Narratives Rather Than News

You may have noticed that I haven’t remarked on the murders in Atlanta last week. I thought they were horrible but this is not a news blog and I saw it as local news. Since the major news outlets have decided it’s national news and moreover apparently for the wrong reasons, I’ll comment now. Andrew Sullivan declaims that the outlets have let their preferred narratives replace the news:

Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.

Meanwhile at Reason.com Robby Soave documents just how the media got an important part of the story wrong:

A moment from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office press conference on Wednesday quickly went viral: Jay Baker, a spokesperson for the police department handling the investigation into the horrific Atlanta spa murders, said that suspect Robert Aaron Long was having a bad day.

“He was pretty much fed up, kind of at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did,” said Baker.

The comment struck many people as overly sympathetic toward Long, as if Baker was making excuses for someone who stands accused of killing eight Asian-American women in cold blood. A 20-second video clip of Baker’s statement was shared on Twitter by Vox journalist Aaron Rupar and swiftly went viral, earning widespread condemnation. Many saw it as evidence that cops are desperate to discount the culpability of white male criminals. For instance, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor and inventor of the term “intersectionality,” described Baker’s comments as “bone-chilling,” and castigated him for refusing to acknowledge “the misogynistic dimensions of anti-Asian racism.”

A police officer excusing Long’s actions as merely the result of him having a “bad day” would indeed be contemptible. But that’s not what Baker did. In fact, many of the people so infuriated about the quote were misled by Rupar’s edit of the video.

and includes this important observation:

It would be naive of the police—or the public, or anyone else—to accept what alleged killers say at face value. It’s similarly naive to assume that the sex and ethnicity of the victims tells us everything we need to know about the crime.

to which I would add that it is equally naive to decide that the race and gender of the perpetrator tells you everything you need to know about the crime.
The narrative is that

• Any crime perpetrated by a white man against anyone other than another white man must be motivated by racism and/or sexism.
• Police officers are racists and sexists.
• Only whites are capable of racism. And presumably only men can be guilty of sexism.

From that narrative the stories practically write themselves.

When I first heard about the story my immediate reaction was that prostitution can be a dangerous business. I have been acquainted with prostitutes socially in my early childhood (we lived down the street from a brothel) and in my young adulthood. I thought they were sad. But I also part ways with some libertarians. I think that prostitution foments abuse and human trafficking. That was my second reaction on hearing the story. I was unaware that brothels with Chinese, presumably, prostitutes were so common in Atlanta and wondered how many of the girls who had been murdered had been working off their debts.