Headlines describing the running down of anti-fascist protesters as “clashes.”
The Washington Post, Boston Globe, AOL News, The Hill, BBC and Sky News UK all chose to frame the ramming of a car into anti-fascist protesters as “clashes.”
The BBC’s breaking news tweet, “One dead amid clashes between US white nationalists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville,” is an extremely odd way to describe a person driving a car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters–as was AOL’s “1 Dead, 34 Injured in Clashes at Virginia Rally.”
The term “clashes”—as FAIR (10/14/15) has noted before—is a term designed to obscure blame, presenting a picture of two equal sides engaging in violent activities. Reading “one dead” after “clashes” at a white nationalist rally gives us no idea who died, or who did the killing.
(Alternatively, one can veil responsibility by attributing agency to an inanimate object and disembodied emotions, as with the New York Times‘ headline, “Car Plows Into Crowd as Racial Tensions Boil Over in Virginia.”)
There are times when things can be ambiguous, but after a person the police say “premeditatedly” rammed into a crowd of anti-racist protesters with a car, it’s fairly clear the anti-racist protesters aren’t to blame for the death. But one would hardly know this, reading these “clashes” framings.
Most of these articles would mention in the text (or later change the headline after social media backlash) to make it clear it was the anti-fascist protesters who were mowed down, but the initial instinct to obscure who did what to whom speaks to the pathological fear of placing blame on the far right.
Hmm how about
“Alt -right driver rams into peaceful protestors.” so at least you know who did what to whom.
or “American terrorists attack in Virginia”
Otherwise the headline writers are making everything inane, which is pretty easy.. So how about this one, “Shots ring out in Dallas, convertible escapes.”…..see no one is dead.
I thought HEADLINES were supposed to make people want to read the story….. but give as much of— who, what, when, and where as they could…..the HOW would be in the story.
Actually, that’s pretty much what the earliest reports from Dallas said… and the earliest reports are what are being unfairly targeted here.
Hi, AB…wow the earliest reports said not much?
Wow # 2 so I googled old newspapers on
9-22-63 Kennedy and aactually, they were pretty basic but they got it right.. The examples that popped up were:
Kennedy Dead. KennedySlain, Kennedy killed, President Dead, Kennedy Shot..
…. so I think that back in those days, the headline writers wrote headlines that gave people a really CLEAR idea….
.sorry, I have to disagree
that the “earliest reports” on JFK were like the lame ones on this terrorist action. in Charloteviile. I think there were actual journalists back then.
The US/UK corporate and state medias obfuscate and dissemble the acts of violent extremists in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Why would they stop now?
Trump is promoting Fascism. No question about it. This nation is in deep trouble. Corporations have near complete control both political parties. If this isn’t a cause for alarm I don’t know what is.
Mussolini’s, fascism’s originator, definition of fascism: corporate control of state power. Although President Bozo Shoes is piling on, fascism isn’t new to him. Any more than Kellyanne Conways’ allusion to a “post-factoid” world. The blowing up of the Maine in fin de siecle Cuba Harbor was filled with post-fact.
Adding the two state troopers whose helicopter crashed into the mix–as in the new “Three Dead” headlines–is also confusing the situation. As sad as it is when a helicopter crashes, it is not the same as a white supremacist deliberately driving into a crowd and killing and maiming anti-racist protesters.
Note also how the deaths of the two officers in the copter accident receives equal weight to the murderous mayhem visited on the protesters.
Anything to diminish a reality the corpress refuses to acknowledge.
Fair? Your piece is so slanted it is absurd. First off, a rogue moron driving into a crowd is not representative of the differing, convoluted, and complex views of the many groups you lump into “Far-Right”. That in and of itself is UNFAIR. Also, the major news outlets, as expected, portrayed the incident along the polar lines they subscribe too.
I stumbled on this site of supposed fair reporting since 1986, only to read your biased misrepresentation of a news story that aligns with leftists ideology. If you want to be truthful you have 2 choices, change the name of this website or find the center my friend.
You mean the extreme center. What is the defining character trait of the United Statesean? I presume you’re one? A fascist? Mo-ooron. Yours is hubris giving one of the best media outlets on the internet an ultimatum. “To” indicates toward that place. “Too” indicates degree, amplitude. Nice try. Maybe you’d like a lesson in the difference between there, they’re and their.
Ah another right wing apologist limpbot who defines everything ‘right’ as “good, lovely and wonderful” and anything ‘bad’ is one off rouge acting out of character. Would you like to also present your limpbot ideal that “anything left is a networked world-wide terrorist Org? Seriously, if your going to be limpbot responder, at least do something interesting. We can read the same Garbage on Yahoo’s website, where you would be walking in lockstep if you had the actual intelligence to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Hi Bob, I think that the center is kind of scary. In the last election the people who said they were centrist…I mean that sounds like center..yes? Those people seem to vote for wars and disabling the 4th amendment, and both parties seem to like to go to war now what with 800 bases around the world . If you want to be truthful, I think we are at the point of that poem where, “the center cannot hold. mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ” FAIR will know when that is, but I don;t think that the major media will know, You should probably keep reading FAIR.
Don’t worry, Bob, some of the good folks at Google are patrolling the boundaries of the center, making sure to decrease the traffic to leftist websites like FAIR: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/02/pers-a02.html
Thank goodness for Google. We wouldn’t want this stuff going out there uncensored, would we? Then it might be popular! And then people might forget that the center is where the truth is.
Perspicacious analysis Adam Johnson. Bravo.
USA Today: “the tragedy of the car crash potentially overshadowed whatever message Heimbach hoped the rally would send.”
An act of terrorism, not a “car crash” and the use of the words “potentially overshadowed” make it all sound like an accident.
MSM does it again; where IS that infamous “liberal bias”, anyway?
Snark
Oh thank god it was a White Supremacist/Neo Nazi who did this; Had this been a Person of Color we would have been subjected to a TERRORIST ATTACK!!!! /snark
Talk about gutless reporting, the Main Stream Media can’t seem to pull its collective head out of the Barrel and call the Radicalized Fascist groups what they are, “Terrorist”. No wonder we have Neo-Nazi’s in the white house writing utter garbage NSC memos about ‘Social Marxists’. When we are going to wake up, when they American Version of the Stasi/SS finally declares war on the world? I used to wonder how the German People could be lead down the path of Nazism. Now we know for sure, the complacent media. Too bad we didn’t study our History because we are repeating one of it’s most serious blunders.
Everyone making knee-jerk reactions to this post needs to look at what the press has written since the facts have actually come out, and not just base or reinforce their views on the earliest breaking news tweets and posts. This fair.org post should actually be a lesson in showing how spot news is handled – with restraint and commitment to understanding news before reporting it.
meanwhile when an Muslim rams a vehicle into people in Barcelona or anywhere he or she is widely condemned as a terrorist and know ambiguous Orwellian terms are used to describe it. Corporate/state media is rotten to the core.