Remember when there was an unstated rule, when following news coverage of a crime in the Metro – if they didn’t mention the offender’s ethnicity or show a photo, it actually answered the question?
New addition to the rule: if the story pertains to criminal justice’s response to last year’s riots, and the offender’s ideology – “Boogaloo”, “proud boy”, whatever – isn’t mentioned, you know by omission whose “side” they were on.
Prove me wrong.
The blonde blue eyed cover boy is supposed to pay $12 million in restitution. How’s that supposed to happen? A book deal?
Ha! Davon and Bryce are being sentenced later?! Let’s see what they have to pay and how much prison time they get.
^ What’s your beef? They’ll get similar steep fines and sentences.
golfdoc – He’ll never pay $12m in restitution. The point is to make him subject to garnishment the rest of his life.
I accidentally made the white power sign today. I know, it sounds awful, but I was watching TV and I looked down and there it was — the tip of my thumb and the tip of my forefinger were in contact, just for a second.
Can’t undo the past. So my question is: does that make me a boogie boi or a proud boy? Where do I send my dues chack?
Prove you wrong, Mitch? I don’t think you have a handle on the correct group / non group / journalism / court phenomena with this stuff. And thus your assumptions get formed by your biases.
You gotta be very “Woody Kaine” to be self identified Antifa, and this blonde kid obviously is not, such that he was working at Menard’s. He’s just some dope kid who rushed down to the chaos to be a part of it, and got caught on someone’s phone cam throwing a brick or firebomb onto the precinct premises. Thus the arrest and conviction. But if the court findings don’t say he’s Antifa, and he never calls himself Antifa, then he’s not, as a matter of reality and the journalist stylebook. And I’d bet this is the case.
If the riot contingent was 5k or 10k over those nights in May 2020, I doubt more than a few several dozen were literally self identified Antifa. They were mostly street fighting men of a certain stripe drawn to the conflagration.
These Boogaloo boys are almost undoubtedly self identified in some way, or can be tied to “Boogaloo boy stuff” via their internet activity… which would be in the court findings and allow a writer at AP or care to call them “Boogaloo boys”.
Oh yeah, Kraephammer? I disagree!
As I say, the “self-described” part is important.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-self-described-boogaloo-bois-charged-attempting-provide-material-support-hamas
He’s just some dope kid who rushed down to the chaos to be a part of it, and got caught on someone’s phone cam throwing a brick or firebomb onto the precinct premises.
Nope. The story says “These four suspects all admitted they were caught up in peaceful protests during the day that turned violent at night, motivated by their anger that George Floyd was killed by police.”
It happens. At 6 PM you are peacefully protesting, and then a few hours later you find yourself firebombing a building.
The so-called “Boogaloo Bois” story is from last September. The two men committed no violent offenses, and were pulled in by an informer. Why include them in this story?
I don’t read the trolls but don’t have to.
If there’s a lotta kraphead droppings in this comment thread, must mean Mitch hit the ten ring.
^ Kid is a lefty, but my characterization isn’t wrong. He was impulsively drawn to the mayhem.
We’re talking about who gets classified as what in news articles. Those Boog guys are mentioned in the KARE article as being targets of the overall prosecutorial effort. I pulled the release and posted it to demonstrate the reason they get called Boogaloo boys is because they are self-described Boogaloo boys, rather than this being an editorial treatment by the story writer.
Kinlaw, you’d be the stupidest dude here if AllenS weren’t around.
Hell, a black dude brutally attacked an asian in Slum Fransisco and it was reported that the attacker was white.
The rule also works for party affiliation.
They are setting a narrative you are buying, Kraephammer.
Sure, these people now stand convicted of throwing molotov cocktails & burning down a police station, but look! Eight months ago some other guys were indicted for trying to buy weapons from an informer they thought was Hamas!
It has no place in the story other than to draw a false equivalence, and get the dread word “boogie bois” into an article about the sentencing of a left-wing terrorist for firebombing a police station.
No MO, “They” are not setting a narrative that I am buying. I’m standing on an observation that argues things here happened for explainable reasons having to do with court docs and journalist stylebooks.
Address my argument.
You are using “journalistic stylebook” to carry a lot of weight, JK.
