For God’s sake describing things that occur are YOUR WHOLE ENTIRE JOB, LESTER:
The Baraboo School District is responding to a photo being shared thousands of times on social media of young men with their arms extended in the air appearing to give the Nazi salute. https://t.co/yV61KUaURX@RonMott has the details tonight on @NBCNightlyNews.
— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) November 12, 2018
Emphasis mine. I get that they are using this evasive weasel language to avoid being wrong, but a) that is not actually the worst thing ever on earth and b) WHAT OTHER POSSIBLE EXPLANATION IS THERE FOR THAT? What other “gesture” looks like that? This isn’t ambiguous, especially since the parents aren’t especially denying it and the kids are all “oh yeah, well what about the one black guy that did it, huh?” and the school administration is apparently saying forget the Nazis and think about how many cops Black Lives Matter has put into industrial ovens.
At a certain point you call something what it is. We see this all the time with videos that wind up on the news: “the video appeared to show …” YOU’RE LITERALLY WATCHING THE VIDEO. And if you haven’t verified it/can’t verify it, don’t put it on the air. The photo is of young white or white-passing kids doing the Hitler salute like it’s a joke, and that’s all this is. You want to make it evadable, okay, but understand that the people you’re helping to evade are Nazis.
This isn’t hard, but damned if we don’t make it sound like it is with the evasions and the bet-hedging and all the other things we think will make people Not Mad because that’s also something we think is a good goal. How on earth are we supposed to deal with things when we’re told that what we’re seeing isn’t quite there?
A.
I’m with you on this. The guy who shot the photo told them to do this AS EXACTLY THAT! In other news, when we were in church this weekend, the priest did a “veterans blessing” and asked us all to “extend your hands outward in prayer” and we ALL looked like we were doing that salute. I didn’t miss the irony that most of the vets in church were of the WW II age and here was this whole sea of extended arms at them. If nothing else, I love the way the vets in the MJS story basically said that even at age 95 or whatever, they’d kick the shit out of those kids if they did that in their presence.
someone lots younger than those vets needs to do exactly that, including to the $#@!$%&*^ photog.
Reblogged this on Thesseli.
some kids did this in a suburban Houston high school. the administration made them go on a field trip to the local Holocaust Museum if they wanted to graduate.
It could also be a Bellamy Salute, which was a required part of the Pledge of Allegiance until the 1940s – on the other hand, none of those pathetic children would probably even know what a Bellamy Salute is.