Perception, Truth and Body Language

Journalists rely on quotes and statistics. But is that all there is to communication?

Trump and Putin in Helsinki in July of 2018. Who’s in charge here?

In the spring of 2020, just as the world was shutting down, a video went viral. The video was of a Black city councilman yelling at the white mayor of their Florida town during an emergency COVID meeting.

The city councilman was Omari Hardy, and he was yelling at Lake Worth Beach Mayor Pam Triolo.

But, as this New York Times piece points out, in its lede sentence, she was yelling at him, too.

That’s important to note. Because when the video went viral, Hardy told the Times that he “wondered what people would think of me, this black man yelling at this older white woman… I didn’t want people to think I was this wild and crazy black man who should be nowhere near a seat of power.”

Audra D.S. Burch, who wrote the Times piece, also talked to Mayor Triolo. 

Triolo - a blonde, white woman - did not have the same worries of perception as Hardy did. She was terrified because she had gotten letters saying she should die of COVID.

I don’t know the context of the letters. But the shouting match was about the city manager turning off people’s electricity just as stay-at-home restrictions were being put in place. Many of the low-income people this affected were Hardy’s constituents.

Burch reports that Hardy had been trying to have a meeting about COVID for a week prior to the shutdown of utilities that happened the night before the meeting. By that time, as Burch notes, “he was seething.”

Well, yes. If the people I represented were being ignored and punished because they were poor and that put them in a dangerous position because of a highly lethal virus, and it took a week for me to get civic leaders to even discuss it, I would be seething too.

We tend to see anger as something to be avoided. That’s a great way to dismiss the issues people are angry about.

Hardy’s worry about how he would be perceived shows this.

Triolo’s attempts to calm him down also shows this. She repeatedly told him he was “out of order” and “disrespectful.”

Black men have been lynched for far less “egregious” behavior.

The “Bully” Pulpit

This incident shed more light on a realization that was dawning on me from my coverage of the Clark County School District in Las Vegas.

When I first met Danielle Ford, in the summer of 2019, she had just been identified to me as a school board Trustee during a town hall I was hosting. I handed her the microphone and thought, “Who is this CHILD?” I found out later she was in her early 30s, but she looked about 15 years younger. And, she looks like a model, with all the assumptions of vacuousness that comes with.

The next time I ran into her was at a trustee meeting. She brought her dog. To sit on the dias with her. I rolled my eyes and said something unflattering to my friend sitting next to me. He chuckled in agreement.

A few minutes later, Ford spoke up and asked that something be pulled from the consent agenda. This snapped me to attention. Board members rarely ask that. That request usually comes from the press. The consent agenda is where things are hidden. By the board. So this request was odd.

Turns out, she wanted to point out that the district was spending money on training for teachers whom they had given a bonus to a few months before for being the best teachers in the district.

Which was a fair point.

Ford would come to focus on that training as a symptom of the nationalization - and attempted dismantling - of public education. Also, of wasteful spending. I didn’t realize that at the time. I just turned to my friend and said, “Woah, she’s smart. She is not what she seems.”

My friend was just as surprised as I was.

She was smart, she was young, she was pretty, she was pushing against the status quo. That meant she was dangerous.

Within a month or two, the president of the board (whose condescension you can see in action here and here), stripped the ability of any one trustee to pull something from the consent agenda. Just to shut down Ford.

The former board president also, to my utter mirth, would audibly sigh every time she had to call Ford’s name during a meeting.

That former board president is the kind of person who doesn’t see or understand anything that she doesn’t learn from the outside. Which means she is always upholding the status quo, which she thinks of as simply “reality,” because she is incapable of seeing that there are alternatives to how systems are ordered within societies.

She doesn’t have a “gut feeling.” She doesn’t work from the inside-out.

Outside-In vs. Inside-Out

I feel like at this point I may be losing people. “You’re not a psychologist, Carrie. Where’s your proof?”

I’m gonna suggest that the people who feel this way just might be upholding the status quo themselves.

Dana Miranda, who writes about everyday economics, noted in a recent piece that she’s flattered when people praise her book as “well-researched,” but “irked by the level of third-party support people need to see to consider my claims legitimate.

“Sometimes I think,” wrote Miranda, “Don’t we already know this is true, if we’re paying attention?”

