So, we have
'white riots' (
because we lost the game), and
'black riots' (
because we're losing our lives). Guess which riots national and mainstream media choose to demonize?
As Occupy Democrats state in their meme below, violent and destructive sports riots barely make the news.
It's a problem. Carl Bialik with the polling aggregation site,
Five Thirty-Eight, writes more about the riots we don't see:
"After Wisconsin upset Kentucky in the men’s NCAA basketball tournament Saturday night, there was a riot near Kentucky’s campus in Lexington. People threw bottles and set fires, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. The police used pepper spray and arrested 31 people. And this wasn’t the first time people in Lexington reacted violently after a big Wildcats game. Last spring, the police arrested dozens of people after riots when Kentucky lost in the national championship game. And they arrested dozens of people in two separate riots in 2012, after Kentucky’s wins in the national semifinal and final. Those are four of about 50 North American sports riots in the past five decades…" See chart
TYT/The Young Turks did an amusing take on this issue in this
YouTube clip. There is a good amount of profanity, so you may want to lower/turn off your speakers, if you're at the office (depending where you work) or if you're at home with children around:
Does this make the Baltimore rioting right? Not at all. It makes mainstream media and a little more wrong.
Thank goodness for social media. We don't always get it right, but we certainly add a whole lot more perspective and information, which mainstream media wouldn't dare touch for fear of losing their high dollar sponsors. Here's to the social, civil, and economical diversity we find everyday at our fingertips.