--:-- [Upbeat music fades out]
--:-- Georgia Howe: A Black Harvard professor is now speaking out, saying Claudine Gay opened an investigation into him after his research showed no racial bias in police shootings.
--:-- John Bickley: I collected a lot of data, and it was in this moment, 2016, that I realized people lose their minds when they don't like the result.
--:-- Georgia Howe: I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Tuesday, February 20th, and this is Morning Wire.
--:-- John Bickley: Controversy and accusations of racism after the identities of the suspects in the Kansas City shooting come to light. Is there a media double standard when it comes to reporting on race?
--:-- Georgia Howe: In order to be conscious about reporting about crime, you have to have a racial lens.
--:-- John Bickley: And Israel is threatening a ground invasion of Rafa if the remaining hostages aren't returned by Ramadan.
--:-- Megan Basham: Hamas is trying to negotiate the return of hostages in order to live another day. And Israel is saying, you cannot live another day. We will give you something else in exchange for those hostages.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
--:-- John Bickley: Did you know that over 5 billion pounds of meat is imported and sold in the U.S. every year? That's why you got to make the switch to Good Ranchers, our number one choice for American-made meat.
--:-- Megan Basham: And right now, when you subscribe to any of their boxes, you'll secure their leap year offer of free bacon for four years. Go to GoodRanchers.com, pick your box, and use code WIRE to get the meat you can trust.
--:-- John Bickley: That's GoodRanchers.com. Use code WIRE to claim over $900 in free bacon before their leap year sale ends. Good Ranchers, American meat delivered.
--:-- Megan Basham: A black Harvard professor has begun speaking out against former Harvard president Claudine Gay. He says she was involved in ideologically motivated targeting that wound up getting him suspended by the university.
--:-- John Bickley: Roland Fryer says he received death threats when his research failed to confirm racial stereotypes about police shootings.
--:-- Megan Basham: So Fryer is a professor of economics and he was also the youngest Black tenured professor at Harvard. He's won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship and a John Bates Clark Medal, which is a medal that's awarded to economists under 40 who have made significant contributions to the field.
--:-- John Bickley: So I think it's very fair to say that he is a well-regarded scholar and researcher.
--:-- Megan Basham: And he's also known for his pretty compelling biography. He was raised by grandparents because his mother was largely out of the picture and his father was in jail when he was growing up.
--:-- John Bickley: So his study found that while police were more likely to use excessive force against racial minorities, they were actually less likely to shoot them as compared to white suspects.
--:-- Megan Basham: And at the time, that very much cut against the grain of conventional wisdom in the wake of police shootings like those against Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile.
--:-- John Bickley: So this was how Fryer described his results to Free Press publisher Barry Weiss during a recent interview.
--:-- Megan Basham: So what my paper showed was that, yes, we saw some bias in the low-level uses of force every day pushing up against cars and things like that. People seemed to like that result. But we didn't find any racial bias in police shootings.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, that was really surprising to me because I expected to see it.
--:-- Megan Basham: The little-known fact is I had eight full-time RAs that it took to do this over nearly a year. When I found the surprising result I hired eight fresh ones and redid it to make sure They came up with the same exact answer and I thought it was robust
--:-- John Bickley: And then I went to go give it and my God all hell broke loose
--:-- Megan Basham: So Fryer says that his friends in academia told him that he could publish the first part of those results, but not the second. And he says that when he rejected that advice and published it all anyway, he was targeted.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, what do you mean by targeted?
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, probably what you remember is that there was strenuous outcry in academic circles, so much so that he felt he had to go out and give a number of interviews to outlets like the New York Times defending his work.
--:-- John Bickley: But he also says that behind the scenes, he was getting death threats.
--:-- Megan Basham: I lived under police protection for about 30 or 40 days. I had a seven-day-old daughter at the time. So I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with an armed guard. It was crazy. It was really, truly crazy.
--:-- John Bickley: Also behind the scenes in 2017, Claudine Gay, who was at that time the dean of Friar's department, opened up a Title IX investigation against him.
--:-- Megan Basham: So it involved claims that he had sexually harassed his subordinates. After about 18 months, the investigators found that Friar had joked about date rape, oral sex, and biting an assistant.
--:-- John Bickley: And these allegations were closely covered in the New York Times. So they received a lot of media attention.
--:-- Megan Basham: Gay ultimately suspended him without pay for two years, claiming that his research and conduct with other employees, quote, exhibited a pattern of behavior that failed to meet Harvard's expectations.
