How to ask questions so you're not snookered by a hoax

It's easy to avoid if you know how

Last week there was an alleged racist incident at a volleyball game between Brigham Young and Duke University. You may or may not have heard of it, but in any event it became a national story overnight: A black Duke volleyball player claimed that at least one BYU spectator in the stands hurled racial slurs and invectives at her “throughout the entirety of the match,” as she put it.

Well, you know the drill: The whole thing went national, every major news network covered it, everyone was all over it, it was shocking and horrifying and and indictment of the racist underpinnings of American society in general and Mormon society in particular, etc.

It now seems dubious that this event ever happened at all. As Doug Robinson put it yesterday at Deseret:

The problem is — and this is a pretty big one — no one else heard the racial slurs. So far, not one person has come forward to say he or she heard anything that was inappropriate. Not the police officer who was posted near the BYU student section. Not the students watching the match just a few feet from the court. Not even [Rachel] Richardson’s Duke teammates. BYU officials can’t find any evidence of it on video, either (since the fans sit close to the court, they are clearly seen on video). The only other people who made the accusation are Richardson’s godmother and father and they weren’t at the match; they were 1,200 miles away, in Texas, and still the first to post the incident via Twitter.

I think it is not unreasonable to assume that the whole thing was made up, either accidentally or deliberately. I suppose there’s the possibility that someone, somewhere at the game actually did hear the slurs and is just waiting for the right time to reveal it, but, you know, it’s been a week and nobody’s even tried to claim they heard it. So I think it’s not unreasonable to conclude that Miss Richardson was either very mistaken or (and this seems marginally though not completely more likely) a liar.

This was, of course, somewhat easy to predict; these sorts of stories, particularly where the media just run with it and print it up as essentially true with no skepticism whatsoever, often tend to go this way. Usually the issue is that the reporters and editors and publishers in charge of promulgating and spreading these stories simply don’t ask a very simple set of questions that might help weed out the false stories from the true ones. Questions like:

• How likely is it that this happened? The answer to this question is not necessarily dispositive; unlikely things happen all the time, while likely things can easily be made up. But if nothing else this can help orient your investigations to some degree. Here we might reasonably argue that it seems very unlikely that a spectator would loudly yell racial slurs at a crowded, well-recorded, well-lit interstate sporting competition for the entirety of the match just to get his dirty rocks off. Some racists might be tactically smart and some might be stupider, but it would take an extraordinarily dumb person to conclude that there was any sort of reasonable benefit to such hateful behavior in a place where you could so easily be identified doing it.

• What’s the evidence? In this case, we really don’t have any evidence; we have the claims of precisely one person who was at the game and two people who were nearly half a continent away from it. Nothing else exists that we know of to substantiate Richardson’s allegations. That’s notable; there were many spectators at the game, many authorities, many cameras, we live in an era where many people are pretty eager to tattle and expose each other for offenses far less serious than this, and—again, this is worth stressing—Richardson claimed the slurs were being lobbed at her for the entire match, which ended up lasting about two hours. And still nothing has been produced. That’s notable.

• What’s the payoff? If you’re ever wondering if something is true or false—which is, you know, the basic job of a journalist—ask yourself: What’s the payoff in either scenario? If these allegations are true, for instance, then I guess the payoff would go to the alleged racist heckler, who got to…yell some nasty slurs at a game for a little bit and risk ruining his reputation for literally the rest of his life. That doesn’t seem like a great cash prize though I suppose racists have their own weird and inscrutable calculations for these things. If it’s false…well, is there a payoff there? Maybe. It turns out, for instance, that the first person to have spread this story—Richardson’s Godmother, Lesa Pamplin—is running for public office in her county in Texas. Is there any sort of payoff for an aspiring politician who ends up a sympathetic figure in a national controversy? Of course. That doesn’t mean the allegations are lies, only that there’s a pretty understandable reason they might be lies (or at the very least untrue).

• Is there any reason the media wouldn’t want to ask these questions? I think hypothetical scenarios aren’t always the most helpful tool in the box, but let’s just consider a particular proposal for a moment: If a white student had been part of a volleyball match at a predominately black school and had claimed later that he had been racially heckled by black spectators in the stand, do you think the media coverage of that controversy would be any different? Do you think national journalists at prestigious outlets would have accepted those claims so critically? Do you think they’d gloss over the comprehensive lack of evidence to support these allegations? Do you think they might send investigative reporters to knock on the door of the student’s Godmother and ask her questions, look into her political career, etc.? Do you think reporters would maybe be obsessively going over every angle of footage of the match to try and prove or disprove the claims? Consider all these things and ask yourself why it’s the case that the media have responded the way they have here. What’s the payoff for them?

I won’t be coy here: I have strong doubts that there were any slurs yelled at the game. Of course it very well could have happened; people do yell slurs, and I suppose they sometimes even yell them on globally televised sporting events, for two hours, loud enough for everyone to hear, with nobody putting a stop to them. Stranger things most assuredly have happened. I am very interested to see what BYU’s energetic investigations ultimately discover, and I am reserving a good old liberal dose of skepticism in the meantime, as should you.

(Update: It does indeed appear that this entire event did not actually happen.)