Partially Accurate Vomit

A recent article from USAToday ran with the headline: Baltimore police stopped noticing crime after Freddie Gray's death. A wave of killings followed. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but this strikes me as a strangely worded headline. There use to be something of an artistic style to writing headlines. Probably it was out of necessity, as the message had to be conveyed in limited print space. Those restrictions are eased in the online setting. The two terse sentences of this headline read more like the brief descriptions that generally follow catchier headlines. The tempo of it strikes me as that of your typical internet click-bait. Baltimore police stopped noticing crime after Freddie Gray's death. You won't believe what happened next... It reads as a strangely artless headline because that's exactly what it is. It's written in a dying medium suffering serious brain drain. The papers' major activity is to compose sensationalism to lure in the diminishing crowd of dimwits who still turn to the big corporate outlets for their worldviews. [When I scroll to the bottom, the first promoted headline is: Professor speaks out after shutting down penis size study amid backlash. It really is a tabloid.]

Focusing on the content of the headline...if you didn't know better, you'd almost think there was an epiphany in the mainstream media. Conservatives, of course, have been saying forever that Obama's war on police would cause crime in the inner cities to increase. Life would become much worse for the typical citizens just trying to make it day to day. (And much better for the criminals.) Now, the papers are printing just the outcome we all predicted. Do they finally realize there is some merit to what conservatives have been saying? Of course they don't! As proof, let me cherry-pick a couple lines from the article.

During the Obama administration, the department launched wide-ranging civil rights investigations of troubled police forces, then took them to court to compel reforms. Under President Donald Trump, Washington has largely given up that effort.

Tuggle blames a shortage of patrol officers and the fallout from a blistering 2016 Justice Department investigation that found the city's police regularly violated residents' constitutional rights and prompted new limits on how officers there carry out what had once been routine parts of their job.

No matter the news, cops and and conservatives can always be blamed for something. When you see headlines like this, you may sometimes be tempted to think the media is finally coming around in some domain where they had previously rejected reality or basic reasoning. Never assume that to be the case. The more cynical among us respond to such articles by saying, "Even a broken clock is right twice a day." That is the proper analogy.

If I wanted to insult you (totally hypothetical, of course), I could slew random insults until finally something stuck. No one is perfect. Everyone is subject to some criticism, and thus some valid insult must exist. If I called you a hundred terrible things and one hit a nerve, would you say I was partially accurate? No, it wouldn't even make sense to issue a judgement on my correctness, because we wouldn't then be operating at the same level of analysis. You'd be responding in the domain of assessing truth. But I'm in the domain of inflicting harm. If I threw three punches at you and one landed solid, you wouldn't give me some credit for being partially accurate.

The papers are operating in a similar sense. They constantly attack the political opponents of the left. Any truth that can be find in the text is merely incidental. Insult someone long enough and there must occasionally be an element of truth. It is inevitable that these publications would at times display apparent moments of partial honesty. They deserve no credit for such inadvertent deeds.