viewers would choose the conspiracy as the “most likely” answer, because that’s how we have been conditioned.
Depressingly true. The American mind continues its speedy devolution. Instead of a fourth estate that investigates, the media environment (good phrase) is dedicated to soaking its audience in cognitive errors, fantasies, and emotional blackmail. Too many news sites bombard their audience with so many flashing, moving ads that their articles are literally impossible to read. Bizarre to think that today's "journalism" is now an agent of illiteracy. There was a time when writers as uncompromising as Joan Didion were mainstream journalists.
This is a great example of how the religious fundamentalist view of race on the Left, as described by folks like John McWhorter, biases coverage.
OBVIOUSLY without knowing the hearts and minds of the reporters behind these articles, it is very likely they subscribe to the view that America is a systematically racist country, so when reporting on a story about a rich and famous person like this, all class nuance is elided in favor of the simplistic explanation: he's black, the owners are white, this is basically chattle slavery all over again. Contract disputes are a seasonal thing in the NFL, there have been other players who have sat out this year who didn't get committed to a mental facility (Chris Jones of the KC Chiefs, for example). What's the difference in Chandler Jones' case? Is it possible he is ACTUALLY having a mental crisis and is in danger? Is it possible all these people, from the Raiders leadership to the police to the Fire Dept, are acting in his best interest as they understand it?
*Kmele Foster code-switch*
Nah, he just a black man in AmeriKKKa.
Coverage like this of sad cases and complex situations is not some kind of conspiracy, it's just the end result of a ton of people approaching the situation with the exact same priors. The same way if journalism were dominated by Conservative Christians, we'd see coverage biased in different ways ("Local Man Reports Satanic Temple Sacrificing Babies," with nary a comment from the ST).
What journalists really need to do is Do the Work, understand their own biases, and recommit to ASPIRING to be objective. Which means approaching a situation like this and wondering what happened.
The point is ‘when predominantly leftist journalists who demonstrably subscribe to leftist ideas about race write about situations involving people of color and government/corporate power dynamics, this lens skews the story in a predictable direction.’
I had not even considered the (very good) point Jesse is making about the media coverage because it seemed so obvious to me that even a simple recapping of what Jones is saying demonstrates he is in some kind of mental health crisis. It didn't even occur to me--a very progressive person absolutely inclined to believe the worst about the police and the nexus of our carceral and mental health systems--that Jones' allegations should be taken at face value. I mean he's saying some pretty wild shit in a pretty clearly disordered way. So I completely agree with Jesse that providing the legal context is necessary and useful, but I am a bit less concerned that there's tons of people who are assuming Jones is perfectly okay and he got kidnapped by the police for no reason. I'm sure some people do think that, but they aren't the ones who are likely to be swayed by a more cautious journalistic approach anyways.
Not enough space in a twitter post or a 15-second sound bite to include the nuance you discuss, so it ain't happening. Won't appear on their "articles" either because the average "reader" today has an attention span of about 10 seconds, and nuance = bored = click away. As we return to a world in which the general public is not really literate in the strict sense - that is, not fluently, effortlessly able to read without intentionally focusing - this kind of thing will only get worse. Literate people in search of nuance will go elsewhere for news, and pig people will continue to be pigs whether pearls or poops are cast before them.
In less cynical terms, I assert that decreasing nuance & precision in reporting is a downstream consequence of decreasing literacy & shortened attention span in the consumer of reporting.
I agree that at least some media coverage of Clement Jones’ troubles has been motivated by the search for “click-bait.” Certainly his accusations should not be taken as gospel.
But do reporters really have some kind of duty to assume that Jones’ forced hospitalization was medically necessary, or that he was a genuine “danger to himself or others”? Should they offer us “context” from experts who know nothing about Jones’ case, but stand ready to reassure the public that if the authorities have taken these measures, there must be a sound reason?
