A student at Bowling Green State University reported what she thought was a Ku Klux Klan rally taking place on campus that ultimately turned out to be a piece of lab equipment covered by a white sheet.
The female student was walking through the campus of Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, when she observed a white sheet through a campus building window, immediately taking video footage and messaging the university’s president on Twitter.
“There’s been an ACTIVE KKK group in Bowling Green, OH since 1922,” the student said, questioning how the presence of a white sheet in a campus building window promotes “diversity and inclusion.”
There's been an ACTIVE KKK group in Bowling Green, OH since 1922. @bgsu @PresidentMazey soo, how does this promote diversity &a inclusion??
Upon investigation, university president Mary Ellen Mazey said the reported Klansman was nothing more than a piece of lab equipment covered by a white sheet.
“We looked into this. We discovered it’s a cover on a piece of lab equipment,” she tweeted.
The student, while relieved, expressed regret that the hate group was active in the community, though it is unclear how many times the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan chose a building on the campus of Bowling Green State University to conduct a meeting.
Social media users were quick to mock the student over the ridiculous case of mistaken identity.
I would laugh but these people will be preparing my coffee incorrectly in a few years. twitter.com/TheSafestSpace…
A similarly ridiculous incident occurred at the Indiana University Bloomington in April, 2016, when students mistook a priest carrying a rosary for a Klansman carrying a whip.
“There has been a person reported walking around campus in a KKK outfit holding a whip. Because the person is protected under first amendment rights, IUPD cannot remove this person from campus unless an act of violence is committed,” said residential hall advisor Ethan Gill in an email to his students about the supposed threat.
“Please PLEASE PLEASE be careful out there tonight, always be with someone and if you have no dire reason to be out of the building, I would recommend staying indoors if you’re alone.”
After confirming the Klansman was in fact a priest wearing his vestments, Gill suggested he may wait for further confirmation of a reported Klansman sighting before frantically alerting his students to hide indoors.
“In the future, I’m still sending my residents warnings of threats, crime, hate gatherings, and all that but I will wait for a confirmation. But now that there is no danger I can say: this is a hilarious miscommunication.”
White House pool reporter has made one thing very clear: For many,
the illusion still remains that the mainstream media is unbiased.
are serving as the eyes and ears of the White House press corps, regardless of their political leaning,” Andrew Seaman, chair of the
Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee and a Reuters reporter, told The Washington Post for an article questioning the appropriateness of Lucas’ role as a pool reporter. “In a perfect world,
only news organizations with editorial independence and proven track records of reliability should be able to provide pool reports for the
White House or any other government agency or official.”
doubt they indeed have a perspective.
Dear reader:
Street Journal are attacking The Daily Signal for our press access
at the White House.
their “mainstream” media megaphones to diminish The Daily Signal.
We are a dedicated team of more than 100 journalists and policy experts funded solely by the financial support of the general public.
our reputation, but the White House Correspondents’ Association is facing pressure to exclude us.
mainstream media starts to make more sense. Take this analysis
by Silver–who got his start on the extremely liberal site Daily Kos—
in a piece headlined “There Really Was a Liberal Media Bubble”:
since the election. According to an Associated Press piece on Pelley,
the anchor said on air, “The president’s real troubles today were not
with the media, but with the facts.” Pelley also said: “Today we
learned the length of the president’s fuse—28 days.”
told the Associated Press that Pelley’s remarks were “striking
because it’s such a departure from the traditional norm of objectivity that serious news anchors have always gone for over the last few generations.”
Editor-in-Chief Gerry Baker raised concerns about his newspaper’s
use of the words “Muslim-majority countries” to describe the countries targeted in Trump’s executive order?
loaded,” Baker emailed Journal editors, according to Politico, citing
a Journal source. “The reason they’ve been chosen is not because they’re majority Muslim but because they’re on the list of [countries President Barack] Obama identified as countries of concern.”
no editorial justification for his objection. For the EIC of a major
American paper to go out of his way to whitewash this is
unconscionable.”
reporters call the countries Muslim-majority without very soon before
or after acknowledging the security concerns about those countries—
is not supported by the facts.
f Neil Gorsuch’s claimed he had made controversial remarks about
women and maternity leave. As my colleague Kelsey Harkness
reported:
Post and the New York Times. Poynter.org reported:
this enthusiasm when Obama was in office?
objective.
newsrooms probably helps contribute to that bubble effect Silver mentioned: It’s easy to be unaware of your own assumptions and
biases when they’re never or rarely challenged.
substantial number of press outlets that were truly not perspective-
driven at all. But the reality is that the mainstream media is not
objective. Instead, it merely refuses to be honest about its own perspective.
rights, did a White House pool report this month. Liberal outlets
such as Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo (as well as conservative outlets such as The Daily Caller) were also slated to
do pool reports in March.
alarm and consternation arise when an outlet on the right, not one
on the left, does a pool press report—especially when there has been
no criticism of Lucas’ actual pool reports that I’m aware of.
But the mainstream media’s hand-wringing over it will gain credibility
only when the mainstream media becomes clear-eyed about its own biases and problems.