The Dartmouth calls itself "the student newspaper of Dartmouth College and the campus’s only daily," and, begun in 1799, is America's oldest college newspaper. It also appears to be a great training ground for journalists who write stories which bury and downplay the lede and cover up key facts when correctly prioritizing and presenting a story would make favored groups look bad.
The Dartmouth Review, whose website has been extraordinarily overloaded today, was founded in 1980 "to question stale academic orthodoxy and to preserve Dartmouth College’s unique liberal arts character." Its alums include several current conservative luminaries. After a Thursday Black Lives Matter rally disrupting the quiet of Dartmouth's Baker-Berry Library, The Dartmouth Review told its readers what actually happened. The Dartmouth's Briana Tang buried multiple paragraphs of pablum which danced around what had obviously taken place towards the end of her insufferably long story.
Here are key paragraphs from the Dartmouth Review's account (HT The Blaze):
Eyes Wide Open at the Protest
... Watching these events (University of Missouri, Yale, etc. — Ed.) unfold from Hanover, no one could have doubted that the (Black Lives Matter-backed campus protest) movement would make its way to Dartmouth within the week. But the particular form that our own iteration took on the night of November 12 was a shock, even to the by-now seasoned souls of students who have witnessed the past years. The tactics, tone, and words of the Black Lives Matter protesters eerily mirrored everything they claim to stand against. The long list of their clear oversteps should spark a moment of reckoning for every honest onlooker, and especially those who have sympathized with their movement to this point.
The Protest…
Black-clad protesters gathered in front of Dartmouth Hall, forming a crowd roughly one hundred fifty strong. Ostensibly there to denounce the removal of shirts from a display in Collis, the Black Lives Matter collective began to sing songs and chant their eponymous catchphrase. Not content to merely demonstrate there for the night, the band descended from their high-water mark to march into Baker-Berry Library.
“F*** you, you filthy white f***s!” “F*** you and your comfort!” “F*** you, you racist s***!”
These shouted epithets were the first indication that many students had of the coming storm. The sign-wielding, obscenity-shouting protesters proceeded through the usually quiet backwaters of the library. They surged first through first-floor Berry, then up the stairs to the normally undisturbed floors of the building, before coming back down to the ground floor of Novack.
Throngs of protesters converged around fellow students who had not joined in their long march. They confronted students who bore “symbols of oppression”: “gangster hats” and Beats-brand headphones. The flood of demonstrators self-consciously overstepped every boundary, opening the doors of study spaces with students reviewing for exams. Those who tried to close their doors were harassed further. One student abandoned the study room and ran out of the library. The protesters followed her out of the library, shouting obscenities the whole way.
Students who refused to listen to or join their outbursts were shouted down. “Stand the f*** up!” “You filthy racist white piece of s***!” Men and women alike were pushed and shoved by the group. “If we can’t have it, shut it down!” they cried. Another woman was pinned to a wall by protesters who unleashed their insults, shouting “filthy white b****!” in her face.
... Few observers outside of the protesters’ inner circle will deny the horror of the worst bits of their behavior and speech. Their march through the library was an intentional exercise in every disgraceful behavior they claim to endure themselves, from insults and physical force, to racial barbs tossed out with disgust. But in the view of many sympathetic commentators, their brutal tactics could never overshadow the basic justice of their cause. ...
... Every time a protester looked a fellow a student in the eye and cursed her for her passivity or privilege, he did so under the pretense that our school is in the grasp of racism so severe that it’s suffocating. Despite this pretense, not once during the march did the protesters raise a specific concern about the College’s climate that was dire and widespread enough to implicate each and every Dartmouth student, or justify the protest’s boundless hostility.
By contrast, The Dartmouth's tedious writeup was, excuse the expression, a whitewash which bitterly clinged to the notion of the nobility of the protesters' cause as it downplayed and ignored its descent into violent verbal assault and intimidation (bolds in this section are limited to verbiage clearly designed to minimize the seriousness of what had taken place):
Students stage a protest in solidarity with Missouri and Yale, drawing both support and controversy
Chants of “We shall overcome” and “Black Lives Matter” echoed through the Green yesterday evening as more than 150 students, faculty, staff and community members dressed in black, walked from Novack Café to Dartmouth Hall in a demonstration of solidarity with the black communities at University of Missouri and Yale University and the larger Black Lives Matter movement.
(Beginning at Paragraph 32)
... A group first met at the Afro-American Society then headed to Novack Cafe. The group walked to the lawn in front of Dartmouth Hall, where several students shared their feelings and experiences. At that point, the official protest ended, but many students wanted to continue moving throughout campus, (Jonathan) Diakanwa said. As an organizer, he moved with the group to provide supervision and direction.
... Some students who were at the library at the time said they felt uncomfortable with the disruption caused by the protest. Some of the demonstrators called out specific students who were studying for not standing up and joining the protest or not wearing black. One student said at one point he was concerned over the possibility of violence, while another said that he called Safety and Security because he was annoyed by the disruption.
Diakanwa said that while he saw “a lot of passion and emotions from both sides,” he did not think the situation would ever escalate to violence. If it did, he said, the appropriate authorities would have been contacted to maintain and control the situation.
A member of the Class of 2017 who requested anonymity for fear of being targeted said that he did not want to be near the protest, but walked through the crowd of demonstrators when they were on First-Floor Berry in order to check out books. He said that after bumping into a demonstrator, she called him a “racist, privileged a–hole,” and as he was leaving another student told him to “go to hell” because he was not wearing black.
Sam Kater ’17 was in Novack at the time of the protest. Kater said that he saw the demonstrating students come down the stairs and enter the study space, chanting “If we can’t study, you can’t study.”
Kater said that he saw one exchange between a female student and the demonstrators that might have been more aggressive, but he was out of earshot.
"There was definitely nothing hostile,” he said of what he observed.
... “You lose the argument as soon as you start yelling and swearing at people,” he (Lucas Ribeiro ’19) said. “You’re not going to win.”
Diakanwa said that some of the reactions from other students may have stemmed from discomfort.
The Dartmouth's Tang, who filed the above report, appears to be on track to have a great career as a reality-concealing establishment press journalist after her time working for her school's establishment press is through:
- She limited the identified profanities to the milder ones.
- She found someone peripheral to what happened to reassure readers that there was "nothing hostile."
- She described the people who were in the library studying and justifying their and/or their parents' annual expenditure of $62,000 as merely being "uncomfortable" and apparently not concerned about violence, despite the harsh verbal assaults and in at least one case physical assault which took place (i.e., the "woman ... pinned to a wall by protesters" noted by the Review).
- She let a person who was primarily responsible for the conduct of the protesting miscreants get away with claiming that the studying students' reactions only reached a level of "discomfort" (Jonathan Diakanwa ’16 is the president of Dartmouth’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People). Horse manure.
It's clear that The Dartmouth Review has scooped its rival in presenting the details of this story. As is also so often the case outside academia, The Dartmouth appears not to care, as long as it controls the mainstream narrative.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
