Style wars

 
This isn't just another cautionary tale from the opinion pages of America's Newspapers®. Look a bit more closely and you'll find a familiar right-wing complaint: If you people in the media won't help us be a little more racist, it's going to go ill for you. Here's Douglas Murray in the New York Post:

If one of your allies starts to fall apart, you should notice it. And learn why.

This past week, Great Britain has been racked with riots and disorder. In Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics even came out to riot alongside each other for once.

At Fox News, corporate bedmate of the Post, this was "some of the worst unrest in the United Kingdom's history." (Oh, child.)

What has gone on has huge lessons for America. (Yes. And one of those lessons might be found in the proportion of Britons who turned out to say, in effect, we're not having any of that.) And our politicians here should take note.

The disorder in Britain began after three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9, were stabbed to death as they took part in a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. In the immediate aftermath, locals in Southport were shocked, angry and looking for someone to blame.

In the UK, as in America, the authorities do not just release information about suspects and culprits. They “manage” the release.

In Britain, as in America, if there is believed to be a racial component to a crime, the authorities are even more careful about what information comes out.

It might have been a while since Douglas Murray tended to the police beat. Neither Fox News nor the local affiliates that provide so much of its episodic crime coverage seem to have any trouble finding and publishing the ethnicity of crime suspects on short notice.

But the British public, like Americans, are used to this process. And the longer they sense information is being kept from them, the angrier they can get.

This time the authorities were clearly holding back something about the identity of the suspect. Soon rumors went around online. All from completely unreliable sources. But they caught on.

A rumor went around that the attacker was a Muslim who had only arrived recently with one of the illegal boatloads of migrants who keep pouring into southern Britain.

In fact, although there have been plenty of crimes and terrorism committed by illegals, this was not such a case.

This time, the person who carried out this appalling crime was the 17-year-old son of Rwandan migrants. His motive is not yet known.

See? It's all your fault, media. If only you'd told us it was a UK-born Black guy in the first place, we wouldn't have had to attack all those mosques and hotels!

Time out for the stylebook here. It's a widely accepted, if fairly recent, principle of style that matters like ethnicity and gender aren't supposed to be attached to people unless they're clearly relevant to the story. That implies a stylistic consistency that isn't there in real life: for example, the 1942 textbook that says, on one page, "it does no good to mention under certain circumstances that a Negro committed assault," then a few chapters laters offers NEGRO ATTACKS WIFE as an example of how to cram the "essentials" into a tight headline count.

As with many style points, knowing the rule isn't nearly as interesting as figuring out who gets to break it under what circumstances. Your shop might have a firm rule that it's not a "miracle" until God confirms it by phone*, but everybody knows which Star Reporter can blow past that stop sign without mussing a hair. More relevant are the examples that "everyone" understands because they meet the Man Bites Dog rule of tabloid days; that's why "male nurse" and "female drunken driving suspect" still populate the general news pages, and why, in the right-wing press, the headline tells you to blame a "nonbinary Biden official," not one of the boring old binary ones.

Now, it's not always the cops', or the press's, job to prove the negative. When the mob knows damn well it was nine-legged Muslim ammonia beings from Planet Mxyzptlk because it says so RIGHT HERE ON MY PHONE, they probably have other things to do (putting out fires, for example) than tell you "nah, it's a Black guy from some unspellable place in Wales." So in a way, following a rule -- even once it's been overtaken by the commonsense idea that the "complete physical description"** of stylebooks gone by is irrelevant when the perp is already in custody -- is beside the point. Our columnist has a bigger point in mind: 

But all this happened in a very dangerous context. And it is one that American politicians would do well to understand. Even if their British counterparts fail to.

In the UK — perhaps even more than in America — there is great dislike of the rule-breaking illegal migration.

... The authorities house the illegals in hotels (sound familiar?), and in short, absolutely nothing is done to punish people for breaking the law by breaking into the country.

Put a Smokey Bear hat, some mirrored sunglasses and a dime-store Southern accent on Douglas Murray, in short, and you can almost hear him saying "Reckon he done stole more chains than he could swim with."

* Or a "tragedy" unless someone kills their stepdad by the fifth act. I've got a million of 'em. Don't forget your server, folks!
** The idea here was that if it wouldn't help the cops, or the public, identify the baddies-at-large, it was irrelevant. As an editor I used to work for put it, "two Black men with sticks" doesn't count.

Guide us to thy perfect light

Came a question a few weeks ago on how the Fair 'n' Balanced Network might compare to the muscular right-wing news empires of the past -- say, Col. Bertie McCormick's Tribune. One point that hadn't stood out was the degree to which McCormick, and perhaps even more so Hearst, lavished space on their own prose and ideas. I'm now tempted to change my mind, based on this epic by one of Fox's pet media writers:

Fox Corporation chairman and News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch turns 90 Thursday, but the media mogul hasn’t taken a step back from defending free speech, harnessing key roles in two of the most recognized and influential media companies in the world.

