Once again the media’s efforts to avoid mentioning that a criminal is a member of a group they wish to protect have ended up stirring people up against that group. Here are two examples of the Streisand Effect as applied to criminals that I came across in the last two days:
The first example was reported the Telegraph about its rival the Guardian: “Guardian writer boycotts newspaper for failing to tell readers ‘cat killer’ murderer was transgender”.
A writer for the Guardian has boycotted the newspaper for failing to tell its readers that a cat killer who murdered a stranger was transgender.
Scarlet Blake, a 26-year-old trans woman, was found guilty last week of murdering Jorge Martin Carreno in July 2021 on his way home from a night out, four months after Blake’s Netflix-inspired killing of a cat.
Louise Tickle, an award-winning journalist who has written for the Guardian for more than 20 years, has accused the newspaper of “deceiving its readers” for using the word “woman” in its headline and omitting the fact Blake was transgender in an article covering the case.
This is the revised version of that Guardian story. It now includes a brief mention of the fact that Blake is transgender.
The second example comes from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and refers to the murder of Laken Riley:
#BREAKING: A 26-year-old Athens man has been charged with murder in the death of a nursing student on the University of Georgia campus.
— Atlanta Journal-Constitution (@ajc) February 24, 2024
Being in the UK, I cannot see the actual article due to GDPR regulations (why do we still have those?), but the tweet from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that links to its report says “A 26-year-old Athens man has been charged with murder in the death of a nursing student on the University of Georgia campus.”
The AJC’s description of the man charged with Laken Riley’s murder, Jose Antonio Ibarra, as an “Athens man” when he is actually a Venezuelan illegal immigrant prompted Elon Musk himself to tweet, “Why did you lie to the people by calling an illegal from Venezuela an “Athens man”?”
Hint to the Guardian and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: when you try to hide something about the perpetrator of a crime and the truth comes out, people do not approach your next report of a similar crime with an open mind. They very reasonably tend to assume that you are hiding the same thing you hid before. Not only does this do the exact opposite of your intention – cause readers to overestimate the prevalence of the group you tried to protect among criminals of that type rather than underestimate it as you tried to make them do – it also means that they lose trust in everything else you tell them.
Mr Gell-Mann? Mr Murray Gell-Mann to the white courtesy phone, please.
Every time the traditional media does this kind of stuff – covering a story, with a pillow, until it stops moving – they chip away a little more at their own credibility, such as it is, so that pretty-soon, there will be nothing left of it.
Oh, well, how sad, never mind.
llater,
llamas
But perhaps the Grauniad don’t care about the disillusionment of those who seek truth but only the unreflective support of those already convinced of a particular world view?
What is this reference to Murray Gell-Mann? I only know of him as a physicist, and without checking I think he won a Nobel for physics in the 60s or 70s.
I lived in the Atlanta burbs at one point. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was often referred to as the Atlanta Urinal-Constipation, with good reason.
James, there’s a thing called the “Gell-Mann” effect, which refers to the tendency among physicists to get outraged whenever they read an article about physics in the popular press (because the articles pretty much always get pretty much everything wrong), but then to take the rest of the paper at face value. It’s not just physicists who make this general sort of error, of course.
Not sure why it’s named after Gell-Mann. I’ve heard that he was particularly prone to make this error, and alternately that he liked pointing out that his co-workers made this error all the time. Maybe both were true.
@James Strong… The Gell-Mann reference isn’t to the man, other than by association, but with the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect popularized by Michael Crichton, the author/academic.
Said effect is succinctly laid out by him as follows:
Here’s the origin of the name.
https://staghounds.blogspot.com/2007/04/rape-trap.html
James Strong, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect was a term coined by Michael Crichton in a speech in 2002. He said,
Personally, I think that the U.S. media’s partisanship for the Democrats has driven such a decline in their standards that the Gell-Mann amnesia effect no longer applies. Everyone can remember the last time the media lied to them.
Edit: three posts by three people explaining it simultaneously! Memorable.
I’ve been pointing this out for years, now. The media had this vast bank of “public trust” that they’ve steadily been drafting on for decades. The account balance on that is now well into the negative numbers, and even the most credulous and trusting among their audience are beginning to look up and go “WTF? Do they really expect us to believe that…?”
The problem here is that none of them bothered to think systematically and consider “credibility” as an expendable, just like all the other dumbasses that participated in the Gramscian takeovers throughout society. Their essential blindness is that they think that the power and authority were inherent to the institutions themselves, not due to the people and activities those institutions possessed.
I used to take “authority figures” from whatever source as being… Well, authoritative and worth listening to. Then, I grew up, and discovered that most of them weren’t just men with feet of clay, but actual busts perched upon entire bodies of really poor-quality and essentially rotten clay.
The media and the rest of these idiots are about to discover, over the next generation or so, precisely what happens when the “willing suspension of disbelief” and “trust in the organization/institution” finally evaporates in the masses.
