Thread by @equalityAlec

On Saturday, I wrote a long thread on how major news outlets all used same corporate and police sources, turns of phrase, and baseless claims to push a hysteria of out-of-control homeless railroad thieves. The response of New York Times editor to my thread is important to see:

As background, here was my thread documenting the news coverage, the hysteria that led politicians to quickly increase funding for cops/prosecutions, and how the story planted by corporate/police PR departments fell apart after they got the $$ they wanted.

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1484966529531879425

Here's where it gets interesting. Look at the New York Times editor's response to my thread:

The NYT's first response is they also "spoke with" (but didn't quote) UPS and Fedex. Wow. I made deep points about how media converged on police/corporate PR points, fueling widespread panic and immediate government action. His response is they talked to two other big companies?

I listed out all the sources the NYT cited (dominated by police and corporate PR), showed how much money LAPD spends on PR, showed how all the stories looked alike, showed how NYT gave LAPD space to link this to its alarming budget request, and his response is UPS and Fedex?

The NYT's second response is bewildering. NYT says the problem is "specific to this railroad hub..." If that's true, why did article give so many paragraphs to LAPD and railroad monopoly to seek massive funding? This point again also ignores larger point I was making about media.

The third response from NYT is just confusing. He says article isn't "hysterical' and doesn't show a crisis. But my point was that it was the *combination* of all major media outlets doing many stories, breaking news, viral videos, etc. that created an atmosphere of crisis.

Within days of all these stories, the governor himself made an emergency visit to the train tracks, police and prosecutors had massive amounts more money to crackdown, Republican senators urged the Attorney General to begin federal crackdown, etc...

Such a crackdown has *never happened* for wage theft, which costs over $137 million *per day,* 100s of times more than train theft. It has never happened for illegal evictions or home foreclosures. Might that be because the media treats these harms differently, with less urgency?

Notice the critical point in my thread is not that no one steals from trains. Question is why police and multi-billion dollar industry want us to think it’s a crisis and why does corporate news treat it with more urgency than other issues that cause orders of magnitude more harm?

To make this point, I added a thread where I analyze why corporate news does not create a daily sense of urgency over far more death and destruction caused by poverty, air pollution, contaminated water, wage theft, tax evasion, evictions, etc.

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1464270519365246979

I don't think the people involved here are bad people. But as fascism rises and ecological collapse nears, it matters a lot what problems the media treats as urgent, and it matters a lot when media pushes authoritarian solutions to those problems. It's a matter of life and death.

On another chain, he wished me "good luck and good health" and said he doesn't like "twitter debates." That's fair, so I asked him for an off-Twitter conversation. He didn't respond.

https://twitter.com/palafo/status/1485357866894692358

I'm not doing these threads b/c it's fun. I'd rather be fighting our civil rights cases, playing with cats, or making my paintings and music. I'm not doing it b/c I hate news outlets. Those orgs are vital, and there are amazing people at NYT. But we have to talk about this.

If you made it this far, you deserve a picture of a kitten sitting in one of my favorite plants.