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This week on CounterSpin: A longtime reporter, at Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV since the 1960s, remembered spending shifts in his early days just listening to a police scanner, waiting for a crime to happen. The station’s decision to adopt a then-novel “Action News” format dictated that hyper-focus on crime. But, as detailed in a new report from the Philadelphia Inquirer, it also dictated that the scanner being monitored was in Kensington, a multi-racial, working-class neighborhood struggling with poverty and its attendant ills—and not someplace else.
“Lights. Camera. Crime” is an early installment of the Inquirer‘s “A More Perfect Union” project, aimed at examining the roots and branches of racism in US institutions, including media institutions. The story was reported by Layla A. Jones. We’ll speak to Layla Jones today on CounterSpin.
Transcript: ‘This Portrayal of Urban Environment Definitely Did Fuel Fear’
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, war coverage and “grooming.”
I was disturbed by the relevant observation (at time mark 25:15), regarding linkage between Western media portrayal of people of color as being “potentially violent,” and the tendency of those in Ukraine to adopt such an attitude, even though MOST of them have never met a person of color… in their entire lifetime!
Much like reflexive submission to the supposed intellectual authority of the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages, billions of modern news consumers are F-A-AAAR too willing to relinquish their intellectual autonomy to the agents of the corporate press, merely to gorge upon the most recent chunks of disinformation tossed into the circus.
Even more disturbing… is the fact recent reporting has uncovered the fact that 10,000+ refugees from Ukraine have jumped line in front of the Haitian refugees in the past two weeks. Some of these Haitians have been waiting multiple years to have their asylum claims heard by INS.
Perhaps this is just another example of White makes right.