--:-- John Bickley: And she also searched lab. But he wasn't fired or stripped of tenure because those actions could only have been taken by the Harvard board.
--:-- Megan Basham: In fact, he's actually back at work at the university.
--:-- John Bickley: I went back to Harvard so that everyone knows here and everywhere else that I could, because there was a lot of obfuscation of facts and things like that.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the question becomes whether retaliation for his research might have played a role in this investigation.
--:-- John Bickley: Well, notwithstanding that behavior, which may have been inappropriate, there's no question Fryer was a quality scholar and he really hit a nerve with that research.
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah.
--:-- John Bickley: Megan, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Megan Basham: Anytime.
--:-- [Upbeat music starts]
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--:-- [Upbeat music continues]
--:-- Georgia Howe: The mayor of Kansas City has accused Missouri's governor of using what he claims are racist dog whistles in response to last week's shooting at the Chiefs' championship parade.
--:-- John Bickley: Mayor Quentin Lucas objected to Governor Mike Parson's use of the term thugs to describe the alleged perpetrators of last week's shooting that left one dead and 22 injured.
--:-- David Marcus: Both juveniles arrested are black, a detail that many outlets have gone out of their way not to highlight.
--:-- John Bickley: Here to discuss the allegation and how the media deals with these thorny racial issues is Daily Wire contributor David Marcus.
--:-- David Marcus: Hey, Dave. So first, what exactly is the mayor accusing the governor of here?
--:-- John Bickley: Morning, John. Typically, dog whistle means that somebody is saying something intentionally racist that is subtle enough to be deniable, but clear enough to be understood.
--:-- David Marcus: It's not clear that Mayor Lucas is accusing Parsons of having that intent but he arguing that use of a word like thug contributes to stereotypes about black people being violent
--:-- John Bickley: It is certainly quite plausible that the governor would have used the term thug regardless of the alleged shooter skin color but it highlights the difference between Americans who believe that our society should be basically colorblind and those who believe we need a set of rhetorical practices or rules that combat what they see as dangerous and systemic bigotry.
--:-- David Marcus: Yeah.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, Ann Coulter suggested on a recent Bill Maher show that if the alleged shooters in Kansas City were white, We would have known it right away.
--:-- David Marcus: But that the government and media try to hide the race of black suspects.
--:-- John Bickley: Does she have a point?
--:-- David Marcus: So in this particular shooting, the suspects are juveniles. So that may explain the lack of details.
--:-- John Bickley: But in general, yes, absolutely. The news media has concerns about how they cover black suspects that are different from how they cover white suspects.
--:-- David Marcus: Just as presumably nobody would object to a white parade shooter being called a thug. We see this with trans shooters as well, famously with the suppression of the Nashville school shooters manifesto.
--:-- John Bickley: We also often see it in a rush to ascribe racial motivation to white suspects while avoiding that in regard to non-white suspects.
--:-- David Marcus: And look, some journalists will point to the FBI and Biden administration calling white supremacist violence our greatest domestic threat as a justification for this double standard.
--:-- John Bickley: How mainstream or institutionalized are these double standards in regard to identity within journalism? Are there written or unwritten rules driving this?
--:-- David Marcus: I mean, mainly unwritten. Newspaper style guides don't have intersectional racial and identity conversion charts to indicate when to bring up race.
--:-- John Bickley: But it is something that the industry invites and is intentional about.
--:-- David Marcus: Just last month, the National Press Foundation held a conference in which it was argued that crime has to be covered, quote, with a racial lens, end quote.
--:-- John Bickley: Check out this audio from the ACLU's Alana Odoms addressing journalists as to what their responsibility is in this area.
--:-- David Marcus: When I think about reporting, particularly when I think about crime and reporting, I think we have to have that race conscious lens.
--:-- John Bickley: So constantly being conscious that we're not just reflecting a system that has a certain set of statistics or a certain demographic or a certain ideology.
--:-- David Marcus: So the job, she says, is not to coldly objectively present the facts, but rather to do so in a way that promotes a progressive vision of social justice that changes the system.
--:-- John Bickley: Those are two very different ways of describing what the job of news is.
--:-- David Marcus: When consumers see news organizations putting their thumb on the scale of what and how they cover events to promote social justice, that is the news media misleading them.
--:-- John Bickley: Even if it is very well-intentioned and enlightened, it is still hiding relevant information. People sense that there is an agenda because often, John, there is.
--:-- David Marcus: Dave, thanks for coming on.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for having me.
