Thursday night, Fox News's Megyn Kelly went after the press's and the political class's continued lionization of a "protest movement based upon a lie," namely those sowing slow-motion anarchy in Ferguson, Missouri following the death of Michael Brown, and "a segment of our political leaders and pundits" egging them on by giving them undeserved visibility and sympathy.
Members of Congress who propped up the odious "Hands up, don't shoot" lie came in for a special mention.
During a report on Friday's NBC Today about the manhunt for suspects in the shooting of two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, correspondent Craig Melvin touted protesters in the community being undeterred by the violence: "One of the protest organizers, Rasheen Aldridge, says he hopes for the officers' recovery, but is determined not to let the shootings slow their movement."
On Thursday's New Day on CNN, left-wing Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal wildly accused fellow guest Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officer Association of being a racist. Chapelle-Nadal asserted that she, as well as the far-left protesters she supports, were "trying to...ensure that racism does not continue by people like you." Roorda replied, "Are you calling me a racist, Senator?" The Democratic politician replied, "Yes, absolutely!"
Don Lemon turned to Inna Shevchenko on Monday's CNN Tonight for her account of surviving the recent terrorist attack in Copenhagen, Denmark. However, the CNN anchor failed to point out that Shevchenko is a prominent member of the radical feminist group Femen, which has a history of targeting social conservatives in general, and especially the Catholic Church, for their opposition to same-sex "marriage."
The Catholic League's Bill Donohue blasted the L.A. Times in a Tuesday press release for hyping the recent protest of a dozen left-wing protesters objecting to Pope Francis's decision to canonize 18th-century missionary Juinipero Serra. By contrast, the liberal newspaper failed to cover the thousands of pro-lifers who marched in Los Angeles on January 17, 2015.
Even as his fellow Morning Joe co-hosts praised John McCain on Friday for denouncing Code Pink anti-war protesters who attempted to disrupt a Senate hearing as "low-life sum," MSNBC's Thomas Roberts lectured the Republican Senator for shutting down the intruders: "If people want to show up and protest, right? They should be allowed to hear their voices. And instead of calling Capitol Hill police and then calling them 'low-life scum.'"
Esquire blogger Pierce alleges that right-wingers have turned the civil-rights movement “into a weapon against issues on which Dr. King surely would have come down on the progressive side,” and declares that the movement “no longer can be used as history's truncheon against the legitimate social, cultural, and political aspirations of the people who are its truest heirs.”
The ability of tiny numbers of far-left fringe group demonstrators to get undue press attention virtually any time they want continues to be intensely annoying.
In mid-2007, Barack Obama made closing the prison at Guantanmo Bay a core promise of his 2008 campaign. That was 7-1/2 years ago. Obama has been in office six years. Gitmo is still open. So naturally, the aggrieved professional protesters at Code Pink organized a demonstration against Gitmo remaining active on yesterday's 13th anniversary of the prison's opening — at former Vice President Dick Cheney's house. They got far more ink and bandwidth than they deserved from the press, including Reuters — i.e., far more than nothing.
“Americans are still free,” wrote blogger Hunter, “to criticize overaggressive police actions which repeatedly and systemically end up killing black men and boys for no discernible reason…so put on your goddamn big-boy uniforms and deal with it.”
In the final three paragraphs of a "Year in Review" item at the Los Angeles Times on December 31 (HT Patterico), reporter Matt Pearce joined the long list of journalists who have failed to properly characterize the evidence in Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri in August.
You had to know that distortions were coming based on the rest of the article content which preceded it. The most obvious giveaway was Pearce's description of Eric Garner's death on Staten Island. He wrote that Garner "died after an altercation with police; the officer accused of putting him in an unauthorized chokehold was not indicted." The officer involved was "accused" of the act, but he didn't commit it. In August, former NYPD detective Bo Deitl indicated that "it was a headlock, not a chokehold," and that the non-choking action was not the cause of Garner's death. Well, if Pearce couldn't get Garner right, it was a near certainty that he'd seriously botch his description of the Brown situation, which he proceeded to do (bolds are mine):
In the interest of getting all supposedly relevant information out there for the public to see, the New York Times amassed an extraordinary array of journalistic resources — three reporters, three who "contributed reporting," and two others who "contributed research" — to what they must have thought was an important, underappreciated element of the saga which ended with the brutal ambush murders of NYPD Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in December.
The three reporters — Kim Barker, Mosi Secret and Richard Fausset — composed roughly 2,500 words as a result of that eight-person effort. Their resulting work was posted online on Friday and appeared on the front page of the paper's January 3 New York Region and National print editions (above the fold, top right). Their mission was to sympathetically portray cop-killer Ismaaiyl Brinsley, which was bad enough. But their ultimate objective, which I'm sure was achieved in the minds of many fever-swamp liberals (example here), was to convince readers that the link between Al Sharpton and his "we want dead cops" crowd and Brinsley's motivations was not all that direct, i.e., that "Brinsley’s short life and violent end is probably less political and more accidental than initially portrayed." The rest of us will find their attempt troubling, but utterly unpersuasive in that regard.
Let's say that a Republican or conservative governor or big-city mayor (yes, there actually are quite a few) was in a heated dispute with his state's or city's police union. Let's further say that this official decided that his or her best method for whipping up support was to order the staff to (ahem) "ask" GOP legislators or council members to issue public statements of support while bashing the cops. If such a campaign were exposed, that town's or state's press would appropriately be all over it. That public official would also get plenty of negative national attention, especially if he or she already had a bit of a national profile.
So let's see how far and wide — my prediction is "not very" — the following report from New York City online publication DNAinfo goes — especially at the New York Times, which has itself editorially attacked the police while indulging and ignoring the serious transgressions of "protesters" who have threatened them (HT Weasel Zippers; bolds are mine):