New York Times Misleads on School Fight Videos, American Dream

Plus, Trump chooses labor union over automation

A New York Times article blames phones for school violence. Where were the editors?

A top-of-the-front-page story in today’s New York Times runs under the headline “Phones Fueling Violent Scenes at U.S. Schools.” The article claims that “technology centered on cellphones—in the form of text messages, videos and social media—has increasingly fueled and sometimes intensified campus brawls, disrupting schools and derailing learning.” As the subheadline puts it, “allure of viral videos provokes melees.”

The online headline is even more sensational, claiming, “An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones…Cafeteria melees. Students kicked in the head. Injured educators. Technology is stoking cycles of violence in schools across the United States.”

The 3,000-word Times account, which jumps from the front page to a full print page and 40 percent of a second one inside the paper, is largely devoted to Revere High School. Of all those words, just two half sentences toward the bottom of the story mention immigration. One says that, “Over the last decade enrollment has grown to 2,100 students from about 1,700, as Revere experienced an immigration boom from regions like Central America.” Another says that, “On local Facebook community groups, some adults blamed the violence on immigration, disparaging Revere students as ‘animals.’”

State data, not reported by the Times, indicate the school is 66 percent Hispanic. Note that this is Massachusetts, not California or Texas or Florida or Arizona or New Mexico or some state like that that is more stereotypically a receiving point for Hispanic immigration.

The Times mentions the local Facebook groups, but the reference to “animals” seems designed to portray the concern as somehow racist. There’s no explanation of why, if it is the phones causing the fights rather than the immigration, the brawls aren’t breaking out in the hallways of Phillips Andover Academy, or Weston High School, where students also have phones, but there are fewer immigrants. Have the Times reporters and editors ever seen West Side Story, about teenage gang fights in the pre-cellphone era? It, too, is not mentioned in the Times article.

Here are some other things not mentioned in the Times article:

A November 2024 press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Massachusetts thanking the Revere Police Department for its assistance in an investigation that led to the arrests of nine individuals: “As part of an investigation into the transnational criminal organization 18th Street Gang operating in and around the North Shore area of Boston, four men were arrested and charged yesterday with federal drug offenses. Five individuals were also arrested for various state crimes including drug trafficking, child abuse crimes (including rape of a child, posing a child in a state of nudity and possession of child pornography) and unlawful possession of ammunition.”

A June 2016 press release from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It also thanked the Revere Police for their help. “Sixty-six alleged gang members from the Boston metropolitan area were indicted in federal court Thursday on multiple charges related to conspiracy to commit murder and fueling a gun and drug pipeline across eastern Massachusetts….More than 400 federal, state and local law enforcement officers carried out the arrests of numerous leaders, members, and associates of the 18th Street Gang, the East Side Money Gang and the Boylston Gang. These individuals operated primarily in East Boston, Chelsea, Brockton, Malden, Revere and Everett….According to court documents, the 18th Street Gang is a multi-national gang that operates throughout the United States and Central America.”

A bag of fentanyl was found in the high school in 2022—also not mentioned by the Times.

Teenagers were involved in a shooting at Revere Beach on Memorial Day weekend in 2023—also not mentioned by the Times.

The reporter who wrote the Times article, Natasha Singer, describes herself as “a technology reporter in the business section of The New York Times” and says, “I write about how tech companies, digital devices and apps are reshaping childhood, public schooling and job opportunities.” If you start out with the preconceived mission of writing about “how tech companies, digital devices and apps are reshaping childhood, public schooling,” you might approach a story about fights in a Revere school by blaming the phones.

If the Times editors sent an immigration reporter, or a gangs-drugs-guns-and-crime reporter, the editors might have wound up with a different story. It shows you how what the Times writes about causation bears little relation to any underlying empirical truth. Sure, there are fights at Revere High School. But there is plenty of gang-related criminal drug violence among the grownups around there and outside the schools, too. Is it driven by cellphones? The kids at Buckingham Browne and Nichols School have cellphones, too, and the local tv news isn't full of footage of gang violence at BB&N.

I’m generally pro-immigration and I harbor no hostility toward Hispanics. Marco Rubio is one of my favorite Trump cabinet picks and, unlike Bret Stephens, I even like Ted Cruz. But the idea that the fights at Revere High are mainly a story about cellphones rather than about drugs or adolescent hormones or criminal immigrant gangs or, for that matter, my own go-to explanation for social ills, declining religious-service attendance, seems like a Times reporter and editors’ fantasy rather than a thesis that is well supported by evidence. I understand it’s just journalism, not a social science paper, but the Times project reads like someone set out to blame the violence on phones rather than like someone set out with a curious open mind to find out what was causing the violence.

The Times reports “Revere students said some adults seem more focused on trying to contain the reputational damage than on examining the underlying causes of school violence.” The “some adults” who don’t seem interested in examining the underlying causes of school violence appear to include the Times editors, who prefer to blame it on cellphones instead of letting Times readers in on the fact that Revere and surrounding areas are troubled with gang-and-drug-violence.

Elsewhere in today’s New York Times, there’s an entire print section devoted to a follow-up on a previous Times series, about a losing girls’ basketball team. Here is how Times reporter John Branch frames the issue: “I have thought of the persistent myth that people in the United States can rise above their inherited lot through dedication and hard work. The more clinical truth is that most of us are echoes of our parents, winners and losers of a genetic, economic and even geographic lottery system.”