This one is a little different than usual, but I wanted to break down the news cycle around the police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant.
It might be the worst I’ve ever seen.
A number of outlets rushed to break the news - about a 16 year old girl who was killed by Columbus Police - before we had any details, tying it to the George Floyd verdict.
Other places raced to get the story out without context, including @BBCWorld, @Newsweek, @Reuters and @thedailybeast, who broke the original story that relied on the account of a relative who proved unreliable.
Then, later that night, the body cam footage of the officer came out. It clearly shows the officer shooting Bryant just as she is about to stab another child.
Stills are below.
At the risk of being uncharitable, it is inconceivable to me that, anything but what the officer did would have resulted in serious harm to or the death of the other girl.
But this point was entirely lost among the reporting and the conversation more broadly.
@NPR’s storytelling here is a classic case of how outlets can set narratives that are too stubborn to yield to updated information.
Look at the number of retweets for the supposed story vs. the updated, more accurate version post-body cam.
Almost a 20x drop-off.
And others included that there was body cam footage but deliberately elide what the video actually shows: a police officer protection a girl who otherwise could well have been killed.
I don’t know how you can watch the video and have these be the details that stand out to you if what you’re concerned about is whether or not the officer did the right thing.
A 13 year old was stabbed to death by another teen down the street in Cincinnati on Monday. google.com/amp/s/www.fox1…
And it wasn’t just activists. You had a sitting senator, @SenSherrodBrown, run with this narrative. And @CoriBush in the House.
These are our legislators! Pushing a false story made to look needlessly divisive.
Some people - like Floyd family attorney @AttorneyCrump - just lied about whether or not she was armed.
It’s one thing when activists lie in furtherance of their goals. But when the media is deliberately misleading their audience for the sake of a narrative, it’s an enormous, malignant problem.
@thedailybeast, what’s the goal of this type of reporting? What benefit does the public have from this?
It calls to mind the @KingJames post, which I can’t imagine reading as anything but targeted harassment.
I won’t share the full thing, but when you say “you’re next” and share the image of a police officer in the public crosshairs, how can it be read as anything but a threat?
We’ve got to remember that Ma’Khia Bryant is clearly a victim in all this. Numerous people and systems failed her in her short life to get to this point. That is enormously, irreparably sad.
This thread, about the odds facing kids like Bryant in the foster care system, is depressingly illuminating.
But suggesting that the problem here is the police is bad faith, as is pretending like any police use of force is illegitimate. This type of push is a recipe for civic disaster (and a world where police forces nationwide see their numbers dwindle dangerously low).
And this isn’t to overlook that we have serious, systemic problems with policing in this country. Many of them intersect with issues of race.
But we aren’t going to get anywhere on any of them by shutting our eyes to the facts of what happened, as @ProfessorCrunk is doing.
We’ve got to tell the truth. Lying to fit the narrative may earn clicks, but it won’t change hearts and minds. And it won’t address the tragedies that led to the death of Ma’Khia Bryant.
And the American people deserve better than to have falsehoods foisted on them by the media.
Sometimes folks ask what they can do to support the work I do. The simple answer is I’ve got nothing. But you should take what you might donate & help a local food bank who needs it. Particularly for folks in DC, Capital Area Food Bank is a great choice. capitalareafoodbank.org
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You remember Russian Collusion. But do you remember the “Russian bounties” allegation, where the press ran with a conspiracy theory to make Trump look like a monster?
With the debate tonight, I think it’s timely to revisit a falsehood Biden pushed. Follow along ⤵️
It started with a scoop from @nytimes that claimed Russia had placed bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, that Trump knew about it, and he did nothing.
Days later, @washingtonpost followed up with the claim that these bounties—again, allegedly ignored by Trump—led to the deaths of American servicemen.
Do you *really* remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? I fear we’ve lost the plot.
With Hunter’s name in the news I wanted to revisit the extent to which the media went to cover up corruption allegations against—and at the behest of—his father.
Follow along. ⤵️
You have to start with the scoop from @nypost and @EmmaJoNYC.
Their lede from October was damning:
“Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The story was fundamentally about Joe Biden’s alleged corruption. It was huge news, on the eve of an election.
The press leapt to claim the scoop wasn’t legit. And they reframed the issue: now it was about Hunter, not Joe. Here’s @NPR before/after
Good to see the NYT’s considerable resources being put to finding the truth in a debate between private citizens that led one of them to raise a flag upside down.
Real afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted stuff here.
It has only become “news” because of the pivot to left wing clickbait that Trump inspired among the press.
It’s politically inspired harassment and not only is it noxious it’s driving a deep animus among its target demo that is fraying what remains of the bounds of our body politic and society more broadly.
I’ve got an oldie-but-a-goodie for you from the archive of unhinged media coverage.
Do you remember how insane the coverage of Trump’s killing of Iranian Gen. Soleimani was?
I bet it’s worse than you remember. Follow along ⤵️
It all started with what I’ve gotta say might be the coldest presidential use of social media in history.
After ordering the strike that killed Iranian General Qaseem Soleimani, Trump tweeted out simply a picture of an American flag.
Many in the media went berserk.
First, the issue was directly with what Trump had done. Outlets claimed that he was rushing America into a war. @washingtonpost tried to point out the hypocrisy of a president who had said he would prevent a war.
My hottest take is that, outside of the Beltway (something, to be clear, I am not!) most Americans to the right of MSNBC simply don’t feel anything like “vertigo” about Trump.
I think part of why Trump is such a visceral experience for so many people who have been in DC for a long time is that these types of people (again, me included!) weren’t familiar with the idea that they could viscerally hate a politician even when he’s out of office.
I think, for lots of people, hating a politician for who they are is not a new experience, but is in fact their default setting for politicians of at least one political party — if not both.