Media Falls for a Fake Utah Racism Claim

Media Falls for a Fake Utah Racism Claim

– By Howard Sierer –

Media outlets nationwide once again fell for a bogus claim of racial discrimination. Utah, in general, and BYU, in particular, provided a readymade setting for the failure.

As reported in the Salt Lake Tribune, the controversy started when the godmother of the Duke University volleyball team’s only black starter, Rachel Richardson, claimed that a BYU fan called her the “N-word” every time she served. The godmother is running for office in Texas and has a history of racist remarks directed at whites.

Once the godmother made the claim, Richardson felt obliged to back her up with a tweet reported by CNN: “Friday night in our match against Brigham Young University, my fellow African American teammates and I were targeted and racially heckled throughout the entirety of the match. The slurs and comments grew into threats which caused us to feel unsafe.” Other family members closed ranks around her as well.

This story was picked up by professional race-baiters in the Atlantic magazine and in USA Today. ESPN fell for it, interviewing Richardson while ESPN commentators condemned the incident. It was picked up without questioning by CNN, NPR, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Yet the entire story was a lie.

No one at the game other than Richardson herself reported hearing racial slurs. Richardson served at the BYU student end of the court only twice during the match, and the fan accused of making the slurs was shown on CCTV footage as being away from his seat during her first serve and on his phone the second time. No one in the crowd that included black members of the BYU men’s basketball team reported hearing any slurs or turning a head in that direction.

Once again, a bombshell allegation of racism has been parroted by the media, only to be a hoax.

Over the last 35 years, three especially notorious supposed hate crimes were the focus of national media coverage for weeks. All were eventually exposed as hoaxes, but only after great reputational damage had been done.

Tawana Brawley’s false accusation of being raped by white men in 1987 was whipped into a national firestorm by Al Sharpton, who hoped to improve his political standing.

The Duke University lacrosse team was falsely accused of raping a black woman in 2006. In a rush to judgment, lurid headlines of white male racism appeared across the country until the claim was exposed for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation.”

Well-known actor Jussie Smollett falsely accused two white men of attacking him in 2019, carrying a noose and shouting, “This is MAGA country.” His bogus claim was reported nationwide, with three U.S. senators and the head of the NAACP all denouncing the country’s “systemic racism.”

How common are hate-crime hoaxes? Here’s a list of 21 hoaxes that occurred during the 2016 to 2019 time period alone. Yet, in all these cases, there was little or no reckoning or accountability for the offending media that, in too many cases, failed even to apologize for its rush to judgment.

In all these cases, reputational damage was done, as it was in the recent BYU volleyball hoax. Millions of people will continue to believe these incidents actually occurred since even when retractions are made, they never travel as far and wide as the original misinformation does.

Sadly, just like the shepherd boy who falsely cried wolf, these fake hate-crime stories hurt the very minorities that the media intends to help. Just as villagers learned to ignore the shepherd boy, the American public will become skeptical of hate-crime reporting, diminishing the prospect of improving minority relations.

It’s fair to ask why the media so readily accept racist claims at face value without doing any of the simple fact-checking that is taught in Journalism 101. Two answers come immediately to mind. First, in today’s hypercompetitive news environment, the media are under pressure to attract eyeballs: sensational headlines lure readers and viewers.

Second, many universities are hotbeds of woke progressivism that sees racism everywhere and deem the country systemically racist. This is especially true of journalism departments that attract idealistic students who are intent on changing the world through their reporting. Politics trumps fact-checking.

Belief in the inherent racism of America is distorting the judgment of many mainstream journalists. This mindset is easily sustained when everyone around them, first at college and now on the job, agrees with them, and those beliefs justify their preferred politics.

Credible outlets cannot remain credible if they go on like this, repeatedly humiliated by fake racism claims. They need to take a day or two to gather facts, talk to all parties involved, cross-check sources and apply some plain old common sense to claims that, in retrospect, frequently are absurd.

But this is about more than taking time to gather the facts. It’s really about what today’s journalists think our country is like. Maybe what is wrong here is the mainstream news media’s underlying assumptions about America.

America is not irredeemably racist. On a one-on-one interpersonal basis, America has never been less racist than it is today, one of the most diverse, accepting and tolerant societies in history.

If our journalists can come to realize this, they will look foolish less often. Only then can our society deal with the diminishing number of real wolves among us.

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