Rob Richie on Ranked Choice Voting, Netfa Freeman on Police Militarization
The passage of a ballot initiative in New York City will change the way we vote.
NYT Perp Walks a Bronx Neighborhood
After two people, one a police officer, were killed by the NYPD in the Bronx, the New York Times took its cue from law enforcement officials in shaping the early narrative around “gang violence”—impugning an entire neighborhood in the process.
Decades After False Convictions, ‘When They See Us’ Highlights Media Failure
The conversation around When They See Us would be incomplete without a serious reckoning with corporate media’s role in fanning the flames of racist hysteria and misinformation.
NYT Reports on ‘Perception’ of Subway Danger—but Can’t Perceive Racism
Inchoate fears about public transit—and the people who use it—have a long history, both in New York and other US cities.
The Media’s Profitable, Indefensible Addiction to Mugshots
The practice of publishing mugshots leads to summary public shaming, firings, diminished social status—all before a trial has even taken place. In the age of SEO, it’s a form of extrajudicial punishment that largely harms the poor and people of color.
The Return of Reefer Madness
Alex Berenson is good at cherry-picking a few crazy examples of where pot use has been linked to violence, with questionable evidence.
WaPo, USA Today, NBC Go Full Breitbart on ‘Prisoners Eating Steak’ Non-Story
Several corporate media outlets thought it newsworthy to point out that prisoners at Coleman federal prison in Wildwood, Florida, received a routine holiday meal that was slightly above their normal, bottom-of-the-barrel provisions.
Key Fact Obscured in Immigration Coverage: MS-13 Was Made in USA
Much media coverage of immigration misses out on why large numbers of people from the Northern Triangle are migrating to the US in the first place. Over the past three generations, the Northern Triangle countries, long marked by profound levels of inequality, have each experienced horribly destructive civil wars and military coups–with the US intimately involved in each of these.
Chicago Media Help Sheriff Exploit Post-Parkland Gun Fears to Expand Pretrial Punishment
By demagoguing the movement against cash bail, the Chicago press is helping to build the case for condemning thousands to preemptive punishment before they face a jury, much less are found guilty.
Two Charts on the Gun Crisis: One Hopeful, One Hopeless
I found two graphics on the gun crisis particularly interesting: one because it brought hope, and the other because it blew that hope away.
Corporate Media Analysts’ Indifference to US Journalists Facing 70 Years in Prison
The attack on the press that kicked off the Trump administration—the arrest and subsequent threatening of two journalists with 70 years in prison—has been met with total silence from most corporate media outlets.
Is Facilitating a Paid Informant Program Part of Journalism’s Job?
A search of NY1’s coverage shows hundreds of segments this year, thousands over the past few years, that encourage viewers to send tips to the Police Foundation’s Crime Stoppers hotline.
Action Alert: With Sleazy Innuendo, NYT Lays Virginia Attack at Bernie Sanders’ Feet
The New York Times started with a false premise and patched together a dodgy piece of innuendo and guilt-by-association in order to place the blame for a shooting in Virginia on “the most ardent supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders.”
Black Man Stabbed to Death by White Supremacist—Then Smeared by Media
Reading media reports of a white supremacist hate crime, one would hardly know who was the killer and who the victim.
NY Daily News: Broken Windows ‘Works,’ and if It Hurts Immigrants—‘Too Bad’
The Daily News editorial board grasps on for dear life to a racially targeted, decades-old policing philosophy as something that “works” without having to prove to their readers any demonstrable correlation to crime levels.
‘The Basis of a Humane Immigration Policy Is to Respect People as Human Beings’
“The exclusion and expulsion of particular groups of people who have been deemed a threat, or un-American, has very much been part of the whole project of nation-building since the very beginning.”
‘Drug Dependence Hasn’t Been Stopped by 45 Years of the War on Drugs’
“As a country, we’re looking at racial injustice, we’re looking at policing, we’re talking about these issues. We have to talk about drug possession laws and enforcement. The No. 1 arrest offense, we’ve got to talk about that if we’re talking about race and policing.”
‘You Know That It’s Not a Few Rotten Apples’
“This is not the first time this has happened. This is absolutely serial criminality from the largest, most elite financial institutions in America.”
‘The Bodies of Prisoners Are Commodities’
Where you oppress people and where there’s bias and behavior that’s fundamentally immoral, where there’s a lack of healthcare, where there are people dying in infirmaries in prison, you’re going to see resistance.
Noelle Hanrahan on National Prison Strike, William Black on Wells Fargo Fraud
You wouldn’t know it from corporate press, but what may have been the largest prison labor strike in the country’s history happened September 9. This country is supposedly taking a bipartisan “fresh look” at mass incarceration; so what does elite media’s collective yawn say about their actual interest in what happens to people once they are behind bars?
