FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The linguistic gymnastics needed to report on police violence without calling up images of police violence is a thing of semantic wonder. The case of Ohio Deputy Richard Scarborough shooting and killing 16-year-old Joseph Haynes inside a courthouse checked off nearly all the pro-police propaganda tropes:
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.
The linguistic gymnastics needed to report on police violence without calling up images of police violence is a thing of semantic wonder.
Maybe now they’ve got this solidarity thing going, corporate media could stretch the idea enough to see where solidarity is needed on issues perhaps even more pressing than whether you got your Thor: Ragnorok review before opening night or a day after.
The experience of Ramsey Orta captures important truths about how targeted, politicized punishment is directed at those who dare to create media that challenge authority.
“A lot of the money we’re spending now on the criminal justice system is not making people safer, it’s often making communities less safe, because of the disruptive effects of cycling people through prisons and jails.”
We may hear editorial calls for better training, or more data, or sometimes even convictions of individual officers. But somehow we never see the problem of policing whole, so the deeper reckoning necessary for real change is forestalled.
“There’s a long history in this country of the FBI using the fear of threats, real or perceived, as a cover for profiling black people, and in particular black civil rights leaders and activists.”
Media might also use the Arpaio pardon to examine their own role in giving a pass and a platform to a person who gleefully, purposefully flouted the law in order to carry out a racist campaign.
“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?
The biggest, most resourced police department in the world likes to work in the shadows. You want to question that? You’re probably a terrorist enabler.
“We actually need to really question what the purpose of police legitimacy is. If it is to manufacture public consent for a war on drugs, a war on terror, a war on disorder, then it’s deeply problematic.”
When elites get to define the problem, they get to decide what constitutes solving it—and for many people, that makes for too shallow a conversation when it comes to policing.
FAIR has noted media’s use of vague or passive-voice framing to obfuscate police wrongdoing, but a recent example by Miami CBS affiliate WFOR stood out as an extreme case.
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.
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.
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.
