I've been amazed -- although I shouldn't be, running a blog called "Wired State" often devoted to studying distortive media practices -- how much the truth of a story doesn't really come out merely from having pictures and video -- and how much manipulation and spin still occurs despite having such obvious artifacts of the truth.
If anything, precisely because we literally have MORE truth now via pictures and videos and power power in the hands of citizens to supply it, we have MORE spin from liberal and "progressive" media trying to evade or suppress the truth.
Example. Many have seen a terribly dramatic picture from Ferguson showing a multi-coloured cloud of tear gas and a man kneeling in it covering his face. What could more dramatically show "police brutality" and "unarmed demonstrator"?
Yet the picture has been divorced from its original tweet and context:
There were people throwing rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails -- *violent* demonstrators -- and the reporter even saw a person with a gun. That's violence. That's when police are justified to use tear-gas, which is legal, despite the complaints about how in other countries it isn't. If you don't want police to be using tear-gas, don't throw rocks, bottles, Molotov cocktails -- and bring a gun to a "peaceful demonstration," you know?
Over and over again, biased activists who watched other biased activists who ran livestreams selectively covering the events, tell you "they didn't see a gun." So what? They are biased activists running live-streams, not devoted truth-tellers willing to cover the negative sides of violent demonstrations. This reporter, a trained reporter from the St. Louis Dispatch, did see these things and reported them accurately -- along with reporting the drama of tear gas in what many agree was an excessive display of force from "over-dressed" police -- even granted the violence of demonstrators.
But biased "progressives" won't even grant there was significant violence or think it doesn't matter! And radicals discount the truth entirely.
There are many issues surrounding the events in Ferguson -- southern racism in the impoverished state of Missouri, high crime rates, police racial profiling, unemployment, militarization of the police in general, and many other things.
My son is a victim of police brutality by the NYPD so I don't need ANY persuasion about the issue of police brutality, and I mean ANY. I've also witnessed police brutality or seen insufficiently just trials since 9/11 against Muslims and blacks, so I don't need ANY lectures about it -- and I mean NONE. So don't start.
But I've also personally experienced and seen violence used by minorities, and I've seen radical groups like Occupy use violence and break the law, so I'm completely sanguine and skeptical about stories that only focus on one side of the complicated story of police brutality -- when one set of male macho meets another set of male macho -- and I say this without any "feminist agenda" but merely as a report of what happens when young men diss police and get force used back on them sometimes ending in tragedy.
I believe the two parts of the equation in Ferguson as in many other settings, including New York City, are both about police brutality AND about a lack of culture of civility and self-restraint that cannot be excused by other factors like poverty.
I'm going to focus now on the issue of the store clerk and the store video.
That's the ONLY focus of this blog -- not debates about whether Al Jazeera did or didn't get tear-gassed or whether these cops showed up like they were in Afghanistan. These are all part of the story but I'm simply UNINTERESTED in debating these well-aired topics because THIS is a blog about SOMETHING ELSE: the willingess of progs to suppress truth in support of a political agenda.
It's not a blog about the willingness of cops or southerners willing to suppress truth in support of a political agenda -- there are plenty of people available to call that out, and no doubt it needs calling out again and again.
But that's not the subject of THIS blog.
This video shows beyond any reasonable doubt that Michael Brown shoved around a store clerk a fraction of his size (he was a large man), and stole a box of cigarillos. His friend who accompanied this also admits it and it is part of the public record. It is not disputed. It is him, and it happened.
Yet there is a large continent of liberals and "progressives" now who think this video shouldn't have been released, that it "slanders" the victim, that it "taints" the case, and that it should have been suppressed. They also think the fact of his store robbery and his man-handling of the little clerk is somehow "irrelevant" because "he shouldn't face the death penalty" for what he did, i.e. through extra-judicial execution by a cop.
In this, as with Snowden, we're seeing the socialist left and the conservative libertarian right join in default, knee-jerk hatred of authority and assume the police are at fault. And we're also seeing some normally sane centrist liberals get dragged into a culture of suppression of the truth mandated by agenda-driven "progressive" media -- although they should know better.
Again -- because you have to keep saying it when people keep distracting -- no one claims that cops should get to gun down suspects for any reason save all but the most extreme form of threat to other people or the cop -- which is seldom the case in these stories as we all know.