Uh, sure. McCormick, whatever else you might think of him,* was an actual defender of the First Amendment, even when it cloaked characters as slimy as Jay Near. Murdoch's outlets think free speech is fine, as long as it comforts the Trump cult and afflicts working journalists.

Murdoch recently condemned cancel culture as "awful woke orthodoxy" suppressing free speech around the globe while accepting a lifetime achievement award from the Australia Day Foundation earlier this year. He began by noting that his career is far from over, before slamming a "wave of censorship" plaguing the media industry.

If by "recently" you mean "late January," true. Here's the same writer then:

Murdoch made the remarks when accepting a lifetime achievement award from the Australia Day Foundation. He began by noting that his career is far from over, before slamming a "wave of censorship" plaguing the media industry.

You have to admit, it's a lot easier to just copy your own prose. Here's today's third paragraph:

"A lifetime achievement award does have an air of finality, almost of closure, but I can assure you that there are many goals still to come, and challenges to overcome. Well, I’m far from done," Murdoch said, noting his journey that "began in a smoke-filled Adelaide newsroom" remained in motion.

And January's:

"A lifetime achievement award does have an air of finality, almost of closure, but I can assure you that there are many goals still to come, and challenges to overcome. Well, I’m far from done," Murdoch said, noting his journey that "began in a smoke-filled Adelaide newsroom" remained in motion.

Indeed, you won't find much new in today's 65o-word labor of love, except -- and this is truly Hearstian -- the paean from another Murdoch shop:

He expanded to the United States in the early 1970s, adding a plethora** of newspapers – including the New York Post – to his portfolio.

"Media mogul Rupert Murdoch turns 90 today, and apart from his family, it’s The New York Post, and New York City, that have the most reason to celebrate the milestone," the Post’s Steve Cuozzo wrote Thursday.

"The Big Apple hasn’t been the same since Murdoch bought the paper from Dorothy Schiff in late 1976. The city is immeasurably more self-aware and better-informed than it was when its media were uniformly liberal if not outright left-leaning. It’s also a more fun place to be, thanks to Page Six," Cuozzo added.

You followers of pre-WWII exceptionalism can clear your own throats here. But if you've been wondering, yes: You may add the Heavenly Chorus to the ways in which Murdoch resembles his predecessors.***

So happy birthday, boss. Here’s to many more.

* Plenty.
 ** Pro tip: Never use "plethora" unless (a) it's preceded by "veritable" and (b) you are Howard Cosell.
*** Three guesses about what the prewar McCormick or Hearst would have thought about being likened to a carpetbagger who received an award from "a nonprofit organization designed to unite the leading figures of the Australian community living in the United Kingdom."

Mind if we dance with your dates?

Q: Is the Murdoch press really, really scared of black people?
A: You make the call!

The federal grand jury handing down indictments for special counsel Robert Mueller doesn’t appear to include any supporters of President Donald Trump, according to one witness who recently testified before the panel.

“The grand jury room looks like a Bernie Sanders rally,” my source said. “Maybe they found these jurors in central casting, or at a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley [Calif.]”

Well, thanks for the brackets. Could we go into some journalistic detail?

Of the 20 jurors, 11 are African-Americans and two were wearing “peace T-shirts,” the witness said. “There was only one white male in the room, and he was a prosecutor.” Mueller was not present.

This wouldn't be one of those unnamed sources, would it? Because everybody knows those are fake.

... My source said, “That room isn’t a room where POTUS gets a fair shake.”

And what kind of tabloid is it where the prescriptive ghost of Hildy Johnson doesn't slap you around with a wet AP Stylebook for saying indictments are handed "down"?

You've got to ask yourself one question

Two questions, actually. The first is "compared to what?" Am I 45% more likely to be murdered in de Blasio's Manhattan than in de Blasio's Brooklyn, or than in Bloomberg's Manhattan, or Duggan's Detroit, or La Guardia's Manhattan, or in the casbah by Colonel al-Mustard with a candlestick?

Murders are way up so far this year in Manhattan, The Post has learned.

Sixteen people were killed around the borough between the first of the year and Sunday. Over the same period last year, the figure was 11. That’s an increase of about 45 percent.

So given that we're comparing de Blasio's second year with his first, you're more likely to be murdered in de Blasio's Manhattan than in ... de Blasio's Manhattan. Your next question should be something like"No, not 'which borough.' Compared to what risk?" That takes a little more work.
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Ebola cured! Mideast at peace!

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Message fail

Looks like somebody at the New York Post didn't get the message from the home planet: Negotiating with terrorists BAD!