How the Media Paints a Story in Hues of Whiteness: The Waco Riot

[dismal]

Gunfight in western Mexico kills at least 39: officials

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - At least 39 people were killed on Friday in western Mexico during a fight between armed civilians and security forces, two government officials said, the latest bloodshed in an area that has been plagued by violent drug gangs

Damn, notice the way the media dotes on Hispanics!!!

http://news.yahoo.com/gunfight-western-mexico-kills-least-39-officials-185913396.html

This is worse than Waco but no "Thugs". No "Riot".

Just glamorous and sentimental terms like "gunfight", "armed civilians", "clash", "shootout" and "violent drug gangs"

 

[Underseer]

Riot? This was a fight between rival groups, not a riot.

And what's the point of this thread anyway??

Do you deny that the media would have used different language if the participants in the violence were non-white?

 

[arkirk]

What happens to people when they settle in Waco? Is there something in the water or air perhaps? Almost without exception, whenever this little town makes the news, it is the kind of thing we really don't want happening in our towns elsewhere...like the Davidians and now the evil white motorcycle gangs. Is there something about wide open spaces that brings folks with guns and wacky ideas to the area. It is more like the way things were when we were kids with forts and paying "grownup." It seems a cultural thing in Texas that you become a grownup when you get a real gun and find a conflict to get embroiled in.

Tom Sawyer has told us that some lives don't matter...well, we better figure out how to stay out of that class. In Waco, it figures out how to eliminate itself. I don't find any of this right. I think we have a civil duty to not engage in killing each other no matter what the squabble is about. Credos and social codes that don't start there seem in abundance in Waco.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Riot? This was a fight between rival groups, not a riot.

And what's the point of this thread anyway??

Do you deny that the media would have used different language if the participants in the violence were non-white?

I see no reason to think the language would have changed.

The terms used to describe it seem appropriate.

 

[ApostateAbe]

I found the CNN article that used the word "brouhaha."

http://www.wdtv.com/wdtv.cfm?func=v...t-Kills-9-Outside-Waco-Texas-Restaurant-23237

Here is the excerpt:

From fists to knives to guns

It all began in broad daylight -- around noon Sunday, at the restaurant known for scantily clad servers and "bike nights."

The fracas apparently started inside the restaurant's bathroom with something as simple as a shove or a disrespectful glance, authorities told CNN affiliate KTVT.

That brawl quickly escalated into a fistfight, which led to a knife fight, KTVT said.

The brouhaha spilled into the parking lot, where the gunfire erupted, Swanton said.

Bullets flew toward police, who returned fire. No officers were wounded, and all of the dead and injured are believed to be bikers, Swanton said.

He declined to identify the biker gangs involved. By the time the scene cleared, CNN affiliate KWTX said, authorities had recovered more than 100 weapons.​

So, the word "brouhaha" was used NOT to describe the gun battle but the fight that led up to the gunfire.

Earlier in the article, a police officer was quoted as follows:

What police saw was more brutal than what they'd anticipated -- and that might be an understatement. Swanton said in his 35 years of law enforcement experience, "this is the most violent and gruesome scene that I have dealt with."​

No one has trivialized this event, it does not fit the typical definition of "riot," and CNN does the kind of reporting Salon should be doing.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

I've also heard Baltimore called a "race riot" by conservative media.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Salon pisses me off. Sam Harris made a similar complaint against Salon when he was slanderously misrepresented. They have the appearance of being a news outlet, but they are really just a blog, caring less about the facts, more about the ideology of their readers. I will add Salon to my Chrome Block Site.

 

[RavenSky]

George Zimmerman was at the biker shoot-out in Texas?

 

[dismal]

I've also heard Baltimore called a "race riot" by conservative media.

Well, fortunately no one on the left has tried to imply the Baltimore Brouhaha had anything to do with racial issues in society.

 

[tantric]

What does this have to do with "hues of whitenes"? Is this just Athena being Athena or is there more to this OP than I am seeing?

i'll quote from my journal:

2% sub-Saharan African – that was the surprise when i had my dna done. i was always told my mother’s father was an indian, ‘one of those wild ass indians’ by which i guessed they meant the creeks, not the civilized cherokee. fine, i bought it, he was dark and died when i was a kid. but now i think that was a lie – my grandfather wasn’t indian, he was high yella. hmm, some background. the one drop rule states that if you have one drop of African blood you are black, regardless of what you actually look like, and was the law of the land in the old south. yeah, the old days…there’s a CSI:Miami episode about a guy who has a whirlwind romance and marries a woman, then kills her when he realizes she’s black. wtf?

i’m gone hafta lay this out: race is a lie. a terrible, insidious monster made of other lies, stitched together with a thread of hate. grok the meaning of the one drop rule: black is pollution, white is purity. it’s *obscene*. a white woman can have a black baby, but a black woman can never have a white baby. or rather a caucasian babies…hint: josef stalin was caucasian, the queen of england is not. take one of these people and have a paint matched to the color of their skin, then paint a wall that color and ask them to name it. it ain’t white – milk is white, you ain’t milk colored.

the simple truth is that all human beings are dirt colored. personally, my skin is like the sandy loam of the great plains, but i don't accept 'White' because i know the deep meaning. i'll accept 'Off-White'. people who classify themselves as 'white' will generally accept me at first, based on appearances, but when i start to talk, they kick me to curb. based on this story, though, i wonder how the stories would go if i acted on my revolutionary ideals? would i be a 'domestic terrorist'? did timothy macveigh get that label only because he was a white supremacist? i'm a felon and thus the bill of rights doesn't apply to me and i can't vote. as an american, i have this idea that i have an extra constitutional right to punch anybody who tells me i can't vote dead in his shit. how would that run on Fox?

