Big Media's Remarkable Lack of Curiosity on Race
Facts contradicting the prevailing narrative are out there. Why does Big Media stubbornly ignore them?
Above: The indoor Black Lives Matter Banner at First Universalist Church of Rochester. Photo by GaramondItalic
Over the past few days, we have seen further evidence (as if further evidence were needed) that Big Media reporters and editors are willfully blind to facts that confront their preferred and lazy narratives about race.
I can already hear objections from many of you: um, Patterico, are you under the impression that Big Media types are open to facts that contradict their narratives in other contexts??! Touché, imaginary reader in my head. Touché indeed. You got me there. But I do think there’s a particularly firm obstinacy when it comes to race, and two recent examples rather leap to mind. As we will see, Bari Weiss’s Substack is related to both.
The Re-Canonization of Aggressive and Threatening Central Park Birder Christian Cooper
I have written about the famous Amy Cooper/Christian Cooper encounter in Central Park many times. You remember this one. It’s the lady with the off-leash dog who told a black birder in Central Park: “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.” Well, hooray, the story is back, because news broke a few days ago that Christian Cooper is hosting a TV series on birding for National Geographic
If all you know of the story comes from the video, together with what you have read in Big Media, then the story is a very simple one. Christian Cooper, the black birder, politely asked Amy Cooper, the racist “Karen” (social media lingo for an entitled white woman), to leash her dog as park rules require. Rather than do so, she aggressively approached the calm black man and then called 911, using the man’s race against him in an effort to get him killed, the way George Floyd was killed (coincidentally the same day).
In reality, that is a highly distorted account of an episode in which both parties behaved badly. The first hint of this appeared almost exclusively in conservative media, such as this National Review post by Kyle Smith, or this New York Post article, both of which published quotes from Christian Cooper’s own account of the incident on Facebook. Here is a quote from that Facebook account, in which he admits having made a pretty aggressive statement:
Central Park this morning: This woman’s dog is tearing through the plantings in the Ramble.
“ME: Ma’am, dogs in the Ramble have to be on the leash at all times. The sign is right there.
“HER: The dog runs are closed. He needs his exercise.
“ME: All you have to do is take him to the other side of the drive, outside the Ramble, and you can let him run off leash all you want.
“HER: It’s too dangerous.
ME: “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it.”
HER: “What’s that?”
ME [to the dog]: “Come here, puppy!”
HER: “He won’t come to you.”
ME: “We’ll see about that.” . . . I pull out the dog treats I carry for just such intransigence. I didn’t even get a chance to toss any treats to the pooch before Karen scrambled to grab the dog.
That first bolded quote — “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it” — is threatening, although the nature of the threat is unclear. It seems more directed at the dog, as if he is going to poison it or abduct it. Any way you look at it, it’s aggressive and confrontational.
Kmele Foster did a podcast about the episode in which he dug deep into the facts of this controversy, and in order to understand my criticisms of the media here, you need to fully understand what Kmele revealed in the podcast. You really owe it to yourself to listen to the entire podcast, which is an hour and 22 minutes long. Knowing that few people reading this will actually listen, I will quote a summary of some of the information one learns therein, as summarized in a newsletter on Bari Weiss’s Substack authored by Megan Phelps-Roper:
Kmele also uncovered important context lost in the public narrative, including:
A recording of Christian Cooper at a local community board meeting just days before his encounter with Amy Cooper. “It’s getting super ugly between birders and unleashed dog walkers,” he says. “I’ve been assaulted twice so far this spring, people actually putting their hands on me, which really surprises me, because I’m not a small guy.”
May 2020 testimony provided by Jerome Lockett, a black man who said Christian had “aggressively” threatened him in the park. Among the details: “when I saw that video, I thought, I cannot imagine if he approached her the same way how she may have genuinely been afraid for her life.” He continued, “If I wasn’t who I was, I would of [sic] called the police on that guy too.”
Lockett also says: “My two fellow dog owners have had similar situations with this man, but don’t feel comfortable coming forward because they’re white. They think they’ll be seen as some ‘Karen’ or whatever.” His complete statement can be found on page nine here.
