First, the backstory: On October 11, the Daily Wire published a story about a May 28 rape at a high school in Loudoun County, Virginia. The gist was that a male student who presented as a girl had entered the girl's bathroom, where he raped a female student. As it turned out, the initial story made a lot of mistakes, though it also pointed out some genuine problems. So why was the whole incident invisible for so long? Ben Smith quotes Jen Monroe, who wrote a followup story about the incident:
This is so very often true: "A right-wing outlet let ideology motivate their reporting, while the mainstream media couldn't be bothered to report on it in the first place." https://t.co/K28iTCb5Eg
— Ben Smith (@benyt) October 29, 2021
I want to take the opposite side of this. This is a story that had no place in the national spotlight to begin with. It's a local story. The real problem is that when they're politically useful, local stories are routinely blown up onto the national stage these days. Social media has a lot to do with this.¹
One of the mechanical reasons for this is that media in the past had word limits. TV news was 30 minutes long. Newspapers were only as big as advertising allowed. Magazines had set page limits. Local stories from around the country might get blurbs on page A34, but only rarely did they truly become national stories.
Needless to say, the advent of unfettered talk radio, 24-hour cable news, and the internet shattered those limits. Today, reporters see a few hundred people griping about something on Twitter and decide it must be a trend. Political players on both sides are constantly on the lookout for minor local stories that are likely to inflame their audience—and in a country of 300 million they're guaranteed to find plenty.
I don't think there's really anything we can do about this. It's just life in the 21st century. Nevertheless, let's get the diagnosis right. It's not that the national media ignores vital local stories. It's that the national media is more and more dragged into paying attention to trivial local stories.
POSTSCRIPT: The original Daily Wire story is here. Jen Monroe's followup story (linked in the tweet above) is here. Another, more detailed story by Jon Ward is here.
¹See? I can come up with negative aspects of social media too. I just don't think social media is uniformly horrific.
Sigh. This brings up another gripe I have. We don’t have to sink to the level of the Trumpers, but it would be nice to get somebody on the liberal payroll who can market to the dumb.
You see, the Repubs have no trouble at all pushing arguments that are so flawed and have no factual support, because they know plenty of their voters are stone idiots.
And, as we illustrate daily here, logical arguments made to idiots get us nowhere.
It’s almost like we don’t want the dumb vote- I don’t get it. There are plenty of nice dumb people out there who are not racists, not out to burn the planet, or infect thier own grandma, or intentionally have houses built which are structurally unsound. But we need to remember such people do not even read, let alone read this blog or the NYT.
The hack gap.
but it would be nice to get somebody on the liberal payroll who can market to the dumb.
There is. His name is David Shor. His advice isn't very often appreciated, though, from what I can see.
I thought you were going to say Sen. LooGAR.
" I just don't think social media is uniformly horrific."
Kevin, no one thinks that. What a weird, obvious, strawman to throw up. People's complaints about social media are pretty well documented and specific with regard to the companies and behaviors that are objected to.
The last link in particular seems to include a number of details of import.
What it says is,
In other words, exactly what Republicans insist isn't really rape at all.
And the boy says that he was wearing a skirt, does not say why.
Why or not the facts of the incident highlight that the Democrats are making an enormous error in willy nilly adopting the extrme positions of Transexual activists broadly and most particularly for schools with adolescents as students.
Adults is quite another matter, but the cultural but also the practical issues (adolesents., teenagers) of sensitivity rather make this a stupid thing for them to do. Teenagers are not generally known for good judgement and rather known for fucking with the system because, well, they are teenagers with raging hormones, as of yet not fully developed "executive function"
Never mind the sensitivity of parents.
It would be rather wiser to walk slowly.
I certainly agree in regard most US high schools. There are some places where a transgender student wouldn't have a worse time than ordinary in high school, but in the high school I went to, some decades ago now, they'd have been lucky not to get assaulted or near killed on a daily basis.
There is almost nothing that could flip out the social conservative imagination more than transgender people and throwing that in on top of the general conflict they cause around all issues of education and civil rights is like trying to attract sharks to the beach on purpose. Tennessee recently passed a law, blocked in court, that would require businesses to post signs outside public restrooms warning the public a transgender person might be lurking within. What effect could that possibly have?
It is self-deception to think this is merely a subject of "conservatives" in a political sense.
While the cultural Left has adopted in a short span the precepts of a fringe activist minority as The Truth, it is by no means a right wing position in itself to not be blindly on-board with that. As various high profile media kerfuffles involving not-otherwise right-wing personalities rather reflects.
But the point was not about High Schools being dangerous or not to X type of kids but the very nature of teenage years and acting out, and the structural quetionability of the appropriateness of applying adult precepts to a set of teenagers - both in the finality and in being blind to teenagers rather well known (not yet mature 'executive function') judgment issues to applying 'presenting' as and such in the same fashion as adults. Willful blindness to the almost inevitable problems.
