This is correct.

This is either naive or disingenuous. You can complain about the fact that newspapers view themselves as being in the job of reporting objective facts and not conclusions, but it's absurd to characterize this as kid glove reporting. Here's the outline of the article:

-Steve King has often been called a jerk or a racist.
-He seems to have endorsed white nationalism.
-He was RTing Wilders who is a super-racist.
-Here's a technical definition of white nationalism that is a direct paraphrase of what King tweeted.
-White nationalists love Trump btw.
-Klansman David Duke loved King's tweet.
-However, here is a list of quotes from people who thought this was a racist tweet talking about how racist it is.
-We dug up some other racist stuff from King, here it is.

You can scare-quote "view from nowhere" all you want, but if your paper won't allow you to interject your personal conclusions into straight news pieces, this is the strongest "Steve King is a racist" article you could possibly write.

I think a lot of people view it as a problem that no amount of racism can seem to escape being a "personal conclusion" rather than objective fact.

When your editor wants to check your sources on "Steve King's tweet was racist," where would you point him? I assume the answer is, "Read the tweet and use common sense," but then what is being reported in the statement "Steve King's tweet was racist" separate from the content of the tweet itself, other than the common sense of the journalist?

It's a big problem when nothing can really be racist. For example it is used to justify Voter ID laws, because since we have decided as a society nothing can be objectively racist, you can argue for these Voter ID laws endlessly and when someone shows data that they are racist you can say "well that's just an opinion."

There's also an argument that headlines are the most important bit to get right.

There's really two definitions of the word racist. One is something that is unfairly discriminatory towards minorities. The other is something roughly like "extremely wicked." The first definition is indeed objectively demonstrable, and you can show that voter ID laws primarily affect minorities and that there's no reasonable concern that they address. But the conclusion that voter ID laws are extremely wicked is a moral conclusion that, while correct, is inherently subjective.

Sure. But I still think bobman is objectively sort of correct that the media has done its part here. And this is ultimately a manifestation of the same characteristics of the campaign: the media does a pretty good job, maybe not universally perfect, but pretty good job -- of identifying when Trump (on in this case King) says something far outside acceptable, cosmopolitan social norms. The Democrats meekly go along in many cases objecting, but not always. Sometimes they throw a big fit. But then a huge part of the non-ideological public shrugs.

Maybe we can make an argument the media should be more polemical about these kinds of things but I find it ultimately the fault of the defenders of the liberal order to muster meaningful objections to this rhetoric. That's not necessarily an indictment that we didn't try but the very clear degradation of our national moral character on this speaks to much deeper problems than the media.

Yup. Right wingers are calling into NPR every single day and complaining about the fact-based coverage and calling it liberal. We have to start pushing back, at least on liberal outlets like the NY Times and NPR. Call them, email, write them a nasty letter, cancel your subscription and let them know exactly why.

"Racial tinged"....."Controversial".......“Racially insensitive”.....“Old-fashioned”...."Nazi inflected mannerisms"...... "Hugo Boss inspired sartorial choices"......

Here’s a white supremacy euphemism generator for struggling journalists

Is anyone following the Dutch election closely? I have only paid it a small bit of attention, but the people head to the polls on March 15.

At the moment the PVV party is 60% on Predictit after having much higher implied odds throughout 2017.

Maybe someone with a little more insight could make an OP if there is any interest, or I may fire one off this evening.

Likewise for the French presidential election for April 23 for any Francophiles.

PR makes it very hard for Wilders to be the next PM even if the PVV win the election, because the other parties have vowed they won't form a coalition with him.

In response Wilders has become more extreme, and has said that the Netherlands is not democratic if he is not in the next government, calling for a revolt if he is kept out.

Netherlands GE

Naive, I guess, because the real issue here is that most of the "objective facts" seem to consist of tweets. That's not kid-glove reporting; it's barely reporting at all. Anyone who despises racism can easily read the Tweetnodrome for themselves and come to these same conclusions. I expect journalists to be diving deeper.

They've done precisely nothing at all. The issue isn't a lack of polemic but a lack of desire to leave the office.

The laziness of the media is a separate, but entirely valid criticism.

Sorry, I should have related this point back to the discussion from earlier. My criticism is that many nominally liberal newspaper editors are keen to enforce a discursive code centered on facts, but because "Politician X tweeted Y" counts as a fact, the Times can print an article that, per bobman's point, is just a thinly veiled accusation of racism, whose main value is that it aggregates and preserves something someone typed into their phone and then published on a social media site. The article itself is tone-policing, in other words; "call-out culture." The article would be equally at home on Jezebel. This has the effect of implying that there's no fact at all about whether King is a white nationalist.

There are quotes too. What are you looking for NYT to be doing here? Should they have embedded a deep-cover reporter in King's office so they could have the inside muck to rake when he happened to make a white nationalist tweet? Your later post seems to suggest that tweet-and-quote-based reporting is apt to throw readers in an almost-nihilistic epistemic paralysis where the very existence of facts is called into question ("All these people say King is a white nationalist, but if third-party opinion is the only source cited to validate these claims, does that not imply that reality itself is nothing more than a set of mutually agreed-upon claims!"), but it seems a bit rough to hold NYT accountable for defending the nature of objective reality. How is this specific story actually supposed to be reported?

One thing the reporter might have done is call an expert on white nationalism, someone who has extensively studied the history or sociology of such movements, for example. Another approach would be to try to contact people who know King personally and ask about his beliefs or statements over the years. I believe someone took this approach to Bannon and asked his old friends from Harvard what he was really like. Another might be to contextualize King's statements by reference to a more detailed look at original sources of white nationalism, offering something resembling a logical argument rather than just a string of denuded factual statements (though I acknowledge the problems with think-piecery in general).

Or really just anything that reflects some level of investment in figuring out what's really going on in this Representative's office, what he believes, what the consequences of his ideology might be, etc. See The Atlantic's story on Bannon reading Mencius Moldbug, for example. I'm not opposed to objective reality (duh). I'm opposed to bad journalistic practices, including language-codes that suggest that tweet-quoting is news reporting just because someone objectively did tweet something.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/13/health...lawmaker-trnd/

Short of a confession that isn't recanted, like 40% of the country won't concede racism. I'd include use of n***** but less than half of that 40% sample would think that was sufficient.

Just watch. Ideally Trump called black people n*****s on tape and it'll be leaked, then we can see just how few conservatives will identify him as racist. The apologia will be deafening.

I think she should have just stuck with the masturbation. The colonoscopy has me going "wtf?" too much to appreciate the troll. There's also some biblical support on that front.

Women have colons too. Do they not get colonoscopies? It should be a waiting period for a prostate exam.

Locker room talk bro. Curt Schilling says Trump's learned from his mistake, time to move on. Those two black women on youtube still support him, so it can't be that bad.

I am of two minds on this. On one hand, repeating what someone says on Twitter is some lazy ****ing journalism (I already have an app that does that for me! It's called Twitter!). OTOH, if some congressbro is spouting off racist garbage, that is sort of newsworthy.

The best approach is probably as you say: give the reader a bit of context. Maybe call up the SPLC and get their take. But even then it feels a bit patronizing. I as a reader, don't need an expert on white nationalism to tell me that it's racist as **** to say that only white babies ought to contribute to Western civilization.

Yeah Trump is on tape admitting to sexual assault and that was relating to white women, who American society and specifically Trump voters hold in automatically higher regard than anybody who has black skin. N-word tape won't do too much.

...from my cold dead hands!



I like her style tho

Try Tweeting at NPR and the NYT about how racist Irish Heritage month is imo.