Hell no. Because there is not always a sound reason, and doctors do not always know best. Especially when a private for-profit behavioral health hospital like Seven Hills (and its owners, the scandal-plagued Acadia Healthcare chain) are involved. And when the story also involves a city police department, a large Black male subject rumored to be acting strangely, and an employer-employee conflict that runs to seven figures at least, trust in the authorities is not a good reflex for journalists.
Over the past dozen years, a truly appalling record has emerged of private behavioral health chains holding patients against their will for financial gain. A string of lawsuits, state health investigations and hospital closures have resulted. And some of the best damn journalistic work of the past decade has been responsible for exposing it.
I won’t drown you in links – but please Google the Seattle Times series on US HealthVest; Denver7 ABC News’ Clear View-Strategic Behavioral investigation; the Montana Standard’s exposes of Acadia’s youth-treatment centers; and the exemplary work by WFSU and the Palm Beach Post on mounting abuses of Florida’s Baker Act. And check out Rosalind Adams’ award-winning work on how Universal Health Services converted involuntary holds into a business strategy (possibly BuzzFeed's finest hour):
The Covid-19 pandemic (not to mention the youth gender transition crisis) have taught us some hard lessons about responsible reporting, medical experts and “what the science says.” No reporter should speculate or spin conspiracy theories based on Clement Jones’ allegations. But they have an obligation to report what is known thus far – not to withhold it from the public “for our own good.”
I think you missed the point. If you have a responsibility to report what is known so far, you also have an obligation to report what is not known. You can't know what you know if you're not aware of what you don't know. Leaping to conclusions based on partial, premature, possibly false info leads to distortion of reality. How does distortion help anyone?
You're right, of course: No one should leap to conclusions or distort reality. However, that was NOT Jesse's objection. He pointed out that so far no one had come forward to refute Clement Jones' version of events (maybe in part because of patient privacy concerns). The press had not endorsed his complaints, much less jumped to the conclusion that Jones was right, or that the cops or the hospital were in cahoots his employer. They simply reported his complaints.
Jesse felt they should refrain from doing even that--because simply transmitting what Clement Jones was saying would somehow "amplify" his allegations. In effect, he argued that "responsible" journalists should suppress the information, unless and until "context" was available, to protect the public from being "misled."
And what would that context be, at this early stage? Apparently, some general remarks from Trusted Experts about how awful mental illness can be, and how it is sometimes necessary to restrain sufferers for their own good, if certain strict criteria are met. (And, apparently, how those criteria surely must be scrupulously respected in almost every case, by just about every cop and healthcare provider in the land.)
In the absence of any new information about what actually went down that night, that would not provide "context." It would simply instruct us as to what All Decent, Well-Educated People are morally obligated to think. That is just as wrong in the extremely fraught context of American psychiatry as it is in the realm of pandemic school closures or youth gender transition. (Not to mention in the context of for-profit healthcare, big-city policing or NFL football.)
The press is free to offer such sermons, of course -- but they should not self-censor, or suppress the statements of one party, until a first-class sermon from "the other side" is made available. And they definitely should not assume that "of course" Mr. Jones is mentally ill, and "of course" his version of events is therefore wrong and constitutes "misinformation." We. Don't. Know.
Like Jesse, I am appalled by the refusal of the "responsible" press to report the experiences of young people who reverse or regret their medical gender transitions. (Based on the assumption that "of course" these folks are either mentally unstable, or shills for the right wing, and therefore "of course" their version of events must be wrong.) However, this is not a new phenomenon. When it comes to suppressing dissenting views, the American medical establishment wrote the book. We need to retain our objectivity, independence and basic curiosity. Especially where psychiatry is concerned.
You can’t win! As a nurse practitioner who has worked in mental health for low these many years you have the likes of ACLU arguing one’s right to autonomy vs families and communities begging for someone to take the reins of a situation to often leads to very bad outcomes. I stand with the courts, the first responders and the many folks who work day in and day out trying to provider a safe environment and health for everyone. I wonder if his family might speak up?