This a subject separate from treatment of adults, and of course their rights.
I'm sadden to see you are okay with Trans hate. It's not extremist to want to protect gender fluid school kids. I've had the privilege of knowing some great wonderful trans people - normal everyday students and working class folks. They just want to be able to be safe, go to the bathroom and not be fired from a job just because they are trans.
Jordan Catalano has entered the chat.
(Yes, it was a teevee show, but so was Murphy Brown.)
I used to think that way, quite some time ago, about equal marriage, adoption by same-sex couples, etc. I trained as a research psychologist, and thought we ought to move slowly with such bold social changes. But I realized that people have to live their lives in the meantime; and that the same arguments had been made against civil-rights legislation and the ERA.
Given the strong feelings about trans and gender-non-conforming individuals, I can’t imagine that there would be any great number of high-schoolers who would present as such for a lark, or to tweak adults. (If there are any, they will find any number of ways to aggravate school staff.) So I’m with HokieAnnie - this a human-rights issue. If we want our children to become adults in a diverse, pluralistic, tolerant, free society, we should not unnecessarily restrict teens’ rights.
How much you want to bet these two high schoolers are Yung GQPers fabricating the externally-genitalled individual's trans status & the alleged assault to create the panic the GQP claims will come of men in the ladies restroom?
The irony of irrational Just So to Justify Political Knee Jerking Conspiracy Mongering in response to the same. Mirror images.
Is Ashley Todd chopped liver?
I live in Northern VA, the story DOES stink of being a stunt, aka too good to check. The facts involve a consensual relationship with an allegation of non-consensual sexual assault per court documents. No evidence whatsoever beyond the assertion by the father of the girl who is a GOP political activist talking GOP talking points that the boy was wearing a skirt and was gender fluid.
The GOP thinks this new flavor of Nixon's Southern Strategy will bring them success. We'll see - this is the first year Virginia has allowed early voting, so votes have been banked since late September - could be that the late GOP surge is not successful.
Insha-Hala Ayala.
🙂
When the national spotlight was on the topic of gender identity and whether hewing to one view would lead (or not) to certain events we had various folks making claims and counter claims about this will lead to X or that will not lead to X.
This story, while one you assert should have remained that way, would seem to be providing a datapoint to inform that debate.
Except that it doesn't provide a datapoint at all once the story is known in all its particulars.
The "story" is that a girl invited her boyfriend to meet her in the female toilets, where they had had sex on at least two previous occasions. When she refused this time, he sexually assaulted her, horny 15 year-old boys not always grasping the concept of "No means no".
If they'd been having it off in a linen closet instead, it wouldn't even have made the local news.
I was thinking along those lines until I read Jon Ward’s piece. By his account, the school did not have a bathroom-use policy; only began to discuss one in a meeting nearly a month after the incident. No assertion that the boy was attempting to present as female. If he was just trying to be less conspicuous sneaking into a girls’ restroom, it’s a reminder that that is always a possible subterfuge regardless of policy.
The real issues are definitely local: the sheriff says he notified a school official of the arrest and charging of the juvenile, the superintendent says there was no notice, which would have allowed suspension or expulsion. Why is there no documentation in a matter of this importance? Why did school officials not follow up more actively? The superintendent acknowledges the need for improved procedures. It may be that some of the lessons learned would be useful to school administrators across the country, and for that a means of dissemination is needed. But that means should not be the the media.
The problem is the closing of local newsrooms. Fewer actual reporters, fewer articles, so grab them from across the country....and then you don't have to worry about checking them before printing.
Add to the mix--local news not locally owned and must run articles will then pop up.
FYI: Phrases such as "below the fold" have no meaning anymore--few people read newspapers on paper.
Thank you, the firehose of disinfo is overpowering the attempts to put out the truth. The death of local news is as big a factor in the state of affairs as is Fox News, Facebook and the like.
The movement of advertising from print to the internet, the consolidation of retail outlets, and the subsidizing of print content by online ads and subscriptions are factors in addition to those Kevin cites.
In the old days the pages of the Post and Times were filled with print ads, full page ads from the major department stores, the car manufacturers, and also smaller ads from smaller outlets and corporations.
I noticed today in the 24-page A section of my Times, there were 3 full page ads, one from Google, one from a Whisky festival, and one for doctors, plus 2 sets of ads running 1/3 of the page--one of which was devoted to the virtures of the Times, and 1 miscellaneous. So 20+pages devoted to content. I'd guess in 1990 the ratio of content to ads would not be 5 to 1 but 1 to 3.
Good post but is there a solution? Unplug the internet? My wife and I stopped watching local TV news 25 years ago and we benefited from that.