The dispatch from Amy Cooper’s 911 call, which seems to corroborate her explanation that her double reference to Christian’s race to the operator — and the growing hysteria she displayed in the video — was the result of a bad cell phone connection. Listen here:
Amy’s history of sexual assault, her suicidal ideation, and why she fled the country.
You learn other things in the podcast. First, dogs don’t always have to be leashed in Central Park; this is required only in certain areas. In the morning, dogs are allowed off-leash in most places. Amy Cooper was initially in one of those places, but it was hard to get back to the east side of the park where she lived from where she was, so she chose to go through The Ramble, an incredibly isolated section of the park at its extreme north end. There, she was supposed to leash her dog, and she should have.
Another thing that really comes across in the podcast is just how isolated this section of the park truly is. It’s a wooded area and there were literally no other people in sight when, Amy Cooper says, a man started yelling at her. She says she was trying to get her dog leashed when Christian Cooper issued the “I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it” threat. She says Christian Cooper was holding dog treats in one hand and a bike helmet in the other. She wondered, given the threat, if Christian Cooper planned to hit her or her dog with the helmet. She says that when the recording we have all seen starts, Christian Cooper’s tone suddenly shifted from menacing to timid and meek — which she found startling and just plain weird. Why had his tone shifted so much? What was he doing?
Many readers will naturally be skeptical of aspects of this account. To them, I say: skepticism is fine, and even laudable, as long as it does not become a form of cynicism that ignores other evidence. So let’s look at some other evidence. For example, let’s look at Christian Cooper’s own admissions — and then, look at his history of conflict in Central Park with people whose dogs are off-leash. As Kemele says at one point in the podcast:
Amy’s fear is always presented as irrational or unjustified or totally performative. In short, we’re told that she is definitely lying. But if there is a documented history of similar incidents playing out in similar ways between Christian Cooper and other people in the park, then we have a better basis from which we can make an assessment as to whether Amy’s account of his behavior is credible. In other words, if multiple people have independently had the same conflict with the same person, and felt similarly threatened, we have less reason to believe that she is exaggerating or inventing things here.
The podcast explains that there is a history of conflict between birders and dog people, all over the country and in Central Park specifically. As noted above, Christian Cooper is on tape specifically talking about this at a community board meeting. At the meeting, he says he actually likes dogs, but adds not to put that out there because: “my rep as a dog hater serves me well in the park.” He says he has been assaulted twice, and he wants more law enforcement out there. Yes, the black man who was supposedly victimized by a white woman trying to get law enforcement involved . . . actually himself wants more law enforcement there.
So Kmele says he tracked down people whose stories were eerily similar to that of Amy Cooper, right down to the detail of Christian Cooper holding his bike helmet held in an intimidating way. Most of these people refuse to go public — after all, look at what happened to Amy Cooper (about which I will say more below). But there is that written statement from Jerome Lockett, a black man who sent his story to NBC. In Lockett’s account, which has been previously reported before the podcast (albeit without much fanfare in most outlets), Christian Cooper yelled at him, pursued him, and tried to lure his dog away with dog treats. Lockett says that he asked Christian Cooper to stop, and ended up feeling so threatened that he pushed Christian Cooper to the ground. He said he knew two fellow dog owners who had had similar encounters with Christian Cooper. In those encounters, Christian Cooper had gripped a bike helmet in a seemingly threatening manner, just as he had done in his encounter with Amy Cooper. But those people did not want to come forward.
Now I want to return to the isolated nature of the Ramble, in connection with another aspect of the story not widely known: Amy Cooper’s history as a survivor of a sexual assault that happened to her when she was in college. That detail should matter. During the Me Too moment, you could imagine people easily identifying with the plight of a woman (of any color) by herself in an isolated area of Central Park, being confronted by a man (of any color) yelling at her and threatening her . . . all without a soul in sight. Imagine what that is like — and what it was like for her to call 911, only to have difficulty being heard because of a bad connection, no doubt due to the isolation of the area she was calling from.
