We’ve had Jussie Smollett, Nicholas Sandmann, and numerous others. Whenever there is a public accusation of racial impropriety, bad-faith media actors leap into action.
This time, it involved black volleyball players from Duke University. Some of these players claimed that several members of the BYU student cheering section were hurling racist epithets and slurs. Specifically, Duke’s Rachel Richardson claimed she heard such insults when she stepped back to serve. This was good enough for CNN’s Brianna Keilar and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, as well as the Atlantic’s Jemele Hill (who practically makes a living off such episodes). Nominally unbiased (very nominally) news outlets such as NPR also ran with the accusation, once again without corroboration.
Shortly after the story broke, however, both the BYU student newspaper and the Salt Lake Tribune said they could not verify important details of Richardson’s story.
Campus police who looked into the incident could not verify any eyewitness accounts of the harassment Richardson spoke of. The BYU student newspaper spoke to several on-the-record witnesses who stated that they neither heard nor saw anyone screaming slurs at any time. Furthermore, when Richardson pointed out an individual believed to be the person committing the act, that person was then escorted off the premises and permanently banned from any future sporting events on campus. The only problem is surveillance video at the time Richardson claims she heard the slurs shows that this individual was not in their seat.
All of these details appeared in law enforcement incident reports, the student newspaper, and the Salt Lake Tribune. Unfortunately, this prudent journalism wasn’t good enough for ESPN, ABC’s Good Morning America, or CNN. Let’s be clear — these aren’t just some one-person partisan blogs. These are supposedly serious news outlets that have many producers to vet stories before running them.
Why are there never any professional consequences for this shoddy journalism?
Is this a recipe for the new “hard news” standard that new CNN boss Chris Licht is reported to be employing at CNN? What happened to standards at the Atlantic, which just recently held a conference on disinformation? Or does that standard only apply to external journalists, not the publication’s own writers?
It’s possible Richardson simply misheard chants of her name or heckling from a rowdy college audience. At least for now, she deserves the benefit of the doubt that she is not simply perpetrating a volatile racial hoax. But no journalist deserves this level of good faith.
Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) has written for National Review, the New York Post, and Fox News and hosts the Versus Media podcast.