What journaistic stylebook requires that eight-months old boogie boi indictments for non-violent crimes must be mentioned when left wing terrorists plead guilty for firebombing a police station?
MO – I think that’s a serious, excellent, good faith question.
2 or 3 things, I’d say – in news story writing there is this tendency to recap things with a lot of tangential details. There’s also a tendency to do some “both sides” ism-ing. I would also acknowledge, pulling in Boog Boys details is an irrelevance here that might be playing to the political sympathies of this newsroom that created the story. A bit, or maybe more.
Why the blonde kid is not Antifa still stands. He’s not Antifa because he doesn’t claim to be Antifa, and the writer of the story would have no basis to assert he’s Antifa unless he claimed he was. There’s still old school copy editors that will nip that stuff in the bud, whether they are liberal copy editors or not.
Okay, true, omitting the race/political affiliation of certain offenders while prominently noting the race/political affiliation of other offenders, is a form of lying by omission. But it’s for the greater good so it’s okay.
After all, how can society march toward the bright shining future of a fully equitable society if we don’t nudge it in the correct direction? Complete and accurate reporting might confuse people, might cause them to question their leaders, might end with them thinking for themselves, leading to Error and Sin and Eternal Damnation.
We have a moral obligation to save people from themselves by doing their thinking for them. You’ll thank us later.
Another way to say it for you bad lawyers in here, is its completely evidentiary and boolean. If Antifa doesn’t have a membership roll showing the kid is a member, the writer has no basis to assert he’s Antifa. If the kid himself won’t claim he’s Antifa, the writer has no basis to assert he’s Antifa.
I wonder what it means when the DOJ says that Solomon and Teeter “self-identified” as boogie bois and something called the boogiehijeen. They visited a BBS & exchanged unpopular views with others? Do they carry a wallet card?
I have been extremely suspicious of the DOJ and journalists on the topic of left wing vs right wing terrorism since I read an article by a r wing antifa infiltrator who claimed that a lot of the antifa thumpers were ex military. DOJ and the pentagon brass don’t care about that, I guess. Also the cavalier admission by some antifa people that they used twitter & other apps to organize violent demonstrations — with no handwringing about “OMG the social media corp’s are encouraging violent extremism!”.
I would be sure that in the course of an FBI interview an agent got them to acknowledge they were Boog, in some fashion
If Antifa doesn’t have a membership roll showing the kid is a member, the writer has no basis to assert he’s Antifa. If the kid himself won’t claim he’s Antifa, the writer has no basis to assert he’s Antifa.
True, but Antifa doesn’t operate like the Elks Club. It’s entirely possible, and maybe even likely, that this kid is just a bored random dumbass, but we rely on the Lou Raguses of the world to do a little digging and find such things out. Raguse’s disinclination to do so is a problem; one might even call it systemic.
Antifa is the Alt-Right’s version of the chupacabra. It’s a fantastic ghost story conjured up by propagandists meant to scare the base in order to get them to behave the way they want them to.
I have neither reason to love or hate Lou Raguse (…for example). Those are high energy jobs though, and he almost certainly works more than 40 hrs a week. If the court allucation doesn’t spell out a guy is Antifa / Boog, Lou isn’t going to have the bandwidth to do gumshoe reporting and nail it down otherwise.
Which Style Guide?
Be Specific there are at least 25;
ACS Style Guide
AMA Manual of Style
AP Stylebook
APA Style
The ASA Style Guide
The Bluebook
The Business Style Handbook
California Style Manual
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage
The Chicago Manual of Style
Citing Medicine
The Elements of Style
The Elements of Typographic Style
Fowler’s Modern English Usage
Garner’s Modern English Usage
IEEE style
ISO 690
MHRA Style Guide
Microsoft Manual of Style
MLA Handbook
The New York Times Manual
The Oxford Guide to Style/New Hart’s Rules
Scientific Style and Format (CSE style)
Style Manual: For Authors, Editors and Printers
Turabian: A Manual for Writers
I have neither reason to love or hate Lou Raguse (…for example). Those are high energy jobs though, and he almost certainly works more than 40 hrs a week. If the court allucation doesn’t spell out a guy is Antifa / Boog, Lou isn’t going to have the bandwidth to do gumshoe reporting and nail it down otherwise.
