Fear and Loathing in Lancaster

On Fake News and Crying Wolf

Last Thursday, a shocking story reported by a local news site in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania spread quickly through the media and the social networks: A Jewish family had fled the county after being falsely accused of getting a Christmas school play canceled, targeted by Breitbart and Fox News, and threatened by an online hate mob.

A (since-deleted) tweet by Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum summed up the response:

Bigotry and “fake news” in Donald Trump’s America? Well, not so fast.

By that evening, the Anti-Defamation League, the anti-Semitism watchdog group, issued a press release saying that the reports were “untrue and damaging” and the family had actually left on a previously planned vacation.

So … liberal media credulously spreading “fake news” that fit its preconceptions? Maybe not.

Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall tried to disentangle the conflicting accounts and concluded that while the family may not have “fled,” they had very real concerns about their safety due to “false but weaponized ‘War on Christmas’ stories from Fox and the Breitbart hate network.”

I’ve spent the weekend trying to piece the real story together from various accounts. (My attempts to reach people with some inside knowledge of the situation have been unsuccessful, which is understandable during the holidays.) It’s a tangled web. And it definitely points to rising fears of online outrage spilling over into real-life threats. But in this case, the right-wing “hate network” may be mostly getting a bum rap.

Don’t get me wrong: I have very little love for Breitbart, even when they’re not attacking me. There’s a good reason the site is readily suspected of directing hate at someone: it’s done that to all sorts of enemies du jour, from anti-Trump conservatives to an obscure pro-Black Lives Matter college student who had posted a nasty sarcastic tweet about a cop-killing. There also seems to be a pattern in recent months of Breitbart targets getting threats and other forms of harassment that go way beyond mean tweets. As for suspicions of Jew-baiting — Breitbart has many Jewish editors and writers, but there’s that whole flirtation with the alt-right and eyebrow-raising stuff like the Applebaum hit piece that referred to her as “a Polish, Jewish, American elitist.”

But guess what: the Breitbart story blamed for fear and loathing in Lancaster turns out to be remarkably non-inflammatory.

The short article, which ran on December 18, simply summarized the dispute over a Pennsylvania school’s cancellation of the annual fifth-grade performance of A Christmas Carol. While Centerville Elementary School officials insisted that the play was nixed because it took too much time away from classroom instruction, “many parents believe it was because two parents complained” about one line — specifically, Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, everyone.” The article ended by noting that officials had encouraged disappointed parents to organize their own afterschool play.

On the other hand, FoxNews.com columnist Todd Starnes really did try to crank up the outrage machine. His December 17 column had an all-caps “SCROOGE!” in the title and decried “the Spirit of Christmas Intolerance.”

Starnes dismissed the school’s explanation that the production was too time-consuming, since it was not an issue in previous years. He wrote that public schools are trying to “eradicate any mention of God” in the name of diversity and urged citizens to “push back.” However, he blamed the school and made only a passing reference to the unnamed parents who supposedly complained.

Both stories were based on a December 15 report by the southeastern Pennsylvania-based ABC News affiliate, ABC27-WHTM — which also focused on the alleged parental complaint as the cause of the cancellation. A town resident who was interviewed spoke of being surprised and upset that a decades-old tradition was being scrapped over “one little line.”

The canceled play had already been a subject of local controversy and rumors, which Centerville Elementary principal Tom Kramer tried to address in a statement the same day the ABC-27 story aired. The FoxNews.com column and the Breitbart piece also attracted national attention: a school district official told Lancaster Online that the school had “received at least 200 emails and phone calls either supporting or objecting to the decision or asking for additional information.”

So, what really happened to the play?

According to the WHTM report, school district leaders said that it was canceled “because it took 20 hours of classroom education away from students” — but also confirmed that “the original complaints … led to an examination of the play that ended with its cancelation.”

Meanwhile, principal Kramer’s statement strongly denied that the school’s decision was influenced by one or two families and asserted that quality education was the main priority. (He attributed this to academic pressures created by “current state standards,” which may explain the departure from past practice.) However, Kramer acknowledged that “the desire to be respectful of the many cultural and religious backgrounds represented by the students” played a role as well.

Meanwhile, the parents at the center of the storm told Lancaster Online, the local news site that first reported on the family’s harassment, that they never complained about the play or the “God bless us” line but simply asked that their fifth-grader be excused from participation. Did their request prompt school officials to worry that the event was insufficiently inclusive toward non-Christians, and did those concerns lead to a more general review of the Christmas Carol performance? Maybe; at least, the statements made by Kramer and other school officials seem to suggest as much. (A “Frequently Asked Questions” update posted by the school on Wednesday emphasizes that there was no complaint and neither confirms nor denies a request for a student to be excused, starting only that “Questions were asked about play processes and procedures.”)

The cancellation apparently generated a lot of rumors about a complaint by the Jewish student’s parents — and ill feeling from some classmates. Rabbi Jack Paskoff, who is based in Lancaster and has been in contact with the family, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “The student would get bullied on the school bus with accusations like: ‘It’s because of the Jew that our play got canceled.’” He added that the parents were able to resolve these problems by talking to the other children’s parents. It is also worth noting that, according to multiple accounts, the Jewish family received an outpouring of support from local residents.

Was the student’s bullying instigated by Fox News and Breitbart reports? That’s what some commentators, such as Marshall at TPM, have charged. However, Rabbi Paskoff’s comments actually suggest that it happened earlier. And Lancaster Online quoted the parents as saying that the child had been harassed “since the school announced the cancellation in November.” (The parents are currently incommunicado, and neither Kramer nor Rabbi Paskoff responded to my email queries.)

It’s unclear whether media attention reignited the tensions at the school. However, the parents were understandably freaked out by some of the comments on the Breitbart piece, many of which slammed the alleged complainers. Things like, “The only solution to this problem is to eliminate the people who wish to destroy OUR freedom.” And, especially: “It would be nice if we had the addresses of those concerned citizens and, I bet, this info is known to people living in the area.” According to Lancaster Online, the parents found this especially troubling “after the pizza incident” a few weeks ago, in which a man fired shots at Comet Ping Pong, the Washington, D.C. restaurant at the center of the Internet-fueled “Pizzagate” child sex ring rumor. So they pulled their child out of school before the official start of winter break on December 23 and left for their trip a day early.

The bottom line:

1. The play’s cancellation was probably at least to some extent related to concerns about cultural sensitivity. However, Kramer apparently did try to have it done as an optional afterschool project (rather than on classroom time) and found no parents who would volunteer.

2. While the parents did not “flee” their home, they apparently did have real fears for their child’s safety. Whether this was the fault of Fox News and Breitbart is very much in question.

3. Most of the responsibility for bad journalism here rests with a mainstream media organization, ABC27-WHTM, which amplified rumors that the play’s cancellation stemmed from one or two parents complaining about the “God bless us” line. Breitbart and FoxNews.com’s Todd Starnes did bring the story to a national audience, but Breitbart reported it in a fairly low-key way and without beating the “War on Christmas” drums. A couple of Breitbart commenters did call for doxing the parents, and one could argue that Breitbart cultivates such a mindset in its readers. But one could just as persuasively argue that sloppy and sensationalist reporting by a local TV station could have done the family more harm, at least as far as exposing the child to harassment at school.

3. None of the stories about the play’s cancellation mentioned the Jewish background of the parents who supposedly complained. Most Breitbart commenters assumed that the complaint came from Muslims, with a few suggesting that it was more likely to have come from liberal atheists. The right anti-Semitic witch-hunt implied by much of the mainstream coverage simply did not exist.

4. Sometimes, even Breitbart can be the target of crying wolf.