Recently a guy smashed a bunch of windows on a museum in Seattle’s Chinatown while yelling that the Chinese had ruined his life and he was going to get back at them. The estimated property damage costs were significant but not a single person was hurt. That guy is being charged with a hate crime, as of last reporting; the article did not even *touch* on the idea that mental illness might have motivated him, even though it seems screamingly obvious that lone wolf white supremacists don’t take sledgehammers to museums in broad daylight and then tell the police how the Chinese have always been conspiring against them. It didn’t even suggest that his motive may have been unclear or that more information would be forthcoming. Nope, he got charged with a hate crime, so it must have been pure, rational, logical racism.
I feel like I read a new article on the “mental health crisis” every two days, but journalists are still so goddamn scared to touch severe mental illness with a ten-foot pole.
Twitter has had a really pernicious effect on discussion of these issues. I've seen so many tweets that are like, "My friend has schizophrenia and HE'S NEVER SAID ANYTHING RACIST" *67,000 likes*. This seems like a bizarre way to approach it, instead of the inverse--racism is a sign of malfunctioning hardware.
Seen the same thing with dementia. Sure, half his brain has rotted away and turned to mush, and he thinks he's living in 1978 and driving his firebird on the moon, but that's no excuse for misgendering someone!! Spank grandpa or he won't learn!!
God I hate those kinds of messages. That or 'my autistic son is never inappropriate!'. Congratulations for you, but some people with mental illness or disabilities aren't quite as photogenic and cooperative.
Singal has written about this before. You’ve got it exactly backwards - it’s not “all political differences are mental illness” it’s “political topics are not immune from mental illness”.
Kanye is example one - Twitterati claiming “mental illness is no excuse for racism” as if no one’s mental illness ever resulted in them saying socially unacceptable things that involve race, politics, etc.
Did I say people with different political ideologies from mine are mentally Ill? Do you even know what my ‘political ideology’ is? Did I ‘diagnose’ any specific person? Do you actually read comments before responding to them?
If you say, "You know, we can't dismiss out of hand how much power Jews have on our culture, and it's reasonable to be wary," that's a political opinion. If you say, "The fucking Sorosbergs and Zuckerheims are SCREWING WITH THE WATER SUPPLY AND YOU FUCKING SHEEP WILL ALL DIE WITH THEM, JESUS IS THE LORD ALMIGHTY," then maybe we're just dealing with mental illness.
There are some people whom I am in a perfectly reasonable position to declare as mentally unwell. I think in some of those cases it's obtuse not to do so. "Well you just can't know, you're not a professional." No, dude. That guy is fucking crazy. Avoid him if you can't directly help him.
Same thing with the story a while ago where a homeless guy in a progressive district found his way into a restaurant in the morning before it opened for the day (it seems to have been unlocked). He promptly shat in the corner before wiping himself with what he almost certainly thought was a tablecloth, and then passed out.
Unfortunately for him, he did not receive the sympathy progressives typically believe is due an unhoused person, because rather than a tablecloth, he had in fact wiped his bum with one of their sacred multicolor polyester banners, which couldn't possibly be a drunken mistake - no, it is certain that this rough-sleeping bum Committed Hate Crime by intentionally tending to his soiled bung with said banner in the early-morning dark. Lock him up and throw the key in Mt Doom.
Honestly, moral of the story here is what we have unfortunately seen time and time again, and can apply to multiple other stories: journalists don't actually so any journalism anymore, and the first story is never the correct one as a consequence of the lack of journalisming journalists.
Do these people understand that literally anyone is capable of ripping off other news sources while sitting in a home office? You can coast for a while on presumption of necessity but these people are utterly replaceable by ChatGPT already. We are in desperate need of such a reckoning, so people stop thinking these parrots know anything about anything.
Their employers should require them to spend at least 2 days a week (or something) doing field interviews, stakeouts, or just man-on-the-streets. When you let people sit around the office ruminating & numinating 24/7 they get mentally and physically lazy - and it's even worse when you're allowing them to just rot away in their own homes. They need to Meet The People for more interesting, less-rehashed journalism, and for their own personal grounding.
It is heartbreaking watching this kind of story happen over and over again. Like with Britney Spears, mental illness is not an issue that is helped by public input.