Accepting that premise, the easiest way to deal with the issue would be to delete the last four paragraphs of the article. “Some others had different motives” is true and irrelevant to the story at hand. Raguse (or his editor) put it in. Why? I don’t know the answer, nor do you, JK. But it’s there.
^ I don’t know. Maybe AP, maybe another. There is a style book that governs their writing, terminology, subject treatment, etc. we don’t have to know which one it is to figure out why the Boogs got a label and the blonde kid didn’t.
MO, I think that’s the actual no brainer example of there being political bias in the reporting.
it makes a difference which style book is used because while they may agree for the most part on grammar they do diverge on the treatment of story content. AP for instance encourages insertion of political content via implicit language into otherwise objective reporting that other style books do not. You cannot effectively deconstruct the story if you don’t know which style book was used.
^ If you’re saying if it was the AP book, and they should have called him Antifa just cuz it’s obvious but didn’t because of bias…
I’m not seeing it. If you’re writing that story you can’t call the blonde kid Antifa unless you have a detail that establishes it. Any stylebook, I’d assert.
AP style is close to ubiquitous in the news business, Pig, but any style guide is just that — a guide. Writers and editors deviate from style guides on a regular basis. Editorial decisions drive what we read and see.
I don’t know if the style book is AP, Columbia, Buzzfeed, or whatever, but not knowing means I find it difficult to deconstruct an article that has at its center the conflation of two dissimilar unrelated sets of facts. The obvious problem then is not knowing if I should dismiss the article out of hand because it represents shoddy journalism or read it as promoting a conclusion the writer is uncomfortable with fully articulating, my bias is to the former.
When I received my first AP Stylebook in journalism school, it was basically a 24-page pamphlet, completely obsessed with punctuation and capitalization. The next one I bought, after my original paperback disintegrated, was about 200 pages. I really don’t even want to know how big the current version is.
Ah, our old friend “editorial discretion.” Which is just another way of saying “we decided to cover it this way and we won’t say why.”
It isn’t just that they don’t use the word “antifa,” they disclose no political orientation at all. The dude is just a guy mad at the murder of Floyd. Now who wouldn’t be mad about that?
I think it would have been a great counter-balance to refer to the guys identified as “boogie bois” simply as “people frightened by the lack of law enforcement.”
I know that the superseding axe that is being ground here at SiTD with this is the notion that mainstream journalism treats radical lefties and radical righties differently. I think that’s true, very true. But not calling the blonde guy Antifa isn’t a feature of that.
You guys are pre-supposing a reality in which there’s a detail to support the blonde guy is in Antifa, and that the story writer didn’t divulge it. That’s the furthest reach out of many scenarios. The easiest reach, the Occam’s razor of it, is there isn’t a supporting detail to show the blonde guy is in Antifa.
The writer can’t just say “he’s antifa” cuz cuz it’s “obvious”. Besides the question of editorial treatment (which I have been conflating with “stylebook”), there’s the matter of slander / libel / defamation. You call him Antifa without a supporting detail, and you create a tort claim for the guy. Which a journalism enterprise tries to avoid doing.
I wonder where Trump can sue the MSM for perpetuating Russia hoax? Journalists™ had no scruples or issues breathlessly reporting on Russia Hoax without any supporting detail for years, not avoiding it. Fuck these lefty idiots are perpetuating their own braindead hypocritical stereotype with every utterance.
If a guy puts on a Nazi uniform and armband, and gives the Hitler salute, is okay to call him a Nazi? Even if he says “Oh, no, I am not an Nazi!” in a german accent?
At some point it is okay to assume a person is antifa, like these weirdos: http://nixle.us/CQNDJ
It’s not like they have an Antifa council, initation rights, etc.
Gee whiz, I just can’t seem to get moderated these days. It’s probably the sky-high Fleisch-Kincaid level of my writing, or maybe it is the typos that confuse the modbot.
BTW, Mitch’s post never mentioned the word “antifa.” He is talking about ideology. If a guy sets fire to a police station in a riot led by the violent radical left, I think it is entirely permissable to call him a violent radical leftist. Even if he says “I was really just mad about this guy I didn’t know who got killed in police custody.”
