Janell Ross's tenuous article on alleged racial profiling in Germantown and/or Salemtown (deciphering which it is nearly impossible from Ross's opaque reporting) is now linked on a white supremacist website under a title like, Neighborhood in Nashville Calls The Police When They See Blacks Out Walking (I have modified the title so as not to subject readers unnecessarily to vulgar and racist epithets). I will not link the site, because I do not intend to dignify it with increased traffic. If you really want to subject yourself to the hatred there, then do what I did: conduct searches that might be connected with Ross's Tennessean story and see what you find (but be warned, the "n-word" appears everywhere).
Looks like Ms. Ross's readership is expanding in unintended, but not surprising ways. Perhaps she should take a more accountable, measured response to reporting community news before putting others' reputations at stake under the title "journalism." I can certainly see how someone would be able to pull the point from the Tennessean article that white neighborhoods are calling police (she labels it "plaguing" police) against any African American pedestrian. No one has to torture her vague reportage to leap to that interpretation. There is no inkling in her article that Salemtown is predominately African American. Doesn't reporter Janell Ross have an obligation to be more transparent about actual conditions of the communities about which she writes?
Interesting circumstantial argument implicit here:
ReplyDeleteThe Tennessean's online format, which displays reader comments immediately underneath website articles, is notoriously a soapbox for far-right political views, largely on immigration and race, in which the most tenuous connection between fringe politics and the actual stories are made time and again.
(Let's set aside the appropriateness of this model, though a reader of stories about Colas murders this summer would see nightmarish, race politics and out-and-out libel of the victims from the right wing peanut gallery appearing immediately after a piece of sober and sad reporting.)
My question is: was the dirtbag who carried this story to the hate websites so quickly one of the ranting rightwingers who flood the responses to every article with their garbage? That information moved very quickly from the Tennessean to the hate network. What is the Tennessean THINKING, providing a prominent forum for the most marginal and bigoted losers in the midstate?