Mansplaining by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Reading the coverage of Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington, where women took to the streets to protest Donald Trump, was reminiscent of the coverage of another news event, when, back in 2013 particle physicists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, or “God Particle.” In both cases, the journalists tasked with covering the story knew they were reporting on a newsworthy event, but struggled mightily to exactly explain why. In the latter case, people who majored in the humanities endeavored to explain the most egg-headed theoretical particle physics to a readership who understands the subject even less than the journalist does. In the former case, people who majored in the humanities endeavored to explain what it was the humans they were talking to were so upset about.
In Journalism 101 we are taught to write lead sentences, that is the first sentence of a news story, that contain as many of the “Five Ws and One H” (who, what, when, where, why and how) as possible. To their credit, most of the stories I read got five of the six out in the first sentence or certainly by the end of the lead ‘graph. All of them struggled to put the “why” into words.
“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Women took to the streets in unexpectedly large numbers in major U.S. cities on Saturday to stage mass protests against U.S. President Donald Trump, in an early indication of the strong public opposition the Republican may face in office.
Hundreds of thousands of women — many wearing pink knit hats — fanned out through downtown Washington around the White House and other landmarks, and also thronged parts of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston to rebuke Trump on his first full day in office.
Trump has angered many liberal Americans with comments seen as demeaning to women, Mexicans and Muslims, and worried some abroad with his inaugural vow on Friday to put ‘America First’ in his decision making,” reads the first three paragraphs of Emily Stephenson and Scott Malone’s piece for Reuters.
The two nail down who, women; what, the protest against Trump; when, Saturday; where, Washington D.C. and other major cities; and how, by marching while wearing pink knit “pussyhats” and carrying signs bearing a bewildering myriad of slogans. Nowhere in there, however, is the “why” ever adequately explained. Searching for that explanation in the next two ‘graphs yields no results, and instead the two report on how the protests drew more participants than originally expected. The following paragraph reports that the protests “illustrated the depth of the division in the country,” following the defeat of Hillary Clinton, whom they misidentify as the first major party female candidate to run for president. By paragraph seven, they’ve found a protestor to interview. Maybe she will shed some light on why she’s there.
“Pam Foyster, a 58-year-old resident of Ridgway, Colorado, said Saturday’s atmosphere reminded her of 1960s U.S. protests against the Vietnam War.
“’I’m 58 years old and I can’t believe we are having to do this again,’” Foyster said in Washington. After the Vietnam War the push for women’s rights and civil rights made her ’believe anything was possible. But here we are again,’” reads ‘graphs seven and eight.
Do what again? I didn’t see any signs about bringing the troops home from the various warzones Barack Obama sent them to. So, protesting 15 straight years of war, the last eight a daily, non-stop campaign of serial murder by the Nobel Peace Prize winner, is not why she’s there again. Maybe the next paragraph will elaborate on her comments.
“Although his party now controls both the White House and Congress, Trump faces entrenched opposition from segments of the public at the start of his term, a period that is typically more of a honeymoon for a new president,” reads the next paragraph, so, I guess not.
The story goes on to say that Trump didn’t mention the protests on Saturday via Twitter, but instead went to an interfaith service at the National Cathedral and then went to CIA headquarters. From there it talks about how the attendance for the march overwhelmed D.C.’s aging metro transit system.
Not having much to write about the march itself, the reporters then spend a few graphs comparing the peacefulness of the women’s march to the relative chaos on Friday when self-styled “anarcho”-communists and/or “antifa” or “anti-fascist” snowflakes broke windows and violently assaulted trash cans; some of whom then got arrested and cried about it hilariously on social media.
There’s mention of two aging attention whores who attended, Madonna and Cher, as well as an appearance by John Kerry, although the way it’s written leaves the reader to wonder if that was on purpose.
“Well-known figures attended, including Madonna, who swore while discussing Trump before singing her 1989 hit ‘Express Yourself’ to the crowd, singer Cher and former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who waved to supporters as his walked his yellow Labrador dog, Ben,” Reuters wrote, suggesting that maybe Kerry stumbled into the mess by accident while trying to take Ben walkies.
The story goes on to talk about Hillary winning the popular vote (with no mention that the difference was all contained within the state of California and therefore is even less relevant than the irrelevant status the popular vote holds to begin with) and that Trump will face some opposition to his proposals to build a wall on the Mexico border and to repeal Obamacare.
As I plowed through this meandering story of re-hashed stats of dubious importance that all sought to relate back to the central task of explaining what the protest was all about, I eventually came to the final two paragraphs. Finally, a marcher in New York City managed to string together two whole sentences that come close to explaining the “why” of this whole thing.
“At the New York march, 42-year-old Megan Schulz, who works in communications said she worried that Trump was changing the standards of public discourse.
’The scary thing about Donald Trump is that now all the Republicans are acquiescing to him and things are starting to become normalized,’ Schulz said. ‘We can’t have our president talking about women the way he does,’” reads the final graph, where they apparently buried part of the lead.
Unless, that is, the authors thought that mentioning that all of this activity was in response to Trump unwittingly saying unflattering things about women into a hot mic ages ago would diminish the “importance” of the demonstration; and that’s why they saved the “why,” such as it is, for the last paragraph? Seems likely to me, given that at no point in all the preceding verbiage did they manage to give any explanation as to why the protests were happening.
Here we have the major difference between this story and the discovery of the Higgs boson, or “God-damned particle.” While difficult for non-particle-physicists to understand, the confirmation of the existence of a sub-atomic particle whose properties were theorized years prior represented a major step in humankind’s understanding of the very nature of the universe itself. The Women’s March on Washington, while difficult for anyone to understand, represented a major waste of time in the form of an organized temper tantrum that had no real purpose, and therefore was doomed to effect no real change.
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