Remember the lady in the park calling the cops on a guy? Which the media pushed as a racial incident?

Much of our media are untrustworthy assholes.
So when I encounter viral moments like the one involving the Coopers — the angel and the villain so neatly laid out, each person frozen in roles in a grand ideological narrative — my first instinct is to ask: What context am I missing here?

Here the answer was: an awful lot.

For starters, there was the Facebook post that Christian shared when he uploaded the original video, which his sister posted on Twitter in the hours after the encounter. In the post, Christian recorded his contemporaneous account of what happened in the moments before the camera started rolling. “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it,” Christian recounted himself saying to Amy. He also shared that he’d pulled out “the dog treats I carry for just for [sic] such intransigence.”

I had read an embarrassing number of stories and social media takes about this brief conflict. Not a single one of them had mentioned this public Facebook post.

He threatened her, I thought, stunned. He says himself that he approached her — a woman alone in a wooded area. He tried to lure away her dog. How was this the first time I was reading these details? Had I just missed them in the other stories I’d read?
And it goes from there.