Appallingly, the New York Times set the tone with their story about the "emotions flare" -- as if the prospect of emotions flaring (and riots coming not far behind) means suppressing truth is justified. The Times turned in a series of hugely biased statements:
The manner in which the police here released the information, which included a 19-page police report on the robbery but no new details about the shooting, led to the spectacle of dueling police news conferences, one led by a white officer who seemed ill at ease and defensive, and the other dominated by a charismatic black officer who expressed solidarity with the crowd even as he pleaded for peace.
The white officer, Thomas Jackson, the police chief in Ferguson, gave a series of incomplete accounts that sowed confusion about whether the officer who shot the teenager knew he was a suspect in the robbery. The black officer, Capt. Ronald S. Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, expressed his displeasure with how the information had been released.
The white officer, Thomas Jackson, the police chief in Ferguson, gave a series of incomplete accounts that sowed confusion about whether the officer who shot the teenager knew he was a suspect in the robbery. The black officer, Capt. Ronald S. Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, expressed his displeasure with how the information had been released.
“I would have liked to have been consulted,” he said pointedly about the pairing of the shooter’s identity with the robbery accusation.
Classic propaganda technique -- looking for support of your agenda from the lips of someone who is a "counter-intuitive" supporter, i.e. a cop himself, who is complaining about being left out of the loop.
And what the Times is telling us here -- inexcusably! -- is that the need for racial harmony and social peace -- "progressive" goals that might be laudable -- means we must suppress truth and must engage in lying and delays and avoiding any material that might support a cop's narrative.
How awful is that!
Yes.
Let's go over it again.
By implying that the cops were evil in their motives, and manipulating public opinion, and not admitting the facts of the case, the Times is implying that the truth should be suppressed "for the greater good."
Nowhere in their report is the admission that it's ok to a) tell the truth even if not flattering to a victim b) okay to tell the truth even if it supports a cop who may indeed have used excessive deadly force.
The inability to preserve any loyalty to the truth; fidelity to the facts; willingness to accept uncomfortable truths -- this is what is so appalling throughout all this story, as never before.
All of this is a distraction from the salient fact -- which the Times won't admit, consider, or reflect upon -- that if the shooter could shove around a short store clerk and steal a box of cigarillos, then he could shove a cop minutes later, too.
And that's why it matters.
We don't know yet what the toxicology report is of the victim, either, which could be a factor in such displays of force.
The Times fumes and frets that the name was withheld, and that's fine, that's what the press should do, but then they can't stand the truth when along with it comes a tape of the shoving of a store clerk. Imagine, a newspaper, the free press, that is for witholding the truth -- and thinks the truth is discounted merely because it does not serve their own political agenda.
All week, community members had demanded the name of the officer who killed Michael Brown, 18, last Saturday, but when it finally came, it was accompanied by surveillance videotapes that appeared to show Mr. Brown shoving a store clerk aside as he stole a box of cigarillos.
The Democratic governor of Missouri thinks it "besmirches" the victim's character to release the video and was "incendiary".
So wait, for the sake of combatting police brutality -- which a court hasn't found in fact occurred yet -- we're supposed to lie? What kind of society will we get out of that?!
What, just because police brutality seems a problem and victims seem innocent, anything that might support a cop's narrative must be suppressed?! Really, guys? That's journalism?!
Not surprisingly, Adam Serwer of MSNBC has picked up this cudgel and fueled the idea that truth-telling -- actual exposure of actual facts and pictures -- is "wrong" because it "feeds an agenda."'
Naturally, he's utterly devoid of any admission that suppressing that truth would wildly fuel an agenda as well.
Serwer is also teeing up the idea that the store video "may not be inadmissible in court" -- using only an ACLU lawyer's word for it -- which is decidedly biased as the ACLU merely wants to use this case like others to fight what they see as a larger issue of police brutality, and are happy to cut corners on the complicated facts along the way. I'd definitely like a second opinion.
The sheer bias and tendentiousness of this concept really appalls me.
First of all, the constant indignant and self-righteous invocation of the "doesn't deserve the death penalty" mantra - served up to me by people like Lee Stranaham (the former Breitbart and libertarian journalist) and various activists and progs on twitter, is irrelevant.
That's because NOBODY deserves the death penalty for the crime of robbing a store, or even the more serious crime of assaulting, much less resisting an officer? NOBODY. And NOBODY says they do! So the invocation of this silly mantra is baseless.
