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.”

Far from a “myth,” it is true that “people in the United States can rise above their inherited lot through dedication and hard work.” There are so many individual examples that it’s hard to know even where to start, but think of Bernie Marcus, or Clarence Thomas, or A.M. Rosenthal, or Steve Jobs (whose biological father was Abdulfattah Jandali), or Bill Clinton. I’m not saying that family background or genetics or geography make no difference at all but the clinical truth, too, is that there are siblings who share parents (and thus have genetic, economic, and geographic similarities) but nonetheless have different life trajectories. Anyway, if the Times wants to do a project taking a serious, statistic-based look at socio-economic mobility in America compared to other places, it’d find that there is plenty of opportunity still, especially if you look across generations, which partly explains why so many immigrants are so eager to come here. To write off the entire American dream as a groundless myth on the basis of discovering that nine students who were on a troubled-girls basketball team in 2013 are still having a rough time a decade later seems as much of a reach as blaming the prevalence of cellphones for the frequency of school fights in Revere, Massachusetts. Where are the editors?

The closing weeks of the year are notorious for this sort of thing. The “projects” that reporters and editors have long been incubating need to make it into the paper by the end of the calendar year to qualify for Pulitzer Prizes, the collection of which help some Times journalists to rise above their inherited lot. Paying readers who aren’t clued in to the prize ambitions may wonder why their newspaper is suddenly packed with overly long articles.

Trump backs union over automation: A December 12 tweet from President Trump says, “Just finished a meeting with the International Longshoremen’s Association and its President, Harold Daggett, and Executive VP, Dennis Daggett. There has been a lot of discussion having to do with ‘automation’ on United States docks. I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it. The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen. Foreign companies have made a fortune in the U.S. by giving them access to our markets. They shouldn’t be looking for every last penny knowing how many families are hurt. They’ve got record profits, and I’d rather these foreign companies spend it on the great men and women on our docks, than machinery, which is expensive, and which will constantly have to be replaced. In the end, there’s no gain for them, and I hope that they will understand how important an issue this is for me. For the great privilege of accessing our markets, these foreign companies should hire our incredible American Workers, instead of laying them off, and sending those profits back to foreign countries.”

You could teach an entire economics course just on that tweet—or perhaps also with the non-Trump follow-up tweet noting that the million-dollar-a-year union leader has two sons who also work for the union at more than half-a million-a-year each. Is automation a bad idea just for foreign companies or also for U.S. companies? Would Trump have kept bank tellers instead of ATMs? Toll collectors instead of EZ-Pass? Phone operators instead of direct dial and voicemail menus? Typewriters instead of computers? Hand shovels instead of excavators? Who should make these decisions in a free economy, the employer-owner or the politician-president?

If Trump wants the economic growth that will Make America Great Again, he may have to resist his urge to get personally involved in business decisions about the level of automation a company should pursue. He could indeed have great personal business judgment about such matters. An economy runs better, though, when those decisions are made not by politicians but by the owners whose capital is at risk.