Media to blame for parade of fake racism stories

A racist slur shouted by a Brigham Young University volleyball fan at a black player from Duke turned out to be false.

David Marcus is a columnist living in New York City and the author of "Charade: The COVID Lies That Crushed A Nation."

The real answer to this constant face planting by the news media is in large part that the credulity with which these incidents are met is a kind of self-fulfilling evidence of how racist our country allegedly is, whether said incidents are true or not. The real message that the media is sending is that overt racism is so commonplace that these tall tales are more likely to be true than not. Even though they almost never are.

And what happens when it turns out these acts of racism never occurred? Practically nothing. There is never a reckoning, there are never consequences. And it never changes. Maybe what is off here is the mainstream news media’s underlying assumptions about America.