No cop in an altercation with a suspect decides "Hey, I'm going to administer the death penalty now over these relatively minor felonies in the scheme of things." It's not how it works. Either accidents happen, or excessive force is used with unintended results, or road rage seizes the cop when he is sassed and he blasts away -- although that morning, or 15 minutes ago, he didn't intend to "execute the death penalty."
That certainly doesn't exonerate him, and if this cop has shot at an unarmed man fleeing and killed him, he deserves to be punished, regardless of what happens.
But again, that's not the point regarding the problem of journalism and truth-telling.
What the point of the store video shows is that this suspect is capable of pushing people around, and therefore a short while later, might have shoved a cop.
Everyone keeps claiming that the cop didn't know that he was dealing with a suspect in a robbery, because that news hadn't been delivered to him yet. I don't believe we know that 100%, as we can't be sure what was or was not on the radio until we hear more about this. But let's assume he DID NOT know. The point is, he stopped a man in a middle of the road -- Michael Brown's friend admits this in his version.
And that's why IT DOESN'T MATTER if he didn't know about the robbery because that's not the point of the video.
The point of releasing the video is precisely what happens next is in dispute, because Brown's friend denies it or omits it or has no comment so as not to implicate his friend.
That is why it is needed -- like all facts regarding the case, some of which are known, some of which are not known.
What the cops say is that the suspect pushed the cop back into his car, made a grab for his gun and then fled -- and was shot.
And now that we have the store video, we can see that there is more credence for that version -- which first the friend, then the entire community, then the entire liberal media want to reject and suppress.
That lets us know that the media is not willing to find facts to report the news, but sees itself as an arm of "justice for the people" by selectively covering or withholding facts, or denouncing the publication of facts if they think it's done with an agenda.
I can understand why the relatives and the community want to suppress it, because it doesn't make the victim seem so innocent.
But the New York Times?
What's awful is that the Times joined in this invocation of the need to suppress the video in this story, by implying that it "slandered" the victim or made the cops' case stronger or "fueled a riot".
First of all, doesn't anyone find it racist to treat the black community as so inherently violent, so inherently touchy, so inherently emotional, that they can't handle the truth?
Does the expectation of such behavior in fact fuel it? After all, you can report the truth, and also point out the other ethics and morality of the situation: that even if Brown robbed a store or shoved a cop, he did not deserve to be shot. Shooting a suspect isn't merited for such crimes, ever.
In fact, the Ferguson police released the name of the cop and the store video at the same time.
What amazed me is how people arguing on Twitter about this became so incredibly manipulative, like this fellow. Unless I joined his agenda in urging the cops to release their incident report, why, I had no case.
And I insisted on not addressing that topic of the incident report, not because I'm somehow opposed to releasing it -- of course not. What I refused to do in that debate was somehow concede some sort of "matched set" or "quid pro quo" in this regard -- that the store video was ONLY able to be released IF the incident report was also released. THAT I refused to concede. All facts of the case should be released, regardless of whether sequencing and timing means some of it is flattering to either party or not; that it doesn't proceed fairly is never an excuse to keep advocating suppression.
Throughout this debate with this prog, again and again I had to fend off his tendentious misrepresentation of what I actually said.
I see today he is serving up one tweet, part of a two-tweet sentence, that should have been obvious even from only the one tweet -- and if we go over the history of it last night, we see he is also serving up a ridiculous claim about me somehow "excusing police lying" -- when that wasn't the issue, is never something I'd advocate, and didn't advocate, of course. What I said was that the police lying about FOIA *was not an excuse to suppress truth*.
So 16 hours ago, I made this point forcefully -- that I wasn't advocating the things I was *listing as distractive issues* -- but today he's still making this false charge against me.
Again, as anyone can see if they aren't tendentious blow-hards, this is a reciting of the list of the kinds of things that people might raise in this case -- and will, whether you like it or not, on social media, if not in mainstream media. In no way is it an advocating of violating parents' privacy, or imagining that the parents' criminal record should somehow be relevant in judging their son. Nothing in what I've said indicates that -- because it wouldn't be admissible in court as we all know.
