Well, someone was racist on the internet.
This isn’t a huge shock, because the internet emboldens the terrible and makes them believe they can get away with being heinous. What was worth commenting on is not the racism, but the ancillary details that the person in question was claiming was true. That tells a different story.
First, the person claimed to work for us at Yorkton This Week. He doesn’t, that much is clear. He claimed he ‘changed his name’ for fear of being fired but when you know everyone in your office you can tell pretty easily that detail was completely made up. Then he claimed to spend time moonlighting as well at CTV. Nothing against CTV, but there’s no overlap between our staff.
But there is a very clear reason why he decided to claim association with two local media institutions; he wanted to discredit them. Beyond just posting racist nonsense on a local Facebook group, he had a second goal, and that was to discredit institutions. He was claiming association to local media in order to attempt to get people to distrust local media. People might be suspicious of an outlet that would hire someone as openly racist as this.
His stories conflicted - if you were so concerned with being fired that you changed your name, why would you provide so many details about your life? You can’t fire someone who doesn’t work for you, however, so he had no real concern about being fired.
He eventually also tried to drag local political parties into the mess, but at this point the post was deleted. That had the same goal; if he works for these parties, they have guilt by association. Who knows who else he would have tried to drag down into the mud with him.
The details he decided to include paint a picture that’s a bit different than just some racist who wants to be awful on the internet. This was not that. Instead, it was someone who had their target somewhere else. He wanted to discredit the local media, he wanted to discredit local politicians, and while he might have been racist himself - who really knows at this point - his real goal was to make everyone else look racist by association.
Naturally, we want to make sure that if someone like that would claim to work here, people would not believe them. How do we do that? Someone might argue that Yorkton This Week could easily become a more diverse work environment and we do have a solution to that. We’re hiring right now in the editorial department, we need a new reporter. We hire the person best for the job, but I know there’s someone who can diversify our office because they’re about to put together a great application (sent to [email protected]). We want to see diversity, we want people to see our office as a place that represents the community, and more importantly, a place that welcomes anyone in the community.
Maybe that should be the legacy of someone trying to create divisions within Yorkton, that instead they bring more people together, and strengthen local media. Society gets better when everyone in the community is included.