Back when I was a newspaper editor, we treated stories like this or suicides (or, frankly, allegations of sexual assault) with a bias toward not reporting anything rather than reporting things that could make things worse for anyone involved.
It feels to me like in the post-metoo journalism landscape, news outlets are much too eager to overreport this kind of story.
This is largely my takeaway. I don't expect a lot from ESPN on reporting on somebody's potential mental illness... because that's not really their job.
The "news" here in the ESPN context is "Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Chandler Jones is unavailable indefinitely". Saying anything much more than that is veering away from "news" and towards "this is a thing that happened"--there is obviously broad overlap between these two categories, but they are not synonymous. In much the same way that some random one-off terrible thing that happened three states over may legitimately be a real thing that happened, and might even be reported on in an evenhanded and careful way, but for me it is not "news" per se. It's news for the locals. (statistics on random one-off terrible things might cross over back to "news")
This is distinct from me lazily saying "stick to sprots", which is commonly used when the speaker actually means "stop injecting nuance or making me feel uncomfortable".
Jesse, any plans to review the color blindness meta-analysis references in the Coleman Hughes FP post? Would love to get your take on it considering the conflicting interpretations.
Yeah, it'll depend how the next week goes but my rough plan is to do a quick diatribe about it first, and then, if I have time, a more substantive look at that dispute. [EDIT: quick, not quite!]
My impression, from having spent time as a patient in psych units and having been in therapy groups with mentally ill people, is that people who aren’t closely familiar with mental illness are terrible at recognizing when something might be a symptom of mental illness. Sure, they’ll probably recognize there’s a mental health issue when some homeless guy is talking to himself. A regular seeming employed guy or celebrity posting amped up semi-incoherent nonsense on Instagram or having some weird sort of public meltdown? The average person seems way less likely to think there might be mental illness involved. Explanations like “he just gets a little worked up sometimes, he’s a dumbass, he’s just an out of touch celebrity, I can’t believe they would send him to the hospital like that,” etc. etc. get tossed around. Obviously, not every case of weird behavior, strange Instagram posting, or public meltdown is caused by mental illness. But given the reactions I’ve seen to this type of stuff, whether celebrities or people I’ve known personally, I think the most people have a very poor understanding of how something like a manic episode or schizophrenia can cause someone to act. These kind of news stories that don’t put things in context do a huge disservice to readers and contribute to public’s misunderstandings about mental illness.
The responses to Jones’ tweet https://twitter.com/chanjones55/status/1706484455614103957 are actually a lot better than I expected, plenty of stuff like “listen to your loved ones” or “praying for you” but there are also quite a few people who seem to think The Raiders are responsible or that Jones should file a lawsuit about the matter. These kinds of news stories deserve some of the blame for the kind of reactions.
Journalists not doing their job seems to be the norm these days. It's a great time to be making one's living pointing out all the ways that journalism sucks.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that a self-interested party with enough clout could orchestrate an unwarranted involuntary commitment (maybe I've seen too many movies with this plot point). But if you're going to allege that this is what happened, you'd better have at least a reasonable hypothesis as to why someone would do this.
Credulous fanboys (and -girls, though I can't imagine there are many) will stand up for the most ludicrous accusations and assertions from their heroes ... who typically are people they've never met, and therefore have no good reason to so vigorously support. Exhibit A: Donald Trump.
People who know little about mental illness should read up on "anosognosia," an extremely common attribute of people with mental illness or dementia:
"Anosognosia is a neurological condition in which the patient is unaware of their neurological deficit or psychiatric condition. It is associated with mental illness, dementia, and structural brain lesion, as is seen in right hemisphere stroke patients. It can affect the patient’s conscious awareness of deficits involving judgment, emotions, memory, executive function, language skills, and motor ability."
Yes, there are instances of fraudulent or malicious detainment of people who are not, in fact, experiencing a mental-health crisis. But they are exceedingly rare compared to the rate of anosognosia in people with mental illness or dementia.