MO, 3:08 – If he’s dressed in the artifacts of Nazism, the reporter can call him a Nazi without another supporting detail
MO, 3:34 – I think its rock solid Mitch is talking about the contrast in descriptive use between Antifa and Boogaloo
Don’t think so, JK. The blonde guy might very well have identified himself as a BLM supporter, not antifa. Maybe he did. But the media has decided not to finger BLM for acts of violence. Isn’t it that Blondie is not ID’s as a BLM supporter? He’s supposed to be some guy so pissed off at Floyd’s death he’ll commit felony arson, but he’s not identifiable as a BLM supporter?
Fair point, “BLM” hadn’t entered into my thinking.
If a guy puts on a Nazi uniform and armband, and gives the Hitler salute, is okay to call him a Nazi?
I dunno, MO, is it OK? That search turned up a small movement of celebrities caught wearing Nazi uniforms.
Of course, no one cares about celebrities or anyone else wearing commie duds nor decorating their dwellings with Commie trinkets. Especially the oh-so-cool Che t-shirts.
The blonde guy might very well have identified himself as a BLM supporter, not antifa. Maybe he did. But the media has decided not to finger BLM for acts of violence. Isn’t it that Blondie is not ID’s as a BLM supporter? He’s supposed to be some guy so pissed off at Floyd’s death he’ll commit felony arson, but he’s not identifiable as a BLM supporter?
That’s the issue. We don’t know, because we aren’t told. Why is that? A few possibilities:
* Raguse and/or KARE don’t know and are unable to find out
* Raguse and/or KARE don’t want to know, so they aren’t trying to find out
* Raguse and/or KARE do know, but don’t want their audience to know
The second part — why include the business about the dumbass from Illinois and the other purported Boogaloo dudes? A few possibilities:
* Raguse and/or KARE suspect the blonde dude is actually Boogaloo, but don’t want to say that or can’t prove it
* Raguse and/or KARE are squirting octupus ink to obscure the actual motivation of the blonde dude, whether it is Antifa, BLM, Spartacus Youth League or Reformed Pastafarian
* Umbrella Man hasn’t told them
What can we reasonably conclude, based on years of observation?
* It’s about the Narrative first, last, and always
NW; the new AP stylebook is 619 pages. I think it’s safe to say they’ve lost their way. There is no way a journalist can comprehend it.
Regarding the political identification of suspects, sure, BLM and Antifa fascists don’t hand out registration cards and such. That noted, it does seem like an enterprising prosecutor might have some incentive to come up with a motive, and an enterprising journalist might inquire about what that motive might be.
And on that twelve million dollar restitution order, keep in mind that criminal restitution orders can not be discharged in bankruptcy. You can mitigate them in Chapter 13, but you cannot eliminate them altogether. So this guy’s sentence amounts in some ways to a life sentence. Somehow that seems very, very wrong here, quite a bit of Inspector Javert, really.
Javert is a good example, being French, of the principle behind utterly crushing the politically unpopular. The phrase you’re looking for is: Pour Encourager Les Autres.
So the story presented by KARE’s ace reporter isn’t the plain truth, “BLM supporter pleads guilty to firebombing police station,” it is “Man angry over George Floyd’s death pleads guilty to taking part in fire bombing police station, but 8 months ago two other guys who didn’t do anything admitted that they were “Boogie Bois.”
Jeebus I gotts get me some of that sweet “pro journalist” money. Beats doing a damn job for a living!
Here’s the most recent exhibit:
https://apnews.com/article/rhode-island-providence-shootings-624410b6ff8a8e5fab98245784200aec
Shots fired by “two groups” who are “known to police” and made up of “young men.” That’s all we are allowed to know.
Despite the lack of information, I’ll bet you a brand new nickel it was not Jehovah’s Witness door-knockers rumbling against the Latter Day Saints bicycle brigade. I’ll bet a second, slightly used nickel, it wasn’t the Amish on Rumspringa responding to being “dissed” by North Dakota Swedish Lutherans on Spring Break.
No membership cards were found at the scene so most likely we will never know who the perpetrators were or what motivated them, which means there’s nothing anybody can do to prevent it from happening again.