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June 18th, 2015 
Awake Goy Yesterday the New York Times ran a story on that balcony collapse in Berkeley that killed five Irish students that suggested they were drunk– and so therefore somehow brought the accident on themselves? Thirteen of them had crowed on to the balcony during a “loud party,” the article said. And here was the crucial second paragraph:
But the work-visa program that allowed for the exchanges [of thousands of Irish students] has in recent years become not just a source of aspiration, but also a source of embarrassment for Ireland, marked by a series of high-profile episodes involving drunken partying and the wrecking of apartments…
Readers began howling about the piece’s stereotype of the Irish– “The only thing missing [is] a picture of a pint and a kid with red hair falling down drunk.” And former president of Ireland Mary McAleese published an angry critique of the Times for promoting a “lazy, tabloid stereotype” of Irish students. And New York Times editors became defensive. “In hindsight, I wouldn’t have had that second paragraph,” national editor Allison Mitchell told the NYT public editor. But the second paragraph was the reason for the story.
Margaret Sullivan, the public editor, yesterday sided with the readers:
My role is to consider reader complaints, report on them internally, and sometimes comment on them publicly, as I’m doing here. In that role (and as a mother), I can say not only that I believe many of the complaints were valid, but also that I’m very sorry for the pain the story caused.
We were pleased to read that, “as a mother.” I.e., you don’t have to be a professional, you can just be a human being to be very sorry for the damage of bigotry.
We need to extend our moral geography to include not just people of Irish descent– who we are more likely to know– but people in far off parts of the world. We look forward to the day when such sensitivity is shown to Palestinians, and especially the 1.8 million people of Gaza, who are imprisoned on the notion that all of them should be punished for the acts of militants. Of course most Americans don’t know Palestinians, they think they’re terrorists. But the great thing about the modern digital world is that we’re able to cross those boundaries.
So: “As a mother” we too are deeply concerned about the four Gaza boys whose slaughter on the beach last summer was lately covered up by the Israeli government, and whose families have been written out of almost all international coverage.
I recently spent time with the Bakr family. Here they pray at the graves of their sons who were killed by Israel. pic.twitter.com/FJmx5O2QR1
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) June 11, 2015
Thanks to Susie Kneedler.
Source Article from http://mondoweiss.net/2015/06/bigotry-berkeley-balcony
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