After the 911 call, Christian Cooper left, but a man who happened along after the incident waited with Amy Cooper and helped her until the police arrived. All very odd behavior for someone who (we are confidently told) never felt threatened at all, but was merely putting on an act out of a racist desire to get a black man killed by the cops.
Kmele confronts Amy Cooper about why she said “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.” She claims, not entirely convincingly, that she was just giving the facts, and that if it had been a white man, she would have said “I’m going to tell them there’s a white man threatening my life.” This is the part of the story that upsets people, including me. I have always said this is a story of two people behaving badly, and this is the part where I believe Amy Cooper behaved badly. I’m inclined to cut her a little slack because of her evident fear; people who are frightened don’t always behave ideally. But she offers no good explanation for emphasizing Christian Cooper’s race in the way she did.
That said, the incredible lack of proportionality between her offense, such as it was, and the punishment for that offense, is stunning. Amy Cooper went home, and a little bit later that same day, her phone blew up with death threats and graphic images about 15 minutes after Soledad O’Brien tweeted the video to her massive Twitter following. Amy Cooper was doxxed instantly. The mob changed the Wikipedia page of her employer. She received scores of threats, and read one on the podcast:
Amy Cooper from New York, if that is indeed you in the video, slit your wrists. You are a piece of shit . . . someone should put that leash around your neck and drop you from one of those trees . . . if anyone deserves prison rape, it is you . . . please kill yourself.
There were probably 100 of those messages and another 100 phone calls, she says — adding, with a tremor in her voice that you have to hear to appreciate, that she told her family to deny they knew her, and to tell people that she didn’t exist. A crowd gathered in front of her apartment. She packed a bag and fled to a safe house. She lost her job. Her dog, which was a rescue, was taken away. Everywhere she turned, she saw the video over and over. She was compared to a lynch mob, and it became Conventional Wisdom that it was “open season on black men.”
Public pressure mounted for the District Attorney to bring criminal charges against Amy Cooper, and mobs protested in front of the District Attorney’s office. Ultimately, the District Attorney formally charged Amy Cooper with making a false police report. I consider that decision to be an utterly shameful act of the part of the District Attorney, and I am not alone in being mystified. Ultimately the case was diverted and dismissed.
Today, Amy Cooper is in hiding. She has moved to a different country and will not say where it is. “I go out but it’s very rare I leave my home without someone.” She drives her dog to a remote field to walk him. There is a hiking trail near her home that she would love to take her dog to, but she does not use it because she is terrified to go into the woods with her dog anymore. Even going to the grocery store is traumatic. She worries that she will be recognized, and that there may be a confrontation. She has contemplated suicide at times. She has contemplated moving to a country where English is not the primary language, thinking that might reduce the number of people who would recognize her.
Meanwhile, Christian Cooper is still ready for conflict with other dog owners. In October 2021, a fellow birder commented on Facebook about off-leash dogs, saying “I swear half my mental energy is spent raging about this and trying to think of ways to stop it (better signage, letting birders give out fines [smiley face emoji inserted here] screaming at them, awareness campaigns, etc.).” (All bold emphasis in this paragraph is mine.) Cooper responded: “You're preaching to the choir! You aren't powerless in this situation, but if you're going to engage you have to be prepared for conflict; the sense of entitlement in the subset of dog walkers who flout the rules leads them to behave in some godawful ways when confronted. Trust me, I know!”
Both Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper spend significant parts of their lives prepared for conflict. Amy Cooper is terrified of conflict. This one destroyed her life. Christian Cooper, who probably still carries his dog treats around with him even though he does not own a dog, is still seeking out conflict.
The above is a lot of background for my ultimate point: media criticism. What astounds me is how incurious Big Media is about all the facts I just told you about. They have their narrative — a polite black man was nearly lynched by a racist white woman — and they are sticking with it come what may. So when Christian Cooper was recently awarded a show on National Geographic, here’s how the New York Times characterized the event that launched his fame:
A Birder Is Back in the Public Eye, Now on His Own Terms
Christian Cooper’s encounter in Central Park with a white woman who called 911 to falsely accuse him of threatening her spurred a national outcry. Now he is hosting a birding series for National Geographic.
