FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
On the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, inmate laborers at 40 prisons in 24 states across the country went on strike. But most national corporate news outlets thought that the potential of history being made needed little to no news coverage.
“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.”
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.
“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.
“Copspeak” — the jargon used by police departments — is internalized by journalists covering police violence, and it affects the public’s perception of crime and police brutality.
Broken Windows enjoyed, for many years, a reputation as public safety gospel and the miracle solution to New York’s crime-ridden past. But now a report by the New York Police Department’s inspector general’s office has undermined the premise of the city’s famed crime-fighting philosophy
“Justice Sotomayor takes issue not just with the result in the Strief opinion, but with the results in a range of Fourth Amendment opinions…. The Fourth Amendment hasn’t been interpreted in a manner that allows for courts to respond to the realities of policing in minority communities.”
The defendant in Utah v. Strief is white, but the suspicionless stops at the case’s heart disproportionately affect black and brown and poor people, marginalized in media as elsewhere.
While corporate media talked about “radical Islam,” others worked to maintain focus on the victims, with things like a short video from the group Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, featuring people talking about the killings and other violence they face.
Max Blumenthal and Sarah Lazare, writing for AlterNet about the refusal of Orlando police to release 911 transcripts from the Pulse massacre, quoted FAIR’s Jim Naureckas on the power of police leaks.
The New York Times sneered at a growing movement against Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson, who is now being criticized for recommending—and getting—a no-jail sentence for the police officer who killed Akai Gurley in 2014.
“A neighbor came to her as soon as the man at the top of the stairs alerted her, and cradled Kitty in her arms as they waited for the ambulance. I think that detail is significant, because it shows that this is not what was then made out to be true. This was a neighborhood of people who, once they knew that their Kitty was in trouble, acted.”
“To the extent that there is violence, community members wanted an approach that really steered people away and got at root causes. And they were continually ignored, over and over. And so what they got instead from the city was a giant raid, because that’s what the city understands, that’s what the police department understands.”
The 1964 New York city murder of Kitty Genovese started as a personal tragedy and a tiny item on a New York Times back page. Within months, it had become an internationally known, emblematic tale about the neighbors, 38 of them, we were told, who reportedly watched Genovese die in the street but did nothing, didn’t come to her aid or call the police. But what if the tale we’ve all heard isn’t true?
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), like all such agreements, was being negotiated in secret–until Greenpeace Netherlands released classified documents revealing elements of the deal the EU and the US were moving merrily toward — now some say the pact may be scuttled.
The New York media tried and convicted 120 suspects as gang members solely on the say-so of the NYPD and federal officials.
“We watched Upper Big Branch because 29 died in one spectacularly stupid explosion. But there are another 20 miners or so underground, one or two at a time, dying because of the same management style, the same sense of dollars over men, the same sense of production over safety, that accounted for Upper Big Branch.”
The police reform conversation, pushed into the national consciousness through mass protests and acts of civil disobedience by everyday people, was steered toward the theme of “community policing” by establishment figures—with the help of the media.
Last week I rolled up to 7 World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan for a “Quality of Life Panel” hosted by the Manhattan Institute, one of the city’s most influential conservative think tanks.
