FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The FBI has designated “black identity extremists” as a movement constituting a violent threat to public safety, and warranting the surveillance and scrutiny of the country’s “counterterrorism” forces.
“We have to do something within the courts to try to offset this bias that is automatically given to law enforcement.”
What does the Castile case tell us about the limits of the law in delivering justice for African-Americans killed by law enforcement, and what are some of the other fronts we need to fight on to push for that justice?
Editorial silence on the Walter Scott mistrial suggests the important gap between the relative ease of calling for change and the difficulty of examining why it doesn’t come.
Erin Burnett, Outside Agitator… Ugliness in the Eye of the Reporter… Berrying the Lead… Justice for Corporations—Not War Crime Victims… When Is Direct Military Intervention Not Direct Military Intervention?… US Media Ignore Brazilian Coup Confession
“What we’ve seen throughout history is the role that the media has played, when convenient, in forwarding a police PR narrative that reinforces the need for surveillance in our community, and conflates safety with surveillance in ways that I think everybody should find alarming.”
Corporate journalists rely on the First Amendment, but it’s increasingly unclear if the First Amendment can rely on them. The relative lack of interest in the impact of spying on activists—a practice with a long and disturbing history given new power by technology—is the latest example.
Why haven’t questions of discriminatory policing played a bigger role in election coverage? There was an opening recently when Republican candidate Donald Trump stated to CNN that five teenagers exonerated for the 1989 rape and assault of a woman jogging in Central Park were actually guilty.
A false claim spread by CNN’s Erin Burnett been retweeted over 4,000 times, and has served as a source for several right-wing and far-right media outlets, often backing up a trope that Black Charlotte/Mecklenburg Lives Matter is a mercenary goon squad directed by George Soros and the Democrats.
Writing about the protests over the killing of Keith Lamont Scott by Charlotte, N.C., police, AlterNet’s Sarah Lazare quoted FAIR’s Jim Naureckas on the need to be skeptical about information coming from police.
Some might say that the turn toward ugliness occurred in the afternoon, when a police officer fatally shot a black man.
Listen up, black kids, David Brooks is here to tell you why your choice of political activism is “counterproductive.” What’s strange is that Brooks never really bothers to explain why, exactly.
“Public safety agencies…perceive any threat to their own political power as analogous to a threat to public safety. And that exactly, of course, precisely gets the relationship wrong, because the people who are capturing police violence on video, they are the ones enhancing public safety here.”
Many Brazilians are calling the ouster of President Dilma Rousseff a coup, but the official US position is, what now? Plus: We talk about the importance of legal—and journalistic—defense of citizen journalists.
“Nearly everyone who’s being arrested or incarcerated is incurring criminal justice debt. And in many states you can be stripped of your right to vote until you pay off all of your criminal justice debt. So I talk about that essentially as a modern day poll tax.”
“This very platform is a manifestation of ongoing work that’s been happening in the black radical tradition, in the black liberation struggle, before many of us were even born.”
One of the legacies of Michael Brown’s killing, two years ago this week, was the exposure of police departments like Ferguson, Missouri’s, that have a system for profiting from fines and fees for low-level infractions that targets African-Americans disproportionately.
The Movement for Black Lives has never relied on corporate media to get their message out. But the coalition’s newly released policy platform does provide an opportunity for journalists—sometimes given to ponder what black activists are for—to engage those ideas.
“What’s needed is something that really asks, why have we so dramatically expanded the role for police, and why are we so heavily targeting poor and minority communities for this kind of intensive and invasive policing?”
Media insist there is “nationwide soul-searching” going on on the problem of racist police brutality. Certainly there is pain and anger, but when it comes time to talk about how to change things, corporate media don’t seem to have a great deal to say.