In medicine, the saying is, "If you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras." If you have a football player acting erratically, think traumatic brain injury, not elaborate conspiracy.
Right now, we lack even the baseline shared understanding that zebras are less common than horses.
In today’s media environment, given the wildly disproportionate and sensational coverage, many average Joe viewers would choose the conspiracy as the “most likely” answer, because that’s how we have been conditioned.
Depressingly true. The American mind continues its speedy devolution. Instead of a fourth estate that investigates, the media environment (good phrase) is dedicated to soaking its audience in cognitive errors, fantasies, and emotional blackmail. Too many news sites bombard their audience with so many flashing, moving ads that their articles are literally impossible to read. Bizarre to think that today's "journalism" is now an agent of illiteracy. There was a time when writers as uncompromising as Joan Didion were mainstream journalists.
This is a great example of how the religious fundamentalist view of race on the Left, as described by folks like John McWhorter, biases coverage.
OBVIOUSLY without knowing the hearts and minds of the reporters behind these articles, it is very likely they subscribe to the view that America is a systematically racist country, so when reporting on a story about a rich and famous person like this, all class nuance is elided in favor of the simplistic explanation: he's black, the owners are white, this is basically chattle slavery all over again. Contract disputes are a seasonal thing in the NFL, there have been other players who have sat out this year who didn't get committed to a mental facility (Chris Jones of the KC Chiefs, for example). What's the difference in Chandler Jones' case? Is it possible he is ACTUALLY having a mental crisis and is in danger? Is it possible all these people, from the Raiders leadership to the police to the Fire Dept, are acting in his best interest as they understand it?
*Kmele Foster code-switch*
Nah, he just a black man in AmeriKKKa.
Coverage like this of sad cases and complex situations is not some kind of conspiracy, it's just the end result of a ton of people approaching the situation with the exact same priors. The same way if journalism were dominated by Conservative Christians, we'd see coverage biased in different ways ("Local Man Reports Satanic Temple Sacrificing Babies," with nary a comment from the ST).
What journalists really need to do is Do the Work, understand their own biases, and recommit to ASPIRING to be objective. Which means approaching a situation like this and wondering what happened.
Did I say it was mentioned anywhere? I don’t think you understood my point
The point is ‘when predominantly leftist journalists who demonstrably subscribe to leftist ideas about race write about situations involving people of color and government/corporate power dynamics, this lens skews the story in a predictable direction.’
I had not even considered the (very good) point Jesse is making about the media coverage because it seemed so obvious to me that even a simple recapping of what Jones is saying demonstrates he is in some kind of mental health crisis. It didn't even occur to me--a very progressive person absolutely inclined to believe the worst about the police and the nexus of our carceral and mental health systems--that Jones' allegations should be taken at face value. I mean he's saying some pretty wild shit in a pretty clearly disordered way. So I completely agree with Jesse that providing the legal context is necessary and useful, but I am a bit less concerned that there's tons of people who are assuming Jones is perfectly okay and he got kidnapped by the police for no reason. I'm sure some people do think that, but they aren't the ones who are likely to be swayed by a more cautious journalistic approach anyways.
Do the laws of any state permit involuntary holds for people who are annoying? Asking for a friend.
Not enough space in a twitter post or a 15-second sound bite to include the nuance you discuss, so it ain't happening. Won't appear on their "articles" either because the average "reader" today has an attention span of about 10 seconds, and nuance = bored = click away. As we return to a world in which the general public is not really literate in the strict sense - that is, not fluently, effortlessly able to read without intentionally focusing - this kind of thing will only get worse. Literate people in search of nuance will go elsewhere for news, and pig people will continue to be pigs whether pearls or poops are cast before them.
In less cynical terms, I assert that decreasing nuance & precision in reporting is a downstream consequence of decreasing literacy & shortened attention span in the consumer of reporting.
He's been arrested.
https://www.tmz.com/2023/09/29/chandler-jones-arrested-las-vegas-raiders/
I agree that at least some media coverage of Clement Jones’ troubles has been motivated by the search for “click-bait.” Certainly his accusations should not be taken as gospel.