--:-- [Upbeat music continues]
--:-- Georgia Howe: Israel has set a deadline for Hamas to return dozens of hostages or else face a ground invasion of Rafa in southern Gaza.
--:-- John Bickley: Here to talk about the Israel-Hamas war is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce.
--:-- Tim Pierce: So Tim, first update us on the state of the war. Where is Israel at in its operations in Gaza?
--:-- John Bickley: Sure. Militarily, Israel's war has been very successful. It's destroyed Hamas infrastructure all over Gaza and blown up miles of terror tunnels.
--:-- Tim Pierce: They've also confiscated weapons, ammo, explosives, anything that Hamas could use in another terror attack.
--:-- John Bickley: Rafah is the last major stronghold of Hamas and is suspected to hold thousands of fighters.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Israel has hit targets in the city with airstrikes and conducted a rescue operation to save two hostages about a week ago, but it hasn't yet moved in with its full military.
--:-- John Bickley: That could happen in the next few weeks The timeline seems contingent on a couple of things planning the invasion and what to do with civilians and negotiations with Hamas
--:-- Tim Pierce: Well, negotiations have still been going on. The Biden administration wants to negotiate an end to the war as quickly as possible. for several reasons.
--:-- John Bickley: But it appears the U.S. has held talks with minimal input from Israel.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Morning Wire talked to Aryeh Lightstone, the former senior advisor to the U.S. ambassador to Israel, about that.
--:-- John Bickley: It's not like once you resolve Gaza, you're now done and everybody can go back to work in a regular way.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Israel is in a really bad neighborhood with people who are dedicated to destroying it.
--:-- John Bickley: And it's not going to end tomorrow.
--:-- Tim Pierce: And there's this wish casting going on from the Biden administration that, hey, this is politically inopportune for us from a timing perspective.
--:-- John Bickley: Can you knock it off? And Israel doesn't have the ability to stop the war now without completing its mission.
--:-- Tim Pierce: So the dynamics are just not there for a peace deal.
--:-- John Bickley: Hamas could get maybe a longer ceasefire and more aid for Palestinians in exchange for the hostages.
--:-- Tim Pierce: But Israel has been clear from the start that Hamas has to be destroyed.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, what do we know about the state of the hostages?
--:-- Tim Pierce: Very little, and what we do know is bad.
--:-- John Bickley: According to some reports, Israeli intelligence suggests that roughly half of the over 100 hostages still in Hamas's hands are dead.
--:-- Tim Pierce: For those that are still alive, they're most likely not getting the treatment they need.
--:-- John Bickley: Israeli troops actually found sealed boxes of medicine and supplies addressed to specific hostages when they cleared Nasser Hospital.
--:-- Tim Pierce: None of it had been dispersed to the hostages it was meant for.
--:-- John Bickley: Alongside that, the IDF found weapons and explosives stored in the hospital and it arrested hundreds of terrorists who had posed as hospital staff.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Now, there's also another parallel negotiation being brokered in Moscow of all places.
--:-- John Bickley: Tell us about that.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Right. The Kremlin has invited Palestinian groups to Moscow later this month to negotiate a Palestinian coalition.
--:-- John Bickley: Lightstone says this is Russia's attempt to drive a wedge between the U.S. and moderate Arab states.
--:-- Tim Pierce: So along with Hamas and Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, known as the PA, is the other major Palestinian governing body.
--:-- John Bickley: It's located in the Judea and Samaria area, commonly referred to as the West Bank.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Palestinian Authority leaders have offered to meet with Hamas and Moscow on the future of Gaza.
--:-- John Bickley: The PA has been approached by the U.S. and others as a likely candidate to take over Gaza after the war is over.
--:-- Tim Pierce: If that were to happen, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shdaye said he would prefer to work with Hamas rather than replace it.
--:-- John Bickley: The prime minister was asked how he felt about a partnership with a group that had orchestrated the mass torture, rape, and murder of hundreds of Israelis last year.
--:-- Tim Pierce: He said that one should not continue focusing on October 7th.
--:-- John Bickley: For its part, Israel has rejected any plan to turn Gaza over to the PA.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Well, it seems difficult to find a good faith partner to negotiate these things with.
--:-- John Bickley: Tim, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Thanks for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more news you need to know.
--:-- [Upbeat music continues]
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's netsuite.com slash morningwire.
--:-- John Bickley: Take advantage of no payments and no interest for six months at Http://www.NetSuite.com/MORNINGWIRE.
