. . . a conniption when social scientist Charles Murray dared speak on campus. All the usual suspects stood up to denounce Mr. Murry for all the usual multi-culti sins, starting with racism and working down the list.
(If you don't know about Mr. Murray, look him up. Here are one, two, three good places to start.)
As for the actual speech, the student newspaper, the Thresher, did a hatchet job worthy of the Houston Chronicle's similar treatment of a Bill Cosby speech at TSU some years back and, more recently, of Mitt Romney at an NAACP event.
The first twelve grafs are not about Mr. Murray's speech, of course, but about student and faculty protests.
Representatives from [Black Student Association], the Hispanic Association for Cultural Enrichment at Rice, the Women's Resource Center and the Asian Pacific American Student Alliance began protesting at 4:30 p.m. in front of Herring Hall. Faculty members were also in attendance [read also attended].
BSA member Brianne Rodgers said she chose to protest against [read protested] Murray because of his racist and sexist views.
The speech itself? It finally appears in graf 13 with this limp transition.
Murray spoke for a few minutes at the beginning of his talk regarding about many people's perception of him as racist and sexist.
Go here to read the full story. It ends, predictably, by cutting back to the protestors to put Mr. Murray's comments in the proper multi-cultural context.
[A Hanszen College junior] said after the event that, on the surface, Murray's statements do not sound incendiary, but that a deeper analysis reveals the assumptions behind his argument.
Not incendiary is almost the same thing as reasonable which is almost the same thing as worth listening to. Can't have that.
The protest was a story, no doubt. But so was the speech. Old-timey newspapers had a neat way to cover both stories, which I recommend to the Thresher. Do one story on the protests. Do a separate story on the speech. Cross-reference one to the other. What's so hard about that?
Wrapping them together as one story, with the speech sandwiched between the comments of self-righteous narcissists and pettifoggers: That's commentary; that's advocacy; that's not reporting.
