Appallingly slanted reporting from the Guardian -- DC plane crash

[GeneralPeter]

This article describes Trump's theory that DEI had something to do with the crash using debunking words throughout. 'Baselessly', 'without providing evidence' etc etc.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/30/trump-washington-dc-plane-crash-dei

The thing is, this isn't 'baseless'.

The FAA has said that the tower was understaffed. We don't know if that was relevant or has not. We do know that FAA recruitment cratered because of a (very well-evidenced) extremely crude attempt at DEI. There is a long-running class action lawsuit that is on public record and not made up. The test really did award points for saying you had more Ds than Cs at school, for saying science was your weakest subject, etc etc and they did then give the answers to candidates of a particular race before the test.

Sometimes things that sound like loonish right-wing conspiracy theories actually turn out to be true. If you think I must be a right-wing loon, please read this thread first (and many others out there -- this is all public record in court documents and not denied by the FAA).

x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752091831095939471

You would not know any of this if you read the Guardian article. Their reporter must surely know this stuff. So it's another attempt to bury with slurs an ideologically inconvenient actual truth. We've seen this before with sex-based rights, and the Guardian should stop it.

(Obligatory: I'm not a Trump fan, think he is appalling in many respects, several of them disqualifying for the presidency. But while comment is free, facts should be sacred).

What do you mean by 'different systems'?

There is, as yet, nothing to suggest that understaffing at the control tower had any part to play in this incident. So to suggest that the FAA's hiring strategies caused this accident is unsupported by evidence.

The vast majority of air accidents are caused by pilot error. The next most common cause is mechanical failure. Accidents caused by air traffic controllers are relatively rare. Yet Trump chose the latter as the most likely cause no because it's a reasonable conclusion to jump to, but because that way he could use a tragedy to score political points.

I've seen reports the pilot of the helicopter was a trans woman, who had served 15 years, transitioned in the military & was pissed off with Trumps ban on trans people serving. No idea if true-anyone else seen this?

Many "PoC" in the United States voted for him. It seems like a bizarre choice to me (as I can't imagine voting for him), but it's not my country and it was a democratic vote. I think it's a bit infantilising to assume that they're scared. Many are probably happy with him being president given how much he increased his vote share in non white demographics.

Yeah I saw it in a twitter account called Fake Gay News.
So I'm.utterly convinced of the accuracy. 🤨

You keep repeating the FAA's point about 'understaffing' at Reagan airport but you are missing the point

General understaffing at the busiest runway in USA and excessive military flights in the same area = yes absolutely

But

'Understaffing' at 8-9pm on a Wednesday evening in January ie a quiet time when one ATC would not be unusual and actually be required for staff safety and comfort = not necessarily a factor/ in need of careful investigation

So maybe qualify the 'understaffing' with some clarity and known facts

@Bromptotoo helicopters on UHF and civilian aircraft on VHF, so they can't always hear each other and it's not standard practice for the same ATCO to manage both.

You're right OP and articles like the Guardian's are part of the problem because people who find out that in fact some of what Trump says and is relevant to their lives is - unbelievably - true then cease to believe anything the Guardian (and other such media) print and then assume that giving Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt is the best option. Because there are so many obvious and false smears against him all the time that really that's the only neutral option.

Which is how he's president again, to be honest.

You can only cry wolf so many times.

And he might be crass and an idiot but he's better than lying liars who lie all the time and just expect others to believe them and follow what they say because they're tribal and superior to their readers or something. Just because, really. No matter the facts.

He's right on quite a few things that are really important to real people's lives.

He shouldn't have said what he did when he did. Of course. It was inappropriate giving the timing. But the attempts to put DEI over competency in air traffic control are a lot worse, and from what I've read this is - unbelievably - true.

Bone deep hatred of Donald Trump as a person doesn't excuse journalists lying and failure to examine facts impartially.

I'm also astounded that no-one seems to consider that - as the president of the USA - he might actually be party to some information the rest of us are lacking... I mean, even if he is, it's still inappropriate to talk about it at this time. But he may well know something the rest of us don't which is why he's come to the conclusion he has.

Sure you have, Jan. 🤔

@Efacsen No, the FAA has already released an initial report which specific understaffing at that specific time at that airport, when the crash happened.

Highly doubt it was a truly democratic vote. Between the use of dark patterns, big data Cambridge Analytica style, and likely third party involvement for their own gains.