But do reporters really have some kind of duty to assume that Jones’ forced hospitalization was medically necessary, or that he was a genuine “danger to himself or others”? Should they offer us “context” from experts who know nothing about Jones’ case, but stand ready to reassure the public that if the authorities have taken these measures, there must be a sound reason?
Hell no. Because there is not always a sound reason, and doctors do not always know best. Especially when a private for-profit behavioral health hospital like Seven Hills (and its owners, the scandal-plagued Acadia Healthcare chain) are involved. And when the story also involves a city police department, a large Black male subject rumored to be acting strangely, and an employer-employee conflict that runs to seven figures at least, trust in the authorities is not a good reflex for journalists.
Over the past dozen years, a truly appalling record has emerged of private behavioral health chains holding patients against their will for financial gain. A string of lawsuits, state health investigations and hospital closures have resulted. And some of the best damn journalistic work of the past decade has been responsible for exposing it.
I won’t drown you in links – but please Google the Seattle Times series on US HealthVest; Denver7 ABC News’ Clear View-Strategic Behavioral investigation; the Montana Standard’s exposes of Acadia’s youth-treatment centers; and the exemplary work by WFSU and the Palm Beach Post on mounting abuses of Florida’s Baker Act. And check out Rosalind Adams’ award-winning work on how Universal Health Services converted involuntary holds into a business strategy (possibly BuzzFeed's finest hour):
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/intake#.yed8qm4wz
The Covid-19 pandemic (not to mention the youth gender transition crisis) have taught us some hard lessons about responsible reporting, medical experts and “what the science says.” No reporter should speculate or spin conspiracy theories based on Clement Jones’ allegations. But they have an obligation to report what is known thus far – not to withhold it from the public “for our own good.”
I think you missed the point. If you have a responsibility to report what is known so far, you also have an obligation to report what is not known. You can't know what you know if you're not aware of what you don't know. Leaping to conclusions based on partial, premature, possibly false info leads to distortion of reality. How does distortion help anyone?
You're right, of course: No one should leap to conclusions or distort reality. However, that was NOT Jesse's objection. He pointed out that so far no one had come forward to refute Clement Jones' version of events (maybe in part because of patient privacy concerns). The press had not endorsed his complaints, much less jumped to the conclusion that Jones was right, or that the cops or the hospital were in cahoots his employer. They simply reported his complaints.
Jesse felt they should refrain from doing even that--because simply transmitting what Clement Jones was saying would somehow "amplify" his allegations. In effect, he argued that "responsible" journalists should suppress the information, unless and until "context" was available, to protect the public from being "misled."
And what would that context be, at this early stage? Apparently, some general remarks from Trusted Experts about how awful mental illness can be, and how it is sometimes necessary to restrain sufferers for their own good, if certain strict criteria are met. (And, apparently, how those criteria surely must be scrupulously respected in almost every case, by just about every cop and healthcare provider in the land.)
In the absence of any new information about what actually went down that night, that would not provide "context." It would simply instruct us as to what All Decent, Well-Educated People are morally obligated to think. That is just as wrong in the extremely fraught context of American psychiatry as it is in the realm of pandemic school closures or youth gender transition. (Not to mention in the context of for-profit healthcare, big-city policing or NFL football.)
The press is free to offer such sermons, of course -- but they should not self-censor, or suppress the statements of one party, until a first-class sermon from "the other side" is made available. And they definitely should not assume that "of course" Mr. Jones is mentally ill, and "of course" his version of events is therefore wrong and constitutes "misinformation." We. Don't. Know.
Like Jesse, I am appalled by the refusal of the "responsible" press to report the experiences of young people who reverse or regret their medical gender transitions. (Based on the assumption that "of course" these folks are either mentally unstable, or shills for the right wing, and therefore "of course" their version of events must be wrong.) However, this is not a new phenomenon. When it comes to suppressing dissenting views, the American medical establishment wrote the book. We need to retain our objectivity, independence and basic curiosity. Especially where psychiatry is concerned.