The
death of the Fairness Doctrine and the consolidation of media have left us in a
sorry place. Newspapers are on the decline and we haven’t yet figured out how,
exactly, electronic media will fill the void. We live in an age rife with
communication possibilities, yet our ability to obtain actual news through
conventional sources is increasingly stunted. Narratives have been created that
are trotted out when they’re needed, to ensure stories are reported in line
with the pre-approved narrative. Nowhere has this been more visible than in the
coverage of the events still unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri.
An
unarmed black teenager was shot repeatedly by a police officer and killed. His
body was left for hours in the road in the hot sun. That much we know for sure.
The members of his community were outraged by the young man’s death, and began
protesting. The police responded to the outrage with a show of paramilitary
equipment, tear gas, and violence. The media didn’t cover the story much at all
for the first couple of days, but when the protests and the militarized
response continued, the media couldn’t ignore it any longer.
That’s
when the narrative kicked in. Whenever a young black man is killed, he’s put on
trial for his own death. We saw it in the case of Trayvon Martin. We’re seeing
it again in the death of Michael Brown. Eyewitness reports do not match the
police story. A video was put out that purports to show the teen stealing some
cheap cigars. The outrage! The horror! Suddenly the honor student became a thug
and a thief and deserved the death penalty for his crimes. This is not a
narrative that would ever be applied to a white kid, but hey, jury pools don’t
taint themselves.
This
story has unfolded for millions on Twitter. Some incredible people are on the
ground in Ferguson, tweeting out the news as it happens. Several nights last
week I was up till the wee hours, watching videos of a SWAT team arresting a
couple of reporters at a McDonalds. St. Louis Alderman Antonio French was
arrested one night. If there is ever a Pulitzer for tweeting, it should go to
Antonio French, whose level-headed tweets have kept us informed about events
almost as soon as they happened.
Sending
in MRAPs and battle clad SWAT teams in to respond to an angry community was a
declaration of war, right from the beginning. A highly militarized white police
force waging war on unarmed black citizens. If you’ve been watching the news
coverage, you know that the black folks of Ferguson aren’t getting the same
sort of reverent coverage that Cliven Bundy received. We saw footage of armed
thugs pointing weapons at law enforcement – and that was presented by the media
as a sort of patriotism. That
Cliven Bundy is essentially a welfare rancher who refused to pay his bills was
not the story that was told. Black folks fighting back against injustice? Well,
now, that’s covered as violent thugs burning and looting. That young black men
stood in front of stores to prevent looting was not shown on your teevee news.
You
haven’t seen the story of Kajieme Powell. Kajieme Powell
was shot about 10 times by Ferguson police on Tuesday night. After they killed
him, they handcuffed him. Several other police cars appeared, and other
officers got pretty angry with folks who witnessed the killing. The police said that he
was coming at them menacingly with a knife. They didn’t bother with pepper
spray or a taser. They just pumped him full of lead. Kajieme Powell was known
locally as someone with learning disabilities. An observer made a video on his
phone of the entire sequence of events. The story the police tell is not the
one that the video tells. You should watch the video. It’s disturbing and
instructive.
A great deal of attention has been
given to the increasing militarization of police departments. They get grants
from the Dept. of Homeland Security to purchase military gear, like MRAPs; mine
resistant ambush protected armored vehicles, built to withstand IEDs. Those are
the big tank-like vehicles we see in the coverage of Ferguson, with camo clad
officers peeking out from the top, guns trained on the crowd. Less attention
has been given to the militarization of police training, which is equally, if
not more important. If we train cops to be a paramilitary force instead of
peace keepers, we get cops who view civilians as the enemy and are untroubled
by using the tools of war to subdue the citizenry.
The drumbeat goes on about looting,
because property is always more important than lives, especially black lives.
We saw it in the aftermath of Katrina. People had no water or food. White folks
foraged. Black folks looted. The best coverage of what is going on in Ferguson
can be found in The Guardian (UK) and Al-Jazeera (America) and the twitter feed
of folks like Antonio French, Wesley Lowery, and Elon James White. What you see on
Morning Joe is cattle by-product. What you see on the nightly news is no
better.
If the events in Ferguson were
happening in another country, we’d be looking at them with scorn and a tinge of
superiority. Instead, the Ferguson police kicked out a group of observers from
Amnesty International a few nights ago. They’ve arrested journalists and
cameramen. The police teargassed a news team from Al Jazeera. If this is how
they behave when the whole world is watching, imagine what they do the rest of
the time?
