Posted on 08/17/2014 10:44:37 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Last night, while police in Ferguson, Missouri, were indiscriminately firing tear gas and rubber bullets at a mostly peaceful group of protesters and journalists, two of whom were arrested without cause, data whiz Nate Silver thought it would be a good time to tell a silly story about how easy jail can be if you’re white. But instead of an allegory on racial privilege, the Twitter tale — which included being fed a burrito (!) in his cell — came off as especially oblivious while interspersed with video, images, and accounts of what looked like a war zone from others. Silver just kept tweeting about himself.
With journalist-centric Twitter serving as a solemn, angry, virtual community square for those not at the protests, the backlash to the first-person reverie was swift and strong:
But a former staffer from Grantland, which, like Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, is owned by ESPN, really spilled the beans, leaking what appears to be Mr. Burrito’s traffic numbers for the month of August:
Maybe Silver should have just put his arrest story in a blog post with a splashy headline and racked up the hate-clicks, Thought Catalog–style.
"1. Sent a stupid set of tweets last night about a run-in with cops I had a few years ago. Came across the opposite from how I'd intended."
What good can come from an epic racist fiasco in Furguson..?
By.. you know..... DEMOCRATS...
FiveThirtyEight is owned by the NYT
My bad. ESPN bought it last Nov.
A white guy getting arrested for jay walking does not help push the liberal media narrative. The media predictably shamed Silver and forced him to apologize.
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