As Kmele Foster says, that subhed is just plain false:
Here are characterizations of the episode from the body of the piece:
He is perhaps best known for his encounter there two years ago with a woman who called the police and falsely claimed that he was threatening her after Mr. Cooper asked that she keep her dog on a leash.
Now, he is about to once again be in the public eye — this time on his own television show.
Again we see the false claim that Amy Cooper’s claim was false. There’s simply no way to reach that conclusion as a matter of undisputed journalistic fact given everything Kmele’s podcast revealed, and everything I have been at pains to describe in this newsletter. The soft focus on Christian Cooper’s aggression continues:
The confrontation in Central Park in 2020 thrust him into the public eye in a new way. Mr. Cooper took out his phone and began recording during a disagreement with the woman he encountered there, Amy Cooper. The video showed Ms. Cooper, who is not related to Mr. Cooper, making a 911 call and saying to him: “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.”
After Mr. Cooper’s sister posted the video to Twitter, it was viewed tens of millions of times. . . . .
Mr. Cooper emerged as a thoughtful, measured voice. He spoke publicly about what he called the “deep vein of racial bias” that runs through society, and he said there was no excuse for the racism inherent in Ms. Cooper making a false allegation against him.
But he also distanced himself from the public pillorying of Ms. Cooper and declined to cooperate with prosecutors, who ended up asking a judge to dismiss the case against her after she completed a therapeutic program that included instruction about racial biases.
There is nothing in this piece about Christian Cooper’s threat to do something Amy Cooper isn’t going to like. Nothing about the numerous other instances of Christian Cooper making similar threats to other people. Nothing about the isolation of the area, Amy Cooper’s background as a sexual assault victim, the inability of the 911 operator to hear her — all facts that contextualize her fear and agitation before and during the 911 call.
Nope, it is the simple narrative of a curiously incurious newspaper hellbent on repeating the established narrative. Next to this, a sheep being led to slaughter is a positive free thinker . . . and at least has the wisdom to keep its mouth shut.
And the New York Times narrative is hardly unique. Good luck finding any story that contextualized the incident the way Kmele’s podcast does.
I’ll conclude this section of the newsletter with a moment from the podcast that really struck me, because it provides a perfect transition to my next topic. Near the end of the podcast, at 1:13:14, Kmele asks Amy Cooper: “I understand your perspective on this and what happened, and why you said what you said. But I wonder if you understand why someone else might have a different conclusion about this.” Amy Cooper began by again citing the statement by Gayle King that the episode shows it is “open season on black men.” Amy Cooper then continued:
You know, if you hear that and believe — you know, and it may be correct or it may not, and, you know, I’m not an expert in the stats or the data — that, you know, black men are more aggressively policed, more aggressively attacked, harmed, hurt by police — yes. Because that’s going to play into — much like a man threatening me in the park plays into my back history and trauma, with being sexually assaulted — someone who has that trauma or has had that narrative given to them, it plays into their trauma and their back history. And it’s exactly the same thing. So yes. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, completely.
Amy Cooper does not know enough about statistics to be in a position to accept or deny the narrative that black men are disproportionately targeted by police. But she knows what Big Media says about it, and she knows that it’s a widespread feeling that is accepted by a lot of people.
Ironically, however, there is a lot out there to question that narrative. And Big Media is curiously, and stubbornly, incurious about that, too.
Which brings us to our next topic.
Big Media Deliberately Blinds Itself to the Facts Regarding Whether Police Have a Pattern of Racially Motivated Shootings Against Black Men
Also on Bari Weiss’s Substack, you may have heard the story about a data scientist for Thomson Reuters, Zac Kriegman, who questioned the prevailing narrative about police shootings of black men. He presented his findings to his employer, which quickly saw the error of its ways and began reporting on the issue in a more responsible and fact-driven fashion. Ha ha, I’m joking of course. Actually they fired him.
What you might not have noticed is that some of the data and analysis he cited can be found right here on the very Substack you are reading.
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