 

[RavenSky]

A timely NPR piece on media portrayal of motorcycle clubs:

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/22/408517195/two-biker-rallies-one-white-one-black-one-badass-one-just-bad

Very different perception of two very similar groups of motorcycle enthusiasts behaving in a very similar manner.

aa

Supports Athena's OP point very well, I think. Good read, thank you for posting it.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

I found the CNN article that used the word "brouhaha."

http://www.wdtv.com/wdtv.cfm?func=v...t-Kills-9-Outside-Waco-Texas-Restaurant-23237

Here is the excerpt:

From fists to knives to guns

It all began in broad daylight -- around noon Sunday, at the restaurant known for scantily clad servers and "bike nights."

The fracas apparently started inside the restaurant's bathroom with something as simple as a shove or a disrespectful glance, authorities told CNN affiliate KTVT.

That brawl quickly escalated into a fistfight, which led to a knife fight, KTVT said.

The brouhaha spilled into the parking lot, where the gunfire erupted, Swanton said.

Bullets flew toward police, who returned fire. No officers were wounded, and all of the dead and injured are believed to be bikers, Swanton said.

He declined to identify the biker gangs involved. By the time the scene cleared, CNN affiliate KWTX said, authorities had recovered more than 100 weapons.​

So, the word "brouhaha" was used NOT to describe the gun battle but the fight that led up to the gunfire.

Earlier in the article, a police officer was quoted as follows:

What police saw was more brutal than what they'd anticipated -- and that might be an understatement. Swanton said in his 35 years of law enforcement experience, "this is the most violent and gruesome scene that I have dealt with."​

No one has trivialized this event, it does not fit the typical definition of "riot," and CNN does the kind of reporting Salon should be doing.

A fight that starts off with namecalling but ends in the morgue is still one fight. That hair is just a little thin to split.

 

[ApostateAbe]

I found the CNN article that used the word "brouhaha."

http://www.wdtv.com/wdtv.cfm?func=v...t-Kills-9-Outside-Waco-Texas-Restaurant-23237

Here is the excerpt:

From fists to knives to guns

It all began in broad daylight -- around noon Sunday, at the restaurant known for scantily clad servers and "bike nights."

The fracas apparently started inside the restaurant's bathroom with something as simple as a shove or a disrespectful glance, authorities told CNN affiliate KTVT.

That brawl quickly escalated into a fistfight, which led to a knife fight, KTVT said.

The brouhaha spilled into the parking lot, where the gunfire erupted, Swanton said.

Bullets flew toward police, who returned fire. No officers were wounded, and all of the dead and injured are believed to be bikers, Swanton said.

He declined to identify the biker gangs involved. By the time the scene cleared, CNN affiliate KWTX said, authorities had recovered more than 100 weapons.​

So, the word "brouhaha" was used NOT to describe the gun battle but the fight that led up to the gunfire.

Earlier in the article, a police officer was quoted as follows:

What police saw was more brutal than what they'd anticipated -- and that might be an understatement. Swanton said in his 35 years of law enforcement experience, "this is the most violent and gruesome scene that I have dealt with."​

No one has trivialized this event, it does not fit the typical definition of "riot," and CNN does the kind of reporting Salon should be doing.

A fight that starts off with namecalling but ends in the morgue is still one fight. That hair is just a little thin to split.

No, I actually think there is a difference between a fistfight and a gun battle.

 

[dismal]

A fight that starts off with namecalling but ends in the morgue is still one fight. That hair is just a little thin to split.

No, I actually think there is a difference between a fistfight and a gun battle.

Well, given the importance of this one word in this one article to our society we should probably convene a panel of English professors and Thought Police to assess this reporter's motives under oath and -- if necessary -- bring whatever charges are appropriate for the improper use of "Brouhaha".

 

[ApostateAbe]

No, I actually think there is a difference between a fistfight and a gun battle.

Well, given the importance of this one word in this one article to our society we should probably convene a panel of English professors and Thought Police to assess this reporter's motives under oath and -- if necessary -- bring whatever charges are appropriate for the improper use of "Brouhaha".

I would not dismiss the argument for that reason. If there was a genuine difference in vocabulary delineated only by race, then Salon would have a valid argument: the mainstream media is systemically white washing violence when whites are violent but not when blacks are violent. I will grant that logic. It turns out that their best example ("brouhaha") is merely a misrepresentation of their source. I didn't check the others. It is Salon, so they didn't cite their sources.

 

[dismal]

Well, given the importance of this one word in this one article to our society we should probably convene a panel of English professors and Thought Police to assess this reporter's motives under oath and -- if necessary -- bring whatever charges are appropriate for the improper use of "Brouhaha".

I would not dismiss the argument for that reason. If there was a genuine difference in vocabulary delineated only by race, then Salon would have a valid argument: the mainstream media is systemically white washing violence when whites are violent but not when blacks are violent. I will grant that logic. It turns out that their best example ("brouhaha") is merely a misrepresentation of their source. I didn't check the others. It is Salon, so they didn't cite their sources.

But if you're going to argue something is systematic based on one potentially ambiguous example you really need to exhaust all of the resources you possibly can to determine what the reporter meant. So much hinges on this one example we can't go about willy-nilly assuming it is or isn't reflective of seething racism in our entire national media. We need the truth.

 

[Valjean]

This wasn't a widespread, prolonged, disorganized, protest by random citizens, lashing out in random acts of violence. It was a brief, contained fight between representatives of competing organizations.
The police would probably responded the same way had it been a black or Asian gunfight.

 

[credoconsolans]

Riot? This was a fight between rival groups, not a riot.

And what's the point of this thread anyway??

I'm wondering too.

Every single news agency I listened to and watched, both local and national/international called it a bloody shootout. Which it was.