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Comment by bumbledraven | Hacker News Reader

Dishonest article. It claims, falsely, that "a Tennessee school board voted to ban the book."

But the book was not banned; it was simply removed from the curriculum. The board even suggested adding it back if they couldn't find an alternative they preferred.

According to the minutes of the 2022-01-10 McMinn County Board of Education meeting [1]:

> Jonathan Pierce: My motion was to remove this particular book from our curriculum and that if possible, find a book that will supplement the one there.

> ...

> Rob Shamblin: At that point if it’s been removed, it could be added back if there is no better alternative, I assume? I don’t know what it’s going to take to find an alternative.

The motion passed unanimously (10-0).

[1] https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_...

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Prohibiting books from being added to a curriculum is what banning is.

I have seen this disingenuous copy-paste objection show up in every thread on this topic on HN, and it hurts to see people swallow it.

Especially since it then conveniently leads down the slippery slope into aggrieved complaining about scumbag reporters and scumbag press and how newspapers were newspapers and news was news back in the good ole days in the nineteen umpties.

Stating that Maus was "banned" without qualification is misleading. It gives the impression that the book was removed from the library and that teachers are prohibited from using it as a resource. The author had plenty of space to clarify this in the article and chose not to.

What happened is that the board approved a motion to remove Maus from the list of prescribed materials for the 8th grade unit on the Holocaust. Lord of the Rings isn't on that list either. Neither book has been "banned".

> Prohibiting books from being added to a curriculum is what banning is.

The board didn't "prohibit" anything from being added to the curriculum. They are the ones responsible for the curriculum and they simply removed Maus from it. As noted in the meeting, they could add it back at any time if they choose.

If a teacher is forbidden from getting copies of a book (even at their own expense), distributing them to students, and assigning reading and giving lessons on the book, then it’s effectively banned. Let’s not play semantics here.

Yes, that would qualify as banning if it happened, but as far as I can tell, neither the article nor the meeting minutes state that McMinn County teachers are forbidden from doing any of those things.

It’s pretty reasonable to infer from the circumstances that such an attempt would immediately get the teacher into big trouble. It would certainly have a chilling effect at the very least.

I think reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which removing a book from the required reading list would have such a chilling effect.

In any event, can we agree that it's misleading to describe what happened simply as "banning" without further qualification? As an example of a more accurate description, I would point to Reason's article on the subject [1]:

> Tennessee School Board Pulls Maus From Eighth-Grade Curriculum

> A grim sign of the bureaucratic mentality controlling public education

[1] https://reason.com/2022/01/27/tennessee-school-board-pulls-m...

I still disagree because my experience with the way schools operate is that “removed from the curriculum” and “banned” amount to the same thing in practice. It’s a distinction without a difference.

I'm baffled there is such obvious hairsplitting on this on HN, of all places, against a notable educational book about the freakin Holocaust. One of my college roommates was assigned this text in a contemporary literature course as it was and is a contemporary historical fiction graphic novel.

Exactly. Banning a book about the Holocaust and saying it's not banning reeks of the appearance of Holocaust denialism, white nationalism, and/or antisemitism.

To avoid difficult, real subjects is to lie to children and make them into ignorant, naive, uneducated adults.

> I have seen this disingenuous copy-paste objection show up in every thread on this topic on HN

To be fair, your comment is objectively more generic and closer to a "copy-paste objection" than the GP's.

I have no idea how the press were in nineteen umpties, but it seems clear to me that the reporting by Mother Jones is pretty biased, and they have their fair share of polemic-level opinion pieces.

Do you think they would cover the recent removal of To Kill A Mockingbird (which is ironically a book they do mention in the article) from the curriculum by a Washington school board [1] in the same way? I don't think so. I searched their website, and it looks like they haven't covered it at all.

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/schools-drop-kill-mockingbird-requi...

“They didn’t complain about this other equally bad thing” is a weak argument and isn’t HN-caliber.

I think that is is an excellent and relevant example of press bias, which @legerdemain was commenting on.

Generic straw mans are not conducive to good faith arguments, HN or elsewhere.

It might also be simply that the press has limited resources, and being composed of human beings, cannot be expected to operate with perfect ideological consistency.

I don't think that's the reason. Hanlon's razor is just a heuristic, we shouldn't blindly and naively apply it to everything. I think you can see how biased Mother Jones is by taking the headlines on their front page, and trying to rewrite them as someone attempting to be impartial would.

There’s no question that Mother Jones has an editorial bias; every periodical does. I’m not sure what the point of complaining about that is. Likewise, it’s not particularly noteworthy that WSJ and Fox News have a conservative bias.

If we are to get up in arms about something, it should be because they are being deceptive (or worse, publishing false information), not because they are merely biased or guilty of omission.

> every periodical does. I’m not sure what the point of complaining about that is.

That is broadly correct, though not all of them are equally biased. However, journalistic objectivity [1] is something we could demand them to strive for. I'm not sure if the press have always been like this.

> Likewise, it’s not particularly noteworthy that WSJ and Fox News have a conservative bias.

Most of the US mainstream outlets are biased in a particular direction. I've said the before here, but you can see that by taking any reasonable list of major outlets [1], and checking their biases [2][3].

> If we are to get up in arms about something, it should be because they are being deceptive (or worse, publishing false information), not because they are merely biased.

Paltering is also a form of deception, and you could argue that it is quite pervasive and pernicious. I think Mother Jones, and many other outlets, are guilty of that.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity

[2]: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_media_in_the_United_State...

[3]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

[4]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings

Bias is only complained about when people passive-aggressively bring their politics into a situation to warp the subject and distract.

There is no such thing as "unbiased" reporting, just as it is impossible to "eliminate racism" or "eliminate rape". Journalists aren't robots. Anyone who tells you they're "unbiased" is either a liar or a fool. Reasonable and accurate reporting, without word weaseling or playing favorites, is honest journalism.

No, I was commenting that deflecting from the banning of Maus to "b-b-but the press is biased!" is an obvious and pathetic diversion.

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