Thread by @equalityAlec

THREAD. There has been another deeply harmful New York Times story about police. I try my best to walk through what happened because the stakes are so high and because the level of right-wing copaganda being pushed by the New York Times is increasingly alarming.

Yesterday, NYT published another in a long line of pro-police articles. It appears to have been pitched by PR for a group of right-wing police leaders to undermine even the embarrassingly meaningless Executive Order on policing that Biden is considering. nytimes.com/2022/02/02/us/…

As I’ve done with many New York Times stories, the place to start is to look at the sources in the article. Just look at the range of sources, in chronological order, that the paper thinks is sufficient to tell you this story. Tell me what you notice:

Anonymous (powerful people)
Susan Rice
ED of Police Executive Research Forum
Anonymous
Rice
Anonymous
Anonymous
“Law enforcement groups”
ED of Fraternal Order of Police
Police Leader
Anonymous officials
WH Counsel
Rice
ED of FOP
“Police group leaders”
ED of PERF (again)

As with many other recent NYT stories, the reporters and editors make a deliberate choice to frame the article entirely around what powerful people want to say to us. They simply don't include critical perspectives at all. Why?

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1484966536209125381

This is not an accident. A multi-million dollar corporate and police PR industry plants articles like this and shapes them. Many well-meaning reporters don't even see how narrow the views are that they are presenting to the public as the full story.

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1470790952558243848

It's astonishing that an article about police reform in the largest human caging bureaucracy in world history does not contain a scholar or directly impacted person talking about how minuscule all these reforms are or who have studied how none of them will change much.

This is how to manufacture consent: present only narrow range of views suggesting that debate is between incarceration proponents like Biden and "centrist" police. This eliminates from discourse an entire movement, and makes their demands seem so radical they can't be discussed.

Next, the article takes political positions. It repeatedly refers to police and police interests as "centrist" and giving into violent police demands as "moving to the center." We are talking about openly fascist formations, which NYT is normalizing as some fictional "center."

The "progressive" view portrayed in the article is: "we need police on the streets, well equipped, but we need them to have the cooperation and trust of the community." This is astonishing and offensive. Tens of millions of survivors want investment in care not cages.

It's especially offensive because Biden has been one of the key forces arming right-wing police with military equipment, weapons, and surveillance that has devastated communities. And this weaponry is still flowing into police as they killed a record number of people in 2021.

And this suggestion of "trust of the community" is straight out of French and U.S. military counter-insurgency manuals from Algeria, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. NYT omits this history and the billions in cash government pays to link counterinsurgency to "community policing."

At the end of the day, this NYT article normalizes fascist positions as "centrist" and then makes the whole article some political game about whether Biden will secure support for some vague, almost meaningless "order" that is barely described.

This is what elite punishment bureaucrats want. They want people following the game of whether some "reform" is passed, and not focused on how right-wing even that "reform" is, and how none of the things being discussed would have any meaningful effect on police violence.

Thank you to all the amazing organizers and directly impacted people who sent me this article for critique.

@ktbenner @KannoYoungs @charlie_savage I'd love to talk about these criticisms of your reporting in this story, how the choice of sources was made, and what perspectives you missed that you might include in other reporting. Let me know if you're interested.

I apologize for missing a short quote from an executive at the national ACLU, toward the bottom of the article. (The quote continues the trend in the article of portraying Biden’s proposal as significant.)