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[Malyse]

Or: Why the both sides argument is bullshit.

Racist mobs murdered African Americans with bullets, nooses, and knives. Innocent people were mutilated, strung up, and roasted alive. In the late 1800s, when these killings reached their peak, more than a thousand African Americans were killed in just five years. In one year, 1892, “there were twice as many lynchings of blacks as there were legal executions of all races throughout the United States.”

And yet, as media scholar David Mindich details in his book, Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism, elite press coverage of these murders typically presented them as morally ambiguous affairs that pitted a crowd’s desire for immediate justice against the horrific — and, very often, fabricated — crimes of the black victim.

The same ethic, in other words, that leads modern day reporters to claim Hillary Clinton’s denunciation of racists is the moral equivalent of Donald Trump’s racism also led journalists from another century to be extra careful to include the murderers’ perspective when writing about lynching.

As Mindich recounts, for example, the Times reported that two men “were hanged last night,” alongside the murders’ claim that “their crime was the murder of Mr. Benson Blake.” Another Times report printed the fact that “a negro was lynched” in Jasper, Alabama alongside the claim that “he attempted to assault two white women.” And a man described as “the young negro who murdered Michael Tierney” was “hanged by a mob.” None of these descriptions of the victims’ supposed crimes were qualified by words such as “allegedly.”

In no small part because lynching bypassed a valid judicial process, we will probably never know how many of the people killed by such mobs were innocent of any crime. We do know, however, that these killings frequently targeted African Americans whose only real transgression was entering into a consensual sexual relationship with a white woman, or opening a business that competed with white-owned companies, or offending the wrong white person, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The New York Times’ account of [Thomas] Moss’ killing (who it wrongly identified as “Theodore Moss”), repeated his murderers’ claim that Moss, along with two other black men, were killed for “ambushing and shooting down” four deputy sheriffs. [Ida B.] Wells knew, however, that the reality was very different.

Moss and his two fellow victims, Wells wrote in the Memphis Free Speech, an African American weekly that she edited, owned a grocery store in town which competed against a white-owned store and was costing them business. To eliminate this threat, a white mob gathered outside the black-owned store and fired into it, leading the people inside the store to return fire. In the ensuing firefight, several members of white mob were wounded—the men the New York Times identified as deputy sheriffs — and over a hundred black men were arrested.

Then, the mob dragged Moss and his business partners from their jail cells and shot them to death. Their real crime wasn’t murder. It was opening a business that threatened white wealth.

As Wells later wrote, knowing why her friend was killed, and then reading the elite press’ misrepresentation of why he was killed “is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was.” Before Moss’ death, Wells “had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed — that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order. . . perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.” Now, however, she knew better. She knew lynching to be “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the n***** down.’”

This new knowledge — not just that lynching was a means of control, but also that major newspapers were not reporting the truth about why it happened — fueled the remainder of Wells’ career. Though she was driven out of Memphis by white supremacists and forced to relocate in New York, Wells would eventually travel to the sites where men were lynched to construct a real history of what transpired.

After the Associated Press uncritically reported claims that a lynching victim raped a seven-year-old girl, for example, Wells uncovered several errors in this account — including the fact that this “girl” was actually a seventeen-year-old woman and that she was found in the victim’s cabin. What was represented as an horrific case of child rape appeared to really be a consensual relationship between a black man and a white woman.

“Prove your man guilty, first,” Wells declared. “Hang him, shoot him, pour coal oil over him and roast him, if you have concluded that civilization demands this; but be sure the man has committed the crime first.” Journalism could not simply collect one quote on either side of a dispute and then print them both as if they were equally valid takes on an uncertain situation. To the contrary, journalism must be a “contribution to truth.”

https://thinkprogress.org/the-dark-...ance-journalism-enabled-lynching-284f2291b4a1

There's a very dark parallel of how Clinton's emails and Trump's numerous actions were treated with a false equivalence much in the same way the black people were lynched for perceived slights. It's as if we learned nothing from Emmett Till. How dark a path this is.