Why yes, yes we do. 

Sort of.

If your way of seeing the world is from the outside-in, then paying attention means reflecting the world as you see it. And no, people with that lens don’t know that issues like health disparities between white and Black women are markers of systemic bias, because systemic bias is not easily identified except through experiences people have. And if you don’t have those experiences, and you have no ability to understand that other people see and experience the world differently, then you simply don’t believe people when they tell you their story is different than yours.

This is what I was seeing when I watched the then-president of the school board. I fully believe that she honestly felt that Ford, who was pointing out things that weren’t obvious, was crazy, and needed to be put in her place.

She even used the same kind of dehumanizing language and appeals to “order” and “disrespect” as the Mayor of Lake Worth Beach used on the only Black person on the city council.

The more I watched the former board president, and the more I heard people excuse her behavior, the angrier I got. I just couldn’t understand how people couldn’t see - or be upset with - this obvious sexism.

Speaking Without Talking

In 2018, I did a brief stint as host of The Morning Show at Wisconsin Public Radio.

There was a woman on the production team who was the best non-verbal communicator I have ever seen. She would telegraph her meaning with her whole body, while often speaking words that were the exact opposite of what her body was saying.

And often, what her body was saying was “fuck you,” while the words coming out of her mouth were sugary sweet.

Ironically - or not - she was one of those journalists who insisted that we could only rely in our talk show segments on the words that came out of people’s mouths, not any other way they communicated. So when Donald Trump slinked out like an admonished schoolboy with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki (see pic above), this producer argued vociferously that we couldn’t point out his body language. We could only focus on what he said - which is that he believed Putin over his own intelligence agencies.

More to the point, we had to take what he said seriously.

There were numerous times when I noted that Trump simply used spoken words to lie, but that he couldn’t help but speak his more sinister truth on Twitter or in his body language.

But we couldn’t report that. We weren’t psychologists. We couldn’t see this. And I’m thinking, “Who the hell can’t see this?”

One time, I wanted to do a segment on a group of Oklahoma legislators who wanted to raise taxes to go to education.

This struck me. In the pitch meeting, I said, “If this can happen in Oklahoma, it speaks to a state like Wisconsin.”

The producer whose body language and words were usually polar opposites pulled in her arms, raised her shoulders, puffed up her chest, and looked up. Then she boomed, at least three octaves lower than her usual voice, “What do you MEAN a state like Wisconsin.”

The room was silent. I was taken aback.

“Well… if a conservative state that has a history of being anti-tax and anti-education can actually raise taxes for education, then it speaks to other conservative states that are anti-tax and have taken money from education.”

“Oh,” she said, as she physically deflated.

To quote Dana Miranda, “Wasn’t this obvious?”

The thing about people who communicate so clearly in every way but words is that the message everyone else gets is that we are not allowed to point out what they are saying with their physicality. They would just deny it. They would tell you you’re seeing things, putting words into their mouths.

And we journalists are so afraid of this, we don’t point obvious things out. We use statistics and direct quotes and hide behind them.

We don’t trust our guts.

This knowledge is Trump’s superpower.

This falls off, of course, if the behavior being evinced matches the anger of the words that are being said. And that anger is coming from a person of color and/or a woman. Then we use the behavior to say they’re out of order.

This is a system. A self-perpetuating system. Editors who are afraid rely on static rules, then insist that writers bring quotes or statistics. The journalists who see the entire picture and want to report from that more expansive framing often get frustrated and leave - not just the job, but the entire profession. And the reporters who uphold the status quo become editors.

Then it starts all over again.

Journalism has become an echo chamber of people who ignore the obvious. And who honestly believe that the people who are pointing out truth are crazy.

That was clear this week when Times political reporter Kenneth Vogel took to Threads to admonish people criticizing the Times for, say, keeping Biden’s age on the front page for three days after the Hur report, while making Trump’s call to Putin to invade any NATO country he wants a one-day story.

That criticism, he said, was “groupthink.”

And he noted that journalism’s role was to “challenge authority, conventional wisdom and - yes - sometimes readers’ misconceptions.”

Which leads me to wonder how he knows that what readers think are MISconceptions?

I’ll explore that next week.