Yet this clueless idiot keeps insisting I've advocated violating the parents' privacy and misapplying their record in judging the case merely because I supplied a list of issues that people will look at -- issues that I explained were distractive -- examples of the kinds of things that will be raised in such a case. You can't help lack of reading comprehension. Twitter is a compressed medium. But when you explain to a biased idiot like this over and over again that you haven't *advocated* a thing you've merely *listed* it as an example of extraneous, distracting issues -- and he keeps deliberately not getting it, and keeps fetching it up as an example of your "awfulness" -- what can you do? You block them because they don't have the intellectual depth to follow an argument and understand people in good faith.
I refused to budge from my laser-like focus on only one issue in this story, which is the legitimacy of the release of the store video because it is true and because it is relevant in assessing the cops' story. What, we're supposed to avoid any evidence that might support the cops merely because they are cops?! We're merely to sustain a narrative of "the people" and "victimhood" endlessly, flying in the face of the truth?!
The idea that the truth "slanders" should be quickly dispensed with -- victims are seldom perfect and there's no need to pretend otherwise. There's something to be said for not walking in the middle of the road and blocking traffic or endangering yourself, you know? Had that not been the case -- and further, had Brown and his friend, after first disregarding these norms of law and civility then heeded a policeman asking them to go on the sidewalk, he'd be alive. That's the problem. There are many that want to portray cops as just indiscriminately shooting black people "just because" and entirely making up things to justify their "militarized" behaviour.
But in this case, we have two things: a) the friend's admission that they jay-walked and b) the store video.
These are relevant in getting at the truth: did the cop have a reasonable expectation that he was in physical danger?
There are many things that will have to come out in this case and of course they will come out -- and hey, no thanks to Anonymous which only muddies evidence, causes mayhem, and obstructs justice in every case it mixes in with -- since its agenda isn't truth, but disruption of civil society in the name of anarchism ("the worse the better").
I invoked lists of things that journalists would be looking for, whether the suspect's own criminal record, his parents' criminal record, the crime rate in the town, etc. - and for that I was accused of demanding that these things be released, in some anti-privacy action. Bullshit. I'm pointing out that the press will get this whether you like it or not. It's not about what I advocate or not.
There are two reasons why the cops are witholding their own report -- besides the obvious ones that their lawyers have told them to do this.
1) It will make them look bad, because even if there was some shoving,he over-reacted, or especially if the cop grabbed the head of Brown and tried to pull him into the car as "punishment," it will show he is to blame.
2) It will show that in fact Brown pushed the cop in the car and tried to grab his gun and it will be so clear-cut that shooting him as violent and dangerous and putting a cop's life in danger -- a shooting back to disable him -- was justified. That he was shot while fleeing is one version of the story; if he appeared strong enough to endanger people (as he does in the store video), a cop might think shooting him in the legs while fleeing was justified, but then erroneously shot him in the back.
I'm guessing that no. 1 is more likely, given where this is and who this is -- in the south -- and the fact that the report isn't released yet.
But no. 2 is possible simply because the police may believe that the truth will be so damning that the community will riot uncontrollably in anger and disbelief and many more people will be injured or killed, not to mention stores looted or torched. And because they want to make absolutely sure of their facts and take their time investigating them.
Every police station is mindful of situations like Watts.
But meanwhile, the libs' and progs' inability to accept truth-telling as part of this process is hugely disturbing. Their inability to be willing to find the truth even if it doesn't suit a "progressive" agenda of exposing police brutality is disturbing. Their insistence on "balance" -- that the store video should have been suppressed until the incident report was released -- is irrelevant if they are not also willing to concede that their case for demanding release of the incident report is made all the stronger by their willingness to concede that the store video has the right to be shown.
Finally there's the issue of the FOIA. Much has been said about cops "lying" about this. Knowing of the readiness of progs to claim "lying" where it doesn't exist, and where good faith exists giving answers they don't like to hear (as with James Clapper), I discard this. Again, it doesn't matter. Even if the cops were lying about the FOIA claims, FOIAs were likely inevitable, and it doesn't matter. Their lying about their motivation to release the video, and that covering up their supposed agenda in portraying the victim in a bad light doesn't matter, because the information is true and they have a right to make their case in support of their officer's action.
The idea that the cops have a right to make their case -- you know, central to a just and fair society under the rule of law -- has been utterly thrown out the window not only by radicals and "the commuty" but the media. Because they are willing to suppress truth.
And in a situation where they were surrounded by unruly mobs, part of the process simply has to include introducing some truth about more of the responsibility lying on the victim that the community is willing to concede.
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