Swimmer Riley Gaines was attacked by a leftist mob, but media look the other way
Quin Hillyer
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Here’s a thought experiment demonstrating that journalistic ethics aren’t just dying at top liberal media outlets but are already deceased.
Imagine if Lia Thomas, the biological male who won a 2022 NCAA women’s national swimming championship, had been duly invited to speak at conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. Imagine if a mob of Hillsdale students had shouted Thomas down, yelling vile curses and threats, then chased Thomas down the hallway, allegedly hit him twice, and forced Thomas into a locked room for three hours while refusing to let him leave unless the university paid them, the mob, to let Thomas go.
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There is not a shred of doubt that every major liberal media outlet in the country would cover the story for days on end. And if the president of Hillsdale then issued a statement expressing more sympathy for the students than for Thomas, every Sunday morning news show in the country would feature pundit panels universally condemning the president.
Yet when the ideological roles are reversed, the liberal media pretend nothing happened. It’s the liberal-media version of the tree-falling-in-forest scenario: If a mob ambushes someone on a left-wing campus and nobody covers it, did it really occur?
Well, yes, it did. Riley Gaines, a top female swimmer who was forced to compete against Thomas, has been on a speaking tour of college campuses, making the case for keeping biological males out of female sports. Her position is supported by a large majority of people. Yet campus rowdies have increasingly protested against her speeches, and things took a particularly ugly turn on April 6 at San Francisco State University.
All the hypothetical abuses in the Lia Thomas thought experiment above actually happened to Gaines. Plenty of video evidence supports the elements of her story, including a video of a school official trying to negotiate with the mob to let her go. Then, the pitiful excuse for a university president, Lynn Mahoney, sent a campuswide letter offering not a single word of apology to Gaines but instead wrote that the very presence of Gaines “was deeply traumatic for many in our trans and LGBTQ+ communities, and the speaker’s message outraged many members of the SF State community who value inclusion and social justice.” Never mind how traumatic it was for Gaines, who told Fox News that, at one point, she feared for her life.
Right-leaning outlets have covered the SFSU atrocity for days. Yet how did the liberal media cover it? Remember that Thomas was huge news a year ago, and Gaines’s complaints about Thomas repeatedly made national news as well. In other words, this wasn’t an unknown, random speaker of whom news outlets were unaware.
I did general web searches for coverage of this assault by, and also site-specific searches on the main online pages of, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN, along with a check for any local coverage from the San Francisco Chronicle. CNN, to its credit, ran three stories on the controversy. CBS local outlets ran accounts of it but nothing on CBS nationally. The San Francisco Chronicle had no separate story on it, but one article did mention the SFSU conflagration in two paragraphs buried in a longer piece on President Joe Biden’s policies on transgender athletes — and the obvious tone of those two paragraphs dripped with contempt for Gaines.
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But none of the other big liberal outlets reported a single word about the attack. Five of the most influential news organizations in the country let the outrage go unacknowledged.
The sound you don’t hear isn’t the tree in the woods. It’s the sad, silent death of ethics in what once claimed to be “mainstream” journalism. How shameful.