Conservative icon Rush Limbaugh declared during his radio show on Friday that the “mainstream media” was unable to transform “gentle giant” black teenager Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, into Rodney King -- the black man who became famous for a high-speed pursuit by the police and later asking “Can't we all get along?” 22 years ago -- because “alternative media,” including talk radio, has destroyed “the monopoly of the Drive-By Media.”
That claim was contradicted by Touré Neblett, a co-host of MSNBC's weekday The Cycle program, who charged in Sunday's edition of the Washington Post that black victims of crime become “thuggified” as negative incidents in their pasts are revealed to the public that diminish their standing in America’s “empathy gap.”
Rodney King
Ten days after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African-American, in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, black filmmaker Spike Lee added his voice to the tumult over the incident. During Tuesday night's edition of Anderson Cooper 360, he told the CNN anchor: “Something smells bad in Ferguson, and it’s not just tear gas.”
“I do not think you should be killed in this country because allegedly you steal some cigarillos. I don’t think you should be killed in this country if there is marijuana in your system,” Lee told Cooper while referring to Brown. “The people -- not only in Ferguson, but all over this country -- do not trust what is happening. I just think there's a war on the black male, and it’s tearing this country apart." [See video below.]
As the trial to determine if George Zimmerman committed a crime when he killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, 2012, draws to a close, hundreds of people have threatened to riot over the verdict, and law-enforcement organizations in and around Broward County, Fla., have been coordinating efforts to have “a proper response plan” in case their worst fears are realized.
However, Time magazine columnist Marc Polite claims that the police have everything backwards since the pre-emptive call for calm “may be akin to racial fear-mongering" and “runs counter to recent history.”
On his "Keeping It Real" radio show on Wednesday, Rev. Al Sharpton introduced new lingo. He said Rodney King would be "funeralized," but Sharpton used that event to then turn and crassly plug he'll be in Los Angeles to receive an award from BET (Black Entertaintment Television).
"Rodney King will be funeralized this Saturday in Los Angeles. I’ll be going to Los Angeles as you will," he said to his guest David A. Wilson of the NBC-owned site TheGrio.com. "I’m gettin’ an award at the BET Awards. And it’s just sad, Rodney King. I’m glad he got to write his book, though, which he was in studio to talk about before he passed, to at least leave his own feeling and his own version, how he wanted to be remembered. I just wanted people to know his family will be funeralizing him this Saturday in Los Angeles." [MP3 audio here]
CBS's Bob Schieffer ended Sunday's Face the Nation by disgracefully connecting the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles to Trayvon Martin.
After showing videos of the King beating as well as the aftermath of the criminal trial, Schieffer stated - with a black and white picture of the Sanford teenager on the screen - "When the Trayvon Martin case came to public attention this year, King said the screams on those tapes reminded him of his own" (video follows with transcript and commentary):