Every so often, the New York Times gifts us with an article that breaks new ground in being so one-sided, off-the-rails and lacking in even the most elementary sense of fairness that one runs out of words to describe it.
While the Gray Lady runs pieces about how a country under Trump might turn out badly for the LGBTQ crowd, mobs of anti-Trump supporters recreated their own kind of media-friendly, multicultural riots a few nights ago on the streets of Portland, Ore. More on that in a moment.
What the Times does is museum-quality Kellerism, a term created by tmatt several years ago to portray an attitude among the MSM. In this case, societal persecution of gays and lesbians is the prevailing narrative and other points of view, primarily linked to the First Amendment, don’t deserve space or explanation. It is a term that means that a media outlet that has made up its mind on a certain hot button issue to the point where there is no legitimate other side to the story. See if you can spot the Kellerism factor below:
The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency sent panic through much of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, which for the first time in eight years will face an administration hostile to its civil rights goals and a president-elect who has expressed a desire to reverse many of its political gains.
Jay Brown, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization, said its office had received calls throughout the day on Wednesday from frightened people who wanted to know what the election results might mean for them.
Some callers wondered if they should speed up wedding plans so they could be married before the inauguration, in case a President Trump tries to overturn gay marriage, he said. Others worried that the military would reinstate “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the ban on openly gay and lesbian service members that ended in 2011.
“This is a devastating loss for our community,” Mr. Brown said. “It is something a lot of folks are still trying to wrap their heads around.”
Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, agreed. “All across America right now there are millions of people who are terrified,” she said.
We’ve written on alarmist predictions about Islamophobia that didn’t quite live up to the scare stories thought up by reporters who are too lazy to get out there and really see what’s going on. I’m seeing the same tendencies here.
As I read the Times piece –- and articles like it around the country -– I wonder: Where was this same sensitivity when the Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015, legalizing gay marriage nationwide? Here you had the White House decorating itself in rainbow-colored lights that very night while at the same time a host of bakers, wedding photographers, owners of wedding venues and more knew that overnight they were facing bankruptcy and death threats because they chose not to support same-sex weddings (as opposed to ordinary commerce with LGBTQ people). With rare exceptions -- brought to us by the Times religion reporter -- I didn’t see a lot of ink in the Times spent on their travails.
Was the writer of this story so asleep at the wheel that he wasn’t paying attention to his third paragraph? A U.S. president can’t overturn a Supreme Court ruling by fiat. Executive orders? Yes, that topic is worth watching.
The story makes one attempt to set the record straight on Trump’s relationship with homosexuals:
Mr. Trump has no reputation for personal animosity toward gay people, and the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay and lesbian political organization, congratulated him on his victory. He employed gay people in the Trump Organization, spent most of his life in socially liberal New York City, and surprised some Republicans this year when he said transgender people should “use the bathroom they feel is appropriate,” a view held by few others in the party.
But many L.G.B.T. leaders said they were unmoved by accounts of Mr. Trump’s personal tolerance.
And on the story goes. Did any editor question this story’s assumptions? I used to notice how, during the annual meetings of the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, it seemed like half of the Times newsroom was involved in these confabs. So I know which way the wind blows there but is there no desire for some professionalism on how to cover this topic?
Not at the Times. USA Today is equally guilty in the following piece about the coming earthquake. My chief beef is their obsessive quoting of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is known for accusing those they disagree with of hate speech.
More than 200 hate incidents -- ranging from swastika graffiti to physical threats -- have been reported across the country since Donald Trump's election, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit that monitors hate groups in the USA.
Now many people of color, women and LGBT people who have long faced threats large and small must grapple with the knowledge that half of their fellow American who voted elected someone who has advocated policies aimed at them: Keeping Muslims and immigrants out of the country, using police tactics considered racially biased such as stop-and-frisk, and grabbing women without consent.
They are part of the other half of Americans who voted, many of whom wept on election night and since, crying not because their horse in the race lost but because they fear for their safety and well-being.
Well, how about the business owners in downtown Portland, Ore., among other cities, who saw anti-Trump mobs destroy and vandalize their stores? Where’s the Southern Poverty Law Center when this happens? The broken glass covering Portland’s streets (see this KOIN-TV video for details) looked like a mini-Kristallnacht. In fact, the anti-Trump riots in Portland and other cities were on 78th anniversary of the anti-Jewish Kristallnacht (Nov. 9-10, 1938). As far as I know, no Jews were harmed in what happened this past week, but the coincidence is creepy.
Also, there is the story of a white Trump supporter in Chicago getting beaten to a pulp by a group of black bystanders. Did the Times report on that? This story about it ran in the Washington Post. The Chicago Tribune also covered it and more news stations are picking it up.
Don’t you think the Times and other media would have been on this a little faster had this been a white mob beating up a black Hillary supporter? As I write this, the Times has been silent about the attack, maybe because it doesn't fit the narrative.
Which is why, despite a lot of national flagellation over not predicting the Trump election upset, most media have returned to the same old, same old a few days later. To borrow from the old anti-war anthem “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?