Robert Peel’s principles can be put something like “you can only police by consent; that consent is withdrawn, you aren’t policing any more, you’re going to have to move to outright oppression…”
What the “elites” are about to find out is that once you’ve lost the “Mandate of Heaven” with the public, you’re not getting it back any time soon. Honestly wouldn’t surprise me if we don’t see a lot of politicians doing the lantern dance before too much longer, joined by their academic peers and a bunch of “journalists”. No plans on participating, myself, but I am “not planning” on getting involved in stopping it, either. They get what they’ve earned, is the way I see it. Succeeding generations of “elite” and wannabe elites may take salutary lessons from the mob actions I see coming down the pike. Or, not… The Dutch pols don’t seem to have picked up much from the fate of Johan de Witte and his brother…
Politician: The other white meat…
Wow. I get on a plane for just an hour or two, and there’s a half-dozen people doing my explaining for me! Good job. Maybe this will become a meme?
llater,
llamas
Paul Marks makes his old point that Mr Putin is NOT the answer to the Critical Theory Marxist “Woke” nightmare that the West is becoming.
As for this case – of course a man should be called a man, not a “Trans Woman”, and of course an illegal immigrant, or a legal immigrant, should be described as-such.
It is a pity that the Corporate owned newspapers of the United States (such as the Atlanta Hate-the-Constitution Journal) are controlled by “Woke”, Critical Theory (Frankfurt School) Marxist types – but that is because the schools and universities that produce them are dominated by such types.
By they way – most of them do NOT even know the doctrines that dominate their conduct are from Marxism.
Paul Marks said:
The majority “most” that you refer to…? In all likelihood, based on the ones I have encountered in the course of my life, they really should never have allowed within any sort of academic program whatsoever. The people you’re referring to, in my experience, haven’t even had mediocre intellects, nor do they possess the slightest intellectual curiosity. They’re second- and third-rate hacks, the sort who boast about not having read a book after college. If they have, the read the approved ones only, and can recite chapter and verse from them as though they mean something.
It’s quite like the second-tier true-believer religious types; they got their indoctrination in young, and they won’t ever deviate. I doubt you could re-educate the current lot of woke fanatics, mostly because the Jell-O of their minds has already set, and they can’t go back. These are people who look at black, see white, and are entirely unable to recognize the fact that they’re mistaken in their identification.
In other words, most of them can’t recognize Marxism for what it is, and wouldn’t, even if they could.
A worse problem than reporting stories with an inconvenient fact missed out is systematically not reporting at all or reporting them very very briefly and then memory holing them.
More often than not when they fail to report a fact it can either be inferred or leaks out.
I remember a particularly bizarre BBC report of riots in Liverpool many years ago, in which the BBC omitted any explanation of who was rioting or about what. It turned out that one side in the riots was West Indians and the other side were South Asians, hence as these uncomfortable facts undermined the official narrative of oppression by white people they were omitted. More recently rioting between Hindus and Muslim both of South Asian origin in Leicester was barely reported by the BBC and the rest of our glorious media.
To find out about the scale and scope of the farmers protest in Europe you would have to go to alternative new sources. The recent series of targetted killings of natives in various European countries by dissatisfied immigrants is simply not reported by the conventional media. I don’t have the time or the energy to trawl through dozens of alternative sources to find out what is really going on. All I can do is know that the official media have a woke Marxist agenda and can’t be believed.
An article hidden midway down today’s “London” section of the “London and the South East” regional section of the “England” section of the “UK” section of the BBC World News website.
A man has been arrested after a person was found fatally injured in a “despicable” act of “unprovoked violence” at an east London train station, police have said. The victim, whose gender has not been released, was found on the floor with extensive injuries at Harold Wood station by a member of staff, who reported it to police at about 04:30 GMT.
Other news outlets have featured this far more prominently and included the minor detail that the victim was an elderly man, not just a person of unknown gender.
Call me cynical but I doubt we will be hearing any more about this case and particularly the identity of the killer.
@Kirk at February 27, 2024 at 5:38 pm
This one is from 10 years ago by a guy that drove a taxi and reported on his passengers and conversations. This one is a long(ish) read but very interesting coming from someone who works in the Intelligence and Security community.
https://taxicabdepressions.com/?p=1193
Only 100? I’d call it a bargain.
I am actually from Athens, Georgia and follow a number of people from that town on FB. I don’t think anyone has even mentioned that crime.
@Phil B,
One the one hand, I’m of a mind he’s probably right in thinking that there are some very hard cases out there, who’ve made short little lists… And, that duly provoked, they’ll act. We still haven’t heard from them, sooooo… Not so sure about that, these days.
On the other, like I say: They’ve not acted, yet. What is it going to take?
I think that time has already come, Llamas.
Intrigued by this one, because it’s on my line. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for further news.
A very quick arrest:
A 22 year old man from Brent Cross? Attacked victim at 4:30am?
I think family dispute is likely. But we’ll see at trial.
https://thehaveringdaily.co.uk/2024/02/28/22-year-old-man-from-brent-cross-charged-with-murder-of-harold-wood-pensioner/amp/
“Kelly Girtz (D), the Mayor of Athens, Georgia, where Laken Riley was m*rdered by an illegal says illegal immigration and crime aren’t connected”
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1762870648794398935
Not all Athens residents are down with this:
https://twitter.com/TheShopEth/status/1762872027797680413
I always try to admit being wrong and in this case I was not expecting what appears to be an Eastern European surname. Mea culpa.
Kirk – I was referring to the Corporate executives, they do not know that the DEI stuff (and so on) that they push, comes from Marxism.
David Foster – Mayor Kelly Girtz is either a liar or an idiot.
Well, it might be, it might not. This Tweeter thinks he’s black. And has footage from a security camera showing the accused wandering around with a hammer, looking for victims:
https://twitter.com/UKRave/status/1762765629788922246
So may well turn out to be a random attack after all.