The corporate media blew up a story about four students who shared valedictorian and salutatorian honors during their high school graduation after the school made an administrative mistake to forward its own narrative about race.
In a recent article, the New York Times amplified the squabble and framed it as though it was a race-based issue.
“Two Black Students Won School Honors. Then Came the Calls for a Recount,” the headline states.
It took until the fifth paragraph for the Times to mention that “race had nothing to do with the events in West Point” and that it was due to an administrative grade point average mixup.
Later in the story, the Times even notes that the school’s black superintendent admitted that there was a mistake and corrected it but that didn’t stop the corporate media outlet from continuing to air race-based grievances about the situation. Even one of the parents of the co-valedictorian said “this has nothing to do with race” but said that “it’s been made racial and that infuriates me.”
Other corporate media outlets picked up the story using similar framing and verbiage as the Times to communicate that the point of the story, according to them, was race.
“White parents claim calculation error after two Black students get high school’s top honors: report,” The Hill headline stated.
“A Mississippi high school agreed to make 2 white students co-winners of top honors after their parents complained about the awarding of prizes to Black pupils,” Insider wrote.
“Two Black students were forced to share high honors after white parents cried error,” Yahoo! Entertainment reprinted from NBCUniversal.
Even the articles with milder headlines capitalized on the students’ and families’ races to forward the narrative.
“The parents of two Black high school students in West Point — originally named valedictorian and salutatorian before their school claimed an error showed two white students were the actual honorees — will address the school board about the issue Monday evening,”
As T. Becket Adams noted in his Substack on Monday, this dishonesty by the corporate media turned a “boring story, unworthy of national news status — a story of confusion, compromise, and clerical errors by an employee of a school you’ve never heard of” into a national bombshell used to push the narrative that the U.S. is still a racist nation.
“Our vaunted Fourth Estate seems hell-bent on making race relations in the United States worse, not better. It’s as if they believe conflict, misery, and anger are good for business…Surely, our media aren’t actually trying to foment racial enmity. Then again, if they were, how would they be acting differently?” Becket Adams wrote.
