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n2doc

(47,953 posts)
Thu Sep 4, 2014, 11:27 AM Sep 2014

If You Are 'Waiting for the Facts' from the Police, You Will Be Waiting for the Rest of your life

It means waiting until "get over it" becomes a legitimate excuse.

By Luke O'Neil

By now you've likely had the misfortune of wading knee-deep into the overflowing septic tank that passes for dialogue surrounding the Michael Brown story. Predictably, on one side of the argument, there are those who see this as yet another example of violence perpetrated against black men by an institutionally racist law enforcement complex. On the other extreme, you have those who think that Brown, simply because he was even in a position to run afoul of the police, must have done something to provoke his own killing, aggression being the natural state of the animalistic black man.

Somewhere in that spectrum there are those who are still waiting for all the facts to come in.

They're going to be waiting a long time.

“Waiting for all the facts to come in” is a common trope whenever there's a racially charged, or politically tendentious story in the news that captures all of our attention. In theory, it's an appeal to some unreachable, platonic model of journalistic balance, the type of “some say, others say” equivocating that comprises most of the work done by our milquetoast national media. This myth presumes that the truth in any story must fall in the exact center of some probability distribution equation between either extreme. It assumes that both extremes hold equal validity, when that is almost never true.

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http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/waiting-for-the-facts-forever

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