Facts Matter

University of Virginia students protest in front ofPhi Kappa Psi Fraternity 

Yellow journalism is a term coined in the late 19^th century to describe the battle between the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers in New York City.  They used yellow ink to exaggerate their headlines.  Using trumped up stories loaded with factual inaccuracies has been around since the invention of the printing press.  After all, if the goal is to sell newspapers, you have to give the public a story they want to read.

With the advent of radio, and television, and now the electronic media, the American public has come to expect, and even believe, that the press is doing a good job by reporting the news that needs to be reported in an accurate and objective manner.  That is misplaced trust.  Today’s press is anything but. Today’s rule of reporting is to define the political narrative you want the public to hear, then bend the facts of the story to fit the narrative.  The proof of that approach was given by Obamacare's Jonathan Gruber who talked about the stupidity of the American public and how easy it was for the administration to fool us. 

But now it has become dangerous. The Michael Brown (Ferguson) shooting, the tragic Eric Garner death (New York City) and the alleged gang rape in a fraternity house at the University of Virginia as originally reported in Rolling Stone have made shoddy journalism an art form.  People are dying.  Businesses are being destroyed.  Students are having their reputations destroyed. 

Facts matter.  In all three of these stories, facts have become secondary as people riot in the streets shouting “hands up – don’t shoot” and the University of Virginia suspends all Greek activity while piously proclaiming that sexual assault on university campuses is a serious problem even after they learned the alleged gang rape was probably a fabrication. 

What I know is that we don’t know the truth in any of the above stories.  Any second year law student will tell you that eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable.  The old adage “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear” is good advice.  One would think that after the Duke Lacrosse fiasco we would have learned.

Today’s narratives are racism and feminism.  The stories are driven by political correctness rather than the facts.  While our leaders and press make pronouncements from heaven, the real solutions languish in the dust.

In the Ferguson case, all autopsy reports refute that Michael Brown raised his hands to surrender to the police officer that killed him.  In New York City, it may be that Eric Garner did not die from a strangle hold but rather from chest compression as the police attempted to hold him to the ground.  Only a few in media reported that there was an African American female police sergeant supervising the arrest who could have stopped the entire incident with an order to stand down.  The University of Virginia gang rape story is now in shambles as Rolling Stone steps back from its reporting as fast as its bias allows.  Lawsuit to follow.

Do the facts obviate the tragedy of each of the above situations? No…of course not.  But how can the root causes of the problems ever be solved if the truth is lost in political posturing?  In the above cases, rush to judgments circumvented normal judicial processes in which lies true justice.  

Investigate, find out the facts, discover the cause of the problem….that is how to resolve these issues.  Not rioting in the streets or yellow journalism in the media.