Riley Gaines, and how to spot a slanted story
Detroit News smears women’s sports advocate rather than play it straight
Who does a story question, and who does it explain?
By reading carefully, you can spot the slant of any news story you come across.
Consider this headline in The Detroit News:
From the headline on, the story presents Gaines as a “critic of transgender athletes.”
What that means is, Gaines wants only women to compete in women’s sports. Not so strange, is it? Yet it’s presented as an oddity.
The story questions Gaines, and why she would dare object to a man in the locker room, in the pool, and on the trophy stand of a women’s sport.
In an alternate universe — the one occupied by the 10 million people of Michigan — Gaines would be presented as a defender of women’s sports. It was only 50 years prior to Gaines’ ordeal that Title IX became the law of the land in America. It could take as little as a flood of men demanding access to unravel all of that progress.
Gaines is trying to stop the flood while it’s still a trickle.
The story explains this phenomenon —men competing in women’s sports — as a matter of “inclusion.” And not as a radical change from women’s sports as we know them.
Reporter Kim Kozlowski writes:
“Gaines has since become a high-profile critic of transgender women in women's sports. While the number of transgender athletes is not large in numbers, it reflects a bitter culture war pitting the inclusion of transgender athletes against traditionalists who oppose it as presenting an unfair advantage.”
But exclusivity is the point of women’s sports. It’s a feature, not a bug. Typically in such situations, the people seeking change need to explain themselves. Only in the upside down world of a newspaper is a woman vilified for wanting only women to compete in women’s sports.
The news lies to you because it lies to itself. The story refers to Lia Thomas, the swimmer Gaines competed against, as “a biological man who transitioned to a woman.” And as a “she.”
That choice in wording indicates it is Thomas’s self-identification, and not the facts of the matter, that should be published.
The news, at its best, tells us things we do not know.
At its worst it looks like this. It tells us what to think. And it sells us narratives that few people believe.
Remember when the news used to tell true stories?
Only in decoding the techniques of the slanted story, and sharing what we see, can the public make itself impervious to their power.
Only then can we demand more honest reports. We need to show the news business that we know exactly what we’re looking at, and we’re not buying it.
Do you think that’s news you’re reading?
Absolutely agree. Is no one being taught how to write completely objectively anymore? It is painful now to read the newspapers, the stories are so glaringly ‘slanted’