Not sure I can stop watching the internet.
Why is Kevin commenting on this old stuff? There is only one story that should be dominating discussion today: five dopey-looking people stood outside a bus in Virginia holding tiki torches. And it was a hoax! The implications of this are profound, not only for Tuesday's election of a governor but for the whole Biden presidency. Lots of people are saying so.
It was the Lincoln Project that did the asinine stunt. It never made the news in on the DC stations. The bigger factor IMO is the GOP trying to scare parent with CRT, Transphobia and liberal commies running the school.
Just taking a flyer here, but maybe kenalovell was missing a /s tag …
I enjoy KKKlay Travis identifying the Lincolneers as Democrats.
I have a feeling, outside of Sarah Palin's Training Wheels*, that the LP dudes would cotton to that appellation.
*Steve Schmidt.
*not cotton
When I saw the headline, I thought the posting would be making a point about the obsessive coverage of that "Gabby" person, which dominated the headlines for what seems like forever. Is it over yet?
As far as the "transsexual" issue goes, it seems like Americans are being pushed to choose between "trans demonization" and "trans domination", neither of which are particularly appealing. What ever happened to "tolerance"? You know, where you don't have to approve of something, but you're not going to let it make you crazy? Can't people go back to being obsessed with normal things, like their cactus collections, cats, children, and favorite teevie shows?
The horse has left the barn due in no small part to the outrage whurlitzer - like gay marriage in a previous decade nefarious people are scapegoating trans people to the point that they are apparently a threat to the very foundations of White Christian America.
My hope is that it will eventually go the way of gay marriage where enough stories of normal trans folks will seep into the public consciousness that they will be accepted members of society.
Well, I hope so. I have zero interest in obsessive discussions of each person's "gender" and "sexuality", "sexual preferences" and "pronouns". Although I believe I'm definitely in the minority here. Seems like this has always been the foundation of much gossip, at least in my extended family.
Maybe it's because today's fiftysomethings weren't alive for his heyday, but gender fluidity has been a monocultural construct since Liberace* was doing national teevee.
*Proud alumnus of West Milwaukee High School. Glad his estate finally deigned to let the middle school that now occupies the building name the auditorium after him.
Oops. Might have just set off the new Drah Queen Story Hour style tempest.
I always loved Liberace. (Platonicly, of course.)
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Read the long form story and as I got near the bottom I started laughing. I knew immediately what was going on. I have wonderful memories of dating a girl in high school and what we did. Fun Times!! I had a car so no need to use the bathroom.
Smart young woman. She would have won a National Merit Scholarship except they had to limit how many went to women in those days. Honors at entrance at UC Berkeley.
Won a Sells Award for high scoring on the CPA exam.
We married 5 years later. Lived a good life for 32 years.
"the father of the girl who is a GOP political activist talking GOP talking points".
This fact, more than anything else, is why a "local" story blew up beyond the merely "local" and may very well affect the outcome of the Virginia governor's race even the smallest of margins.
Apparently Louden County is home to lots of GOP political operatives. Louden County is also close to Washington D.C. (as opposed to say a similar county in Wyoming) which has lots of national press in it. Apparently the pandemic and the racial reckoning of 2020 has made what school districts do and teach a focus again (and they have been focuses before) These political operatives joined with sympathic parents in the county to stir up activism over these questions because that's their job...politics. They reasoned such questions would resonate in other suburban communities, not just in NoVa but suburban Richmond and along the Tidewater areas. Oh, there happens to be an election for Governor in Virginia and other local and statewide offices this year! The national political press gives this election undue over-attention because, well quite frankly, there's nothing else going on and it's close to D.C., it's easy to cover. Then throw in this rape allegation and the district's clumsy way of handling it and well, what you have is a perfect storm that blows up this incident into something much bigger.
Now all local stories are not going to be like this nor grab people's attention like this. And even in the "good old days" what was once a local story went national for various reasons, often because, as it reflects the situation in Louden County, national trends or other wider topics. The difference, of course, is technology, is making things go a lot faster through more inter-connected means, technology gives more ideological players in the media the opportunity to look for this stuff to generate outrage content which is what they do to make their livings at and technology gives people more opportunity to comment and shape the debate of such topics. The difference is in the past a local story would go "national" only if the top media players allowed it to do so. Today, anyone can make a local story go "national" and there's nothing the "national" news can do about it because they're more worried about being scooped or losing clicks or other means of measuring "ratings" than they are reporting a story. I agree without Kevin all of this is just exhausting but its just a doom-loop cycle that no one seems to know how to escape.
Who gets to decide which stories should be local only and not get national press?
Why should the George Floyd, Armand Aubrey, Michael Brown, or Trayvon Martin stories have been anything except local news? Or do you think they should also not have gotten national press?