Twitter As Enforcer

When I’m not churning out these biweekly pieces, I spend a great deal of time reading articles on Grantland, Deadspin, and ESPN. As some of you may know, these sites have posted an article or two (sarcasm) regarding the Donald Sterling fiasco and what it means for basketball. Recorded telling his mistress not to bring black people to Clippers games and not to take photos with them, the business magnate and former attorney was on Tuesday banned from the NBA for life and fined $2.5 million. Soon he may be coerced into selling his team. From “despicable and prejudiced” (his wife’s words), to a “piece of human waste,” Sterling has deservedly taken on many labels in the past few days.

Sterling’s audio rant is not his first brush with racial insensitivity. In deposition for a discrimination lawsuit brought in 2003, one of his top employees testified that Sterling said that “all of the blacks in this building, they smell, they’re not clean” and “all of the Mexicans … just sit around and smoke and drink all day.” In 2006, the United States Department of Justice charged Sterling with housing discrimination, after he allegedly refused to rent his Los Angeles residential complexes to African- or Mexican-Americans. Both cases were settled without public admission of guilt.

Fast forward to 2009, when former Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor filed for a wrongful-termination lawsuit, claiming that Sterling discriminated against him due to his age and race. In court papers, Baylor, an 11-time All-Star and a Hall of Famer, claimed that Sterling confided in him his desire for a “white Southern coach coaching poor black players.” The report alleged that potential head coach candidates were turned down for racial reasons. Well, Doc Rivers, an African American head coach, just led the Clippers to their winningest regular season in franchise history. In his first season with the team. Imagine that.

ESPN’s Bomani Jones wrote an article in 2006 titled “Sterling’s Racism Should Be News.” But it wasn’t. More people read that column this week than when he wrote it nine years ago. Why? Journalist Howard Kurtz recently quipped that “lawsuits are dry,” while “secret tapes are hot.” True, but there’s more to the story than that.

Think back to 2006. If you wanted to pass along an interesting news story, what were you going to do? Mail a newspaper clipping to a friend? Build a fire and send smoke signals? Myspace it? All kidding aside, what may seem like minute technological advancements have actually contributed to a major shift in the dissemination of news.

Back to 2014, we all have smartphones. Okay, 65 percent of us do. Personally, mine alerted me approximately 4,050 times about the developing scandal, and that’s before I even placed my thumb on the fingerprint scanner. Whether I opened up Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or even 2048, I just could not escape this guy.

Social media allows for current events to transcend reality and assume an online metanarrative. Take CNN’s coverage of the tragic Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. I cannot begin to fathom the frenzy our world would be thrown into if historical tragedies like President Kennedy’s assassination or the Challenger explosion occurred in today’s day and age.

No longer are articles limited by the numbers of interviews conducted, as anyone can post their thoughts on Twitter. And they have.

No longer is the viewing of related visuals limited to subscribers to a certain source, as photographs and videos can go viral on social media. And they have.

But perhaps most importantly, social media allows each and every one of us a larger stake in the public discourse. That is the reason why this story blew up now rather than in 2006 or 2009. In 2006, the initial TMZ report could very well have remained just that: a TMZ report. But because hundreds of thousands of Twitter users became justifiably invested in this story, major news outlets and the National Basketball Association sprung to action. Because ultimately, the media is a business that caters to the curiosity of the public. And social media has provided this public a powerful mechanism in dictating the way events unfold around us.

Prior to the advent of Twitter or Facebook, civilian efforts to alter the status quo often relied on mass protests or boycotts that drew attention to the issue at hand. While honorable and often effective, these efforts were frequently plagued with the problem of “free riding.” But sending a tweet or sharing an article takes much less effort and is in turn more likely to reach a larger audience. Whether online protests are as effective as their predecessors is yet to be determined, but in this instance, the media latched on and Donald Sterling is banned for life.

Declan P. Garvey ’17 is a Crimson editorial writer living in Canaday Hall.