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The New York Times Reduces Parents’ Education Concerns to a Simple ‘Left vs. Right’ Political Battle

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The entrance to the New York Times Building in New York, June 29, 2021 (Brent Buterbaugh/National Review)

The paper dismissed parents’ concerns about CRT, gender policy, and school closures as mere political bickering.

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Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we take aim at the New York Times’ take on Loudoun County and recount the media insanity over the Rittenhouse trial.

New York Times Downplays Loudoun County Parents’ Concerns

The New York Times delivered a masterclass in oversimplification on Sunday, reducing the varied concerns of scores of Virginia parents to a simple Left vs. Right political squabble with this headline: “How a School District Got Caught in Virginia’s Political Maelstrom.”

The subheadline of the story is equally laughable: “Loudoun County tried to address racism and promote diversity within its schools. Then it found itself on Fox News.” The implication being that the backlash unfolding in Loudoun and across the country is not driven by grassroots outrage over the remaking of K–12 education, but is instead a creation of the nefarious right-wing media.

The piece dubs Loudoun County the “epicenter of conservative outrage over education.”

“Several hundred parents, in a district of 81,000 students, managed to pummel their school board and become a cause célèbre for opposing the district’s handling of race and gender issues,” it adds.

The article, like much of the mainstream conversation over the parent-driven revolution in education, minimizes the concerns that parents of all political stripes have about what their children are being exposed to in school.

The media turned the other cheek as the issue became a central sticking point in the Virginia gubernatorial race, particularly after failed Democratic candidate Terry McAulife argued that parents should not have a say in what their children learn.

The mainstream media has repeatedly and falsely claimed that critical race theory is not being taught in schools.

Yet the Equity Collaborative, a consulting firm that LCPS paid over $500,000 in taxpayer funds to inject CRT to the curriculum, has a presentation dedicated to introducing teachers to CRT. The presentation tells teachers that racism is “an inherent part of American civilization” and asks them to discuss how they might use CRT to “identify and address systemic oppression in your school, district or organization.”

Loudoun County teachers were asked during the training to acknowledge their own “racist, sexist, heterosexist, or other detrimental attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and feelings” and were told that “addressing one’s Whiteness (e.g., white privilege) is crucial for effective teaching.”

And yet, in the Times‘ telling, the Equity Collaborative is merely “a consulting firm [hired] to help train teachers about bias.”

Meanwhile, a Virginia juvenile-court judge found last month that there was sufficient evidence to conclude that a transgender teenager sexually assaulted a female student in a Loudoun County high school in May.

The victim’s father told the Daily Wire that the male student forcibly sodomized his ninth-grade daughter in a school bathroom while wearing a skirt. When the father tried to tell the school board about the incident at a meeting, he was arrested for disorderly conduct.

While the 15-year-old girl testified that she had engaged in consensual sexual activity with the defendant twice in a girls’ bathroom at Stone Bridge High School before the assault, she described being violently coerced into performing sexual acts during a subsequent encounter.

The perpetrator was allowed to remain enrolled in the school system while local law enforcement conducted an investigation.

Is it so hard for the New York Times to understand why a parent might be upset?

Can They Take a (Lame) Joke?

The media proved last week that it can’t take a joke after the judge overseeing the homicide trial of Kyle Rittenhouse quipped that he hoped the Asian food he ordered for lunch wasn’t stuck in the backlog at a California port.

“I hope the Asian food isn’t coming . . . isn’t on one of those boats from Long Beach Harbor,” said Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder as the court was nearing a lunch break.

As NR’s John McCormack detailed, the Washington Post seemingly created its own short-term Schroeder beat, with four reporters descending upon the story: “Judge in Kyle Rittenhouse trial faces backlash from ‘Asian food’ joke: ‘Definitely not okay.’”

CNN, meanwhile, called it an “inappropriate” and “anti-Asian” joke. The president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice- AAJC told CNN the joke “harms our community and puts us in the crosshairs of micro aggressions as well as actual physical violence.”

All of this over a supply-chain joke?

Headline Fail of the Week

The New York Times reports: “Republicans Gain Heavy House Edge in 2022 as Gerrymandered Maps Emerge.” If you stopped there, you might be under the misimpression that the Times is simply unaware of Democrats’ prodigious efforts to redraw congressional maps to their advantage where they can. In fact, even if you read through only paragraph 21, assertions like “gerrymandering, carried out by both parties but predominantly by Republicans,” and quotes such as “‘They’re [Republicans] really taking a whack at competition,’” you could be forgiven for believing Republicans are especially culpable for drawing distorted districts.

It’s only the especially interested reader who eventually learns — in paragraph 22 — that “Illinois will eliminate two Republican seats from its delegation and add one Democratic one when Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs the map that the state’s Democratic-controlled Legislature approved last month. New York is likely to add seats to the Democratic column once the party’s lawmakers complete maps next year, and Maryland Democrats may draw their state’s lone Republican congressman out of a district.”

Compare that late mention to Texas, where, according to the Times, “the trend is starkest” because Republicans plan on drawing a map that will add two seats to the GOP’s column.

As it turns out, the Times is conscious of Democrats’ fondness for gerrymandering, they just don’t want you to be.

Media Misses:

-Brian Stelter proved in a tweet last week that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data” when he shared a photo of a fully-stocked supermarket and pretended that meant the supply chain issues plaguing America must be the stuff of myths:

-MSNBC’s Chris Hayes sought to draw a confusing comparison between the Columbine High School massacre, in which two students murdered 15 people in a premeditated act of nihilism, and Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people, killing two, while he was lying prone in the street being beaten by several attackers in the middle of a riot. Rittenhouse and his attorneys have claimed he was acting in self-defense.

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