American journalists have suddenly discovered where four years of Trump characterising the media as the enemy of the people have landed them: in the sights — often literally — of police.
The shock has rolled over the media in a breaking wave, from “surely there’s been a mistake”, to “a few rogue cops”, to the chilling realisation that, no, this is no accident.
Journalists are the enemy of the people in the eyes of the increasingly Trump-aligned US police forces.
It’s not the first time the media gaze has been shut down. But now that mobile video has made that impractical — as NSW Police discovered again in Sydney last night — scenes in the United States look much more like a deliberate strategy of violent intimidation against journalists.
It challenges the reluctance of America’s media to respond to presidential provocations. As The Washington Post editor Marty Baron said in Trump’s early days: “We’re not at war. We’re at work.”
Journalists need to question the limits of a naive both-sides-ism that continues to shape coverage in the social media age.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reports more than 100 attacks on media in the US during the nationwide protests kicked off by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week. Foreign media — including Australians — haven’t been left out. A Seven network crew was assaulted by military police yesterday while broadcasting from Washington DC during the Sunrise program.
It’s forcing the most sensible centrist of the US press corps to go all Angela Davis, warning America: “If they come for me in the morning …”. (Although the point of the protests about police violence is that it’s already late evening in America.)
It’s not supposed to be like this.
In the both-sides world, media at protests are the impartial eyes of the world. It’s a belief that has, in response, shaped the politics of non-violent resistance. As Martin Luther King Jr said after Selma in 1965: “We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.”
Now that mobile technology allows both protesters and police to bring streaming services, the media likes to think it offers, instead, a mediated understanding of the actions. Here the police are, like them, often just caught in the middle, between the protesters and the state.
But these attacks are forcing a deeper realisation: too many US police are active players in Trumpism, in white supremacy and in violence against African Americans.
Police unions create the problem by actively lobbying and campaigning for police powers. The National Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, and many city and state police unions have done so again for 2020.
Digital media are quicker to pick up what’s happening. Slate, for example, headlines its weekend report on the violent escalation with, “Police erupt in violence nationwide“. Traditional media have been slower. The New York Times fumbled the ball in print yesterday, headlining the Trump Washington circus with “As chaos spreads, Trump vows to ‘end it now’”. (Could have been Brietbart, tweeted BuzzFeed.)
Of course, in the News Corp echo chamber there’s a different reality.
Fox News is close to all-Antifa-all-the-time.
Here in Australia it can turn up the reverb. On Sky after dark last night, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s interviewer of choice, Paul Murray, was behind the chyron “STOP THE LOOTING PANDEMIC NOW”, attacking The New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 project on the history of slavery as “self-hatred”, and calling out its lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones over a Martin Luther King quote on riots.
In real-world Australia there are lessons for all on our social and political differences from the US, including the policies and practices of Australian police (and police unions). The report in The Guardian yesterday that 432 Indigenous Australians had died in police custody since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody — with no officers held accountable — demonstrates the urgency of applying those lessons here.
One big lesson? Even in the both-sides world, police are a powerful side. In that world they are increasingly likely to use that power against journalists.
Fantastic piece, CW. Worth a year’s subs alone. Thank you, Crikey.
I guess it does not help when the media pile on to the police for any so-called wrong actions. Beat much of it up to a frenzy of froth and bubbles, vilifying and trying to portray a person doing a difficult and dangerous job as a racist, or some kind of psychopathic thug.
Our local yokels of the media are having a field day with the NSW Cop and the aboriginal bloke. Gotta climb on the Yank bandwagon I suppose.
The local news claimed- smashed his face into the pavement, kicked his legs off him and various other atrocities
The video showed the Cop using what seems standard arrest procedures. He swept (kicked if you like) the suspects legs from under him then supporting him from the front lowered him to the ground. Yeah OK, not gently, then restrained him.
Very different to a knee on the throat until dead.
If the police feel that whatever they do they can’t win, then there is nothing to be lost by giving the “journalist” a biffing.
However, I agree a constant oversight of the forces of LauraNorder is needed. But not straight into a trial by media and prejudged guilty verdict. It’s not hard to see how Cops can believe it is them against the world.
Smartass lawyers must be a real pain to them as well. Getting some guilty crook off on some technicality after all their hard work and possibly danger.
Why would anyone want to be a Cop? What would the rest of us do if there weren’t any?
My brother is a copper and I have some good mates who are coppers. Both would tell you that some 16 year old kid mouthing off is hardly assault. By all means respond to violence with whatever you have, but responding with violence to a smartarse kid is hardly a proportionate reponse.
Police forces have some of the best highly financed PR Media units that tax payer funds can buy .The MSM have a long history of being embedded with them since , well since, a news hound wanted continuous access to get & promote a story & career .The USA situation ,of the militarized militia Police Forces turning on their embedded ‘partners in crime’ ,is not surprising, given the rising Trumpism of ‘all is fake news’ & enemies are everywhere ( although journos’/press have previously been attacked by police in the USA ) . But they, for there own protection ,really should start wearing their war zone press battle dress & helmets, when under fire from their own troops..As for the Aussie aside ,mentioned by some other commentator …the deeply embedded historical violent relationship practiced by Australian Police upon Australian Indigenous peoples’, is only too well known..