 

[LiquidSword]

Scary stuff. Read a related article earlier this year about lynching and journalists. The people doing the lynching would say the people on the outside looking in just didn't understand. Just like Trump voters, we just don't understand right? Just like Duterte and an overwhelming majority supporting him, we just don't understand. The only thing we can do is keep fighting back because there would be a large group of people telling you that you just don't understand as the Nazi's are shoving you in the oven. It's all bullshit. People want to do and support evil shit and then think of themselves as a good person and the media is coddling them in that regard.

 

[finley83]

Scary stuff. Read a related article earlier this year about lynching and journalists. The people doing the lynching would say the people on the outside looking in just didn't understand. Just like Trump voters, we just don't understand right? Just like Durante and an overwhelming majority supporting him, we just don't understand. The only thing we can do is keep fighting back because there would be a large group of people telling you that you just don't understand as the Nazi's are shoving you in the oven. It's all bullshit. People want to do and support evil shit and then think of themselves as a good person and the media is coddling them in that regard.

Yikes, maybe I should stop using DSFix

Spoiler

you meant Duterte, right?

 

[Slayven]

History is a circle

 

[Ogodei]

Thing is, the lynchers or people who sympathized with them were probably the majority of their customers. Especially back then when segregation meant that large black city communities probably had their own newspapers.

False objectivity is a terrible thing, to clarify, but the lack of desire to rock the boat is more rooted in a desire to sell papers than a belief that telling both sides is the only way to be fair.

 

[jon bones]

History is a circle

It is a spiral, slowly working it's way towards equality.

 

[Moonkid]

History is a circle

There's a lot of history is X phrases, my favourite is what someone here said: history doesn't repeat, it rhymes.

 

[Cyan]

I'd be interested to see the original articles they're citing. They don't provide a link (I don't know how much of the NYT's archival material is online anyway), so I'm not sure where to look. Anyone know?

 

[Akronis]

Yikes, maybe I should stop using DSFix

Spoiler

you meant Duterte, right?

Durante confirmed for serial killer.

 

[Palette Swap]

Coates touched on this particular symmetry and its racial component when discussing how the press reacted to the deplorables comment. His commentary is more modern, but I think both speak to the same fundamental mechanics.

The shame reflects an ugly and lethal trend in this country’s history—an ever-present impulse to ignore and minimize racism, an aversion to calling it by its name. For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary. Lynchings, pogroms, and plunder proceeded from this fiction. Writers, journalists, and educators embroidered a national lie, and thus a safe space for the violent tempers of those who needed to be white was preserved.

The safe space for the act of being white endures today. This weekend, the media, an ostensibly great American institution, saw it challenged and—not for the first time—organized to preserve it. For speaking a truth, backed up by data, Clinton was accused of promoting bigotry. No. The true crime was endangering white consciousness. So it was when the president asserted that it was stupid to arrest a man for breaking into his own home. So it was when the president said that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. And so it is when reformers suggest police not stop citizens on so flimsy a pretext as furtive movements. The need to be white is a sensitive matter—one which our institutions are inexorably and mindlessly bound to protect.

Sorry if this is a bit tangential, but I read this article a couple of days ago and this new one resonated with it.

I'd be interested to see the original articles they're citing. They don't provide a link (I don't know how much of the NYT's archival material is online anyway), so I'm not sure where to look. Anyone know?

I tried looking for one of the articles, the one about "Theodore" Moss, and it's there. I can't find a permanent link, only a link to my
query but the article is from March 10, 1892.
I basically searched the name of the victim and a quote from the article.

 

[Cyan]

Thanks. Only for subscribers though.

 

[Palette Swap]

Thanks. Only for subscribers though.

I might have botched something in my URL (or maybe it's because I'm a subscriber) because they say pre-1923 should be available :

Nonsubscribers:

— 1923–1980: Articles in this date range (from January 1, 1923 through December 31, 1980) are available for purchase at $3.95 each.
— Pre-1923 and post-1980: Articles published before January 1, 1923 or after December 31, 1980 are free, but they count toward your monthly limit.

Here's the basic archive query URL for 1851-1980 : http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?srchst=p