San Francisco's "Joyful Mayhem"

photo by Noah Berger AP (2012)

Last night, immediately following the defeat of the Detroit Tigers to the San Francisco Giants in the 2012 World Series, live video feeds showed a city bus on fire, lit by rowdy fans celebrating in the aftermath of the Giants victory in Detroit. A video from KTVU in San Francisco shows a mob of people attacking a car, and then pulling people out of the car, and proceeding to beat the hell of them till riot police intervened. When I revisited the site were the video had been posted, it was removed from the site. WTF?  So much for freedom of the press.

The larger media outlets were late to report the mayhem, and when they finally got around to doing so, they served it up light, with a cherry on top. USA Today, in a small three paragraph article, referred to it as a "gleeful throng," while the San Francisco Chronicle showed riot photos, while referring to it as "joyful mayhem." You know, the type of joy that involves looting, and setting bonfires in the middle of the street, and pelting police in riot gear with glass bottles; that type of joyful mayhem is what I believe they were referring to.

photo by Susana Bates/San Francisco Chronicle (2012)

Which gets me to my point; What would have happened if  this had occurred in Detroit? Would the press have been so gleeful? Would they have minimized it with a fluffy piece defending the  mob mentality, by saying that most of them were just "having a good time." Remember when the Tigers won the World Series in 1984? There was a dramatic image of Kenneth Holms, a Detroit Tigers fan who is shown holding a pennant above his head, with a overturned cop car set afire directly behind him (look at the bottom of this post to see the image). This image was singled out, and distributed to every news agency around the world, and was held up as a metaphor of how the media looked at Detroit, and how we were to be viewed by the rest of the world. Never mind that we've managed to make it peacefully through six major championships, and two World Series losses, along with a couple of Stanley Cup losses, without any full-blown incidences. Despite this, media types from around the world will line up in droves, hoping to catch a Detroiter so much as cutting a fart, to uphold their "Rolodex" approach to journalism, which locks in stories based on perception, while using tired old sources, and go-to approaches that guarantee a story, regardless of its authenticity.

1984 World Series, photo by Robert Kozloff AP