Matt Welch:

There is something revealingly incongruous about a news organization that in one breath conducts hair-splitting fact-checks deferring to the government’s of view (“In fact, there’s no mention of ‘parents’…at all in the memo, none,” Cooper said triumphantly Wednesday, about the controversial October 4 Justice Department directive to have federal agents be on the lookout for anti–school board violence), then in the next being content to nod along when a colleague accuses citizen participants in democracy and a major political party of being primarily motivated by white supremacy.

Since this issue is not going away anytime soon, particularly if Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin upsets Virginia power pol Terry McAuliffe in the governor’s race next week, it’s worth being on the lookout for recurrent media framing devices that distort the depiction of an important set of debates. (K-12 instruction amounts to about 20 percent of all state and local government spending, don’t forget.) The point is not to be steered toward my admittedly idiosyncratic school policy preferences, but rather to become via pattern recognition a more discerning consumer of news.

Here are two of the most common ways the media warp school board politics.

1) Exaggerating the incidence of violence.

On October 22, in an article picked up widely and also adapted by the Associated Press, Minnesota Public Radio made this alarming assertion: “Violent school board meetings and threats toward school board members [in Minnesota] over these issues have caused dozens of board leaders to quit their positions.” Do note the serial pluralization.

Were there really multiple acts of violence, and multiple threats, causing “dozens” of board members to quit, in a state known for its niceness? The 757-word article did not explicitly list any; there was one hyperlink to a June piece that mentioned “someone had recently threatened on a community Facebook page to rush the podium” at one meeting, but no such bum-rush took place.

I was able to find one violent incident in Minnesota, from late September, when two members of the public who were on opposite sides of a school masking policy debate got into a brief scuffle that was broken up by a police officer.