We (the West, broadly) are living through a Crisis of Competence. There's lots of scholarly articles about it, books, plus mainstream media explanations if you want to explore further as to why that's happening and what effect it's having on our infrastructure (very interesting to explore but it could affect how well you manage to sleep at night).

It's much bigger than DEI hiring but that is one strand of it.

I'm hoping that one outcome of this tragedy is that the CoC is brought into mainstream conversation as that's how it can start to be fixed.

@Pootles34 the Guardian regularly used to publish articles stating the baseless fact that mammalian sex is not binary, which is flat out wrong, so I'm afraid I don't have as much faith in their editorial standards as you do. The Guardian has been going through it's very own CoC since about 2015, imho.

It may well be true that people have been hired due to DEI targets who are not up to the job (not necessarily ATCs) and more qualified people have been rejected. It's fair enough for Trump to raise this as an issue.

What's not right is using the immediate aftermath of a crash where a lot of people have lost their lives and the investigation as to the cause has not taken place to start pointing fingers. If we were just relying on "common sense" for everything then we wouldn't need an investigation, would we?

That is 100% untrue. Why spread utter lies??

@heyhopotato That's silly. The Republicans won the House, the Senate, the presidential election and the popular vote. I think that makes it pretty clear that they and their policies are popular. I don't like that either, but just denying it and insisting there must be a conspiracy based reason is Trump tier denial.

Yes agree and, like you, I also have a feeling he may well have more intel than we think he has. Why wouldn't he as US President??

But absolutely not the time nor place to raise it.

Where is your evidence op that those DEI recruits have caused air crashes?
Once in training they would surely not progress unless they pass tests simulations etc
To state crassly that Dei recruits caused a crash before an investigation is complete is crass and dumb

Did you read the reporting I linked to? There's plenty more. I just chose one fairly accessible one. There is plenty of evidence.

Did that have anything to do with the crash? I don't know. The FAA has said they were under-staffed. Maybe totally irrelevant to this crash.

But 'no evidence' is not helpful when it's applied entirely one-sidedly to suit a political agenda (I'm commenting on the Guardian here, not you).

When we hold an enquiry into something, we don't look at one side's case and say it's 'no evidence' on the grounds that the tribunal hasn't yet ruled, then disregard it. That's backwards.

Test the evidence, sure. Provide countering evidence, great. But systemically ignoring parts of the case that are inconvenient is a terrible way to proceed.

You have a point, OP. The Guardian could have referred to some of the context that you describe, but they chose not to because they are politically biased IMO (as is much of the media one way or the other, to be fair).

But Trump was wrong to focus on that issue in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, when the priority should have been to express sympathy, and when we don't know yet why it happened. Plenty of time for him to make his opinions known and call for a wider debate on DEI later on.

It's not unknown in the UK for the same controller to be broadcast on two or even four frequencies including mixing UHF and VHF.

Do you know the term bandboxing?

I agree that, from the point of view of situational awareness, it's better if pilots can here conversations between ATC and other traffic in the vicinity. However, if the UHF/VHF split meant the military and civil flyers couldn't hear each others' messages whether there was one controller or two is immaterial.

I've not made any such claim. If you can find such a claim I've made, paste it and I'll try to explain my rationale a bit more in case I wasn't clear enough the first time.

The most direct causal line would be through understaffing. There is a very sober and well-evidenced case that this was in part because of a terribly-conceived and implemented FAA DEI programme. The facts of the programme aren't really in much doubt, having been litigated for a decade.

It is very disturbing that Trump found a way to blame the plane crash immediately on nonwhites. Declarative statements should only be made once a thorough investigation which has collected all the relevant evidence has taken place.

The Swiss cheese model can normally account for plane crashes - ie crashes typically result from a combination of factors rather than a single root cause (dh is an EasyJet pilot and watches a lot of air crash investigation programmes).

And in The Guardian!

Trump is an appalling idiot - no argument there.

But I'm very cynical about The Guardian's reporting in general. I've seen some very dodgy things in all the years I've read it. It's not an original comment to suggest that you need to wary of press bias/agendas etc, but I say this because The Guardian is very snooty about its credentials and (I feel) tries to suggest it's an unbiased newspaper. I've seen all kinds of things cancelled, censored, minimised, spun etc etc. It's no different from the others - you just choose the agenda that you mind least, I guess!

But the balanced reporting is that this is a baseless claim and isn’t backed up with evidence or facts. It’s a mark of how far standards of journalism have fallen that people have lost sight of this.

I doubt it. No one else has mentioned it. Everyone here is debating the issues. That's what I expected. MN is full of smart people.