Police forces have some of the best highly financed PR Media units that tax payer funds can buy .The MSM have a long history of being embedded with them since , well since, a news hound wanted continuous access to get & promote a story & career .The USA situation ,of the militarized militia Police Forces turning on their embedded ‘partners in crime’ ,is not surprising, given the rising Trumpism of ‘all is fake news’ & enemies are everywhere ( although journos’/press have previously been attacked by police in the USA ) . But they, for there own protection ,really should start wearing their war zone press battle dress & helmets, when under fire from their own troops..As for the Aussie aside ,mentioned by some other commentator …the deeply embedded historical violent relationship practiced by Australian Police upon Australian Indigenous peoples’, is only too well known..
“ Gotta climb on the Yank bandwagon I suppose.“ We did that long ago.
Percentage of USA citizens who are African Americans- 14%. Percentage of US inmates incarcerated in US prisons who are African Americans- 30%.
Percentage of Australian citizens who are of First Nations descent – 3%. Percentage of inmates incarcerated in Australian prisons who are First Nations descent – also 30%.
If that doesn’t tell you Australian police forces have a bit of bigot problem, nothing will.
Up to a point Police express their own culture.
But we should not overlook ‘parallel forces’ within society that create and insert means whereby accountability, transparency can and is ‘managed.’
Could Trump’s posturing exist without Murdoch Media? Or the Republican Party? Billionaire Corporate Donors? Or the rank, obsessive “frontier” mythology? A culture so deeply embedded within American social and national psyche that even the slaughter of school children has no lasting impact upon National Rifleman Association?
The insidious impact of ‘Police in black’. Or a ‘Border Force’ . . . intimidates! Arm Police to the teeth. Train them within a culture totally contrarian to peace and protect. Even the dumbest citizen connects “black” with intimidation?
Why does a free democratic nation descend into chaos? Aside from those powerful individuals with undeclared agenda. Not enough of us . . . care. Until it is too late!
When Murdoch’s FUX News is a Trump allied fifth column in the fourth estate.
Cold reality for a media seems to think it floats, above, in a different effluent pond to the one we’re cast in….. That what happened to us was only news.
The cover they provide for politicians/government only goes so far.
There are many reasons for the rise in this sort of politics – not least the actions of a “infallibly” self-obsessed media.
A media playing favourites has dealt itself the hand it is paying for today.
They’re part of the problem – but they won’t see that, for the chickens coming home to roost.
Especially a media dominated by a loud and vociferous conservative element. Media long abandoned objectivity and impartiality to take up subjectivity and partisanship, acting like the PR arm for one side of politics and attacking the left. Using their elite position to peddle their politics, taking one political side while tossing grenades and smoke bombs at the opposition – trying to influence public perception of fitness to govern to their side – to influence electoral outcomes (“IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT”).
“Fighting progressive ideology in the rest of the media”? Where “in the rest of the media”? Where, on the left, is the same sort of bilious vociferous petty parsimonious and cant shop-front as the Murdochs and Stokes in Oz?
“The ABC”? Because it doesn’t echo Rupert? Because it reports stuff that reflects badly on his Limited News Party – the sort of stuff Limited News would rather remained hidden from the electorate’s view, while they’re contemplating how they’re going to vote?
A media that doesn’t call out, that ignores, those in it’s own ranks that draw the “profession” into disrepute – where (with their power to direct the glare of accountability) the standard you walk past is the standard you condone?
Reasoning away antisocial behaviour as exercising “free speech” : while taking umbrage and offence at how the general public reflect on that media – for not holding power to account.
Media attacking social media for the sort of behaviour they themselves have pioneered – for pay.
Advocating “rationalisation”/the shut down of industries, anti-union rhetoric – now they’re out begging for sympathy and looking to point the finger of bad behaviour at others?
Rooted in their own ideology they can stay that way.
To then draw a long bow to lump those that criticise that media with Trump?
432 Indigenous died in custody – how many of natural causes and how many not? Important distinction, you’d think.
As well as the number of those that were suicides, which would be significant and a tragedy, but can hardly be considered in the same category as death by asphyxiation from a knee on your neck.
26-year-old Dunghutti man David Dungay died while being restrained by five prison guards at Long Bay jail in 2015. Prison officers restrained him, including with handcuffs, and pushed him face down on his bed and on the floor. One officer pushed a knee into his back. All along, Dungay was screaming that he could not breathe and could be heard gasping for air. He said “I can’t breathe” 12 times before he died. At the time of writing, the five guards have not faced disciplinary action.
Does Dungay’s asphyxiation rate with you? Or can knee in your back hardly be considered in the same category as a knee on your neck?