Maynard Institute archives

Media Fan Anti-Police Attitudes, Critics Say

by richard0389

Some on Right Link Reporting to Texas Deputy’s Slaying

Editorial Writer: “Birthright Citizenship” Issue Is Personal

Stories on Va. Shooter Say Co-Workers Offered Help

Wrong Man’s Photo Circulated as Va. On-Air Shooter

Media Coverage of Katrina Said to Fail, Like the Levees

Military Writers Honor Package on Troops’ “Moral Injury”

That Line About Armor and Other Asian American Issues

Sharpton to Keep Same Salary for Doing One Show Weekly

Six Black Women on Covers of September Magazines

Short Takes

Some on Right Link Reporting to Texas Deputy’s Slaying

“Texas deputy Darren Goforth was shot ‘execution-style’ fifteen times while he was pumping gas on Friday night,” Aviva Shen wrote Monday for the progressive website ThinkProgress.

“A suspect, who is black, is in custody and has been charged with capital murder. No motive has yet been revealed for the shooting, but that hasn’t stopped police and right-wing news outlets from pinning the responsibility on the Black Lives Matter movement, which calls for police to respect black people’s civil rights.

“Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman announced the charges against Shannon Miles in a press conference on Saturday afternoon, speculating that recent criticism of police misconduct had something to do with the murder. ‘The general climate of that kind of rhetoric can be influential on people to do things like this,’ Hickman said. Earlier on Saturday, he remarked, ‘Cops’ lives matter, too. So why don’t we drop the qualifier and say lives matter.’ . . .’

“Soon after, Fox News called Black Lives Matter a [‘ “murder” movement‘] perpetuated by ‘cop-haters.’

Shen listed “five tragedies that black and brown people have been asked to answer for.”

In an opinion piece for yourhoustonnews.com, Rep. Kevin Brady, a Houston area Republican, wrote, “While the national media hotly debates whether ‘black lives’ or ‘all lives’ matter, it conveniently ignores the consequences of carelessly fanning the flames of hostility against local law enforcement. . . .”

Miles walked up behind Goforth at the gas station at Telge and West at about 8:20 p.m. Friday and shot him repeatedly in the back without any apparent provocation or motive, said Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman, who called the crime ‘cold blooded’ and ‘cowardly’ at a press conference Saturday, St. John Barned-Smith and John D. Harden reported Sunday for the Houston Chronicle.

The article added, “There was scant information about Miles available Sunday and no motive had been identified.”

Barned-Smith and Harden also wrote, “Reaction from law enforcement to the deputy’s killing centered around growing hostility they said they are encountering from the public, the aftermath of a nationwide examination of police practices in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed African-American in [Ferguson], Mo. and other police shootings.”

The reporters quoted Deray McKesson, a leader of the Black Lives Matters movement, responding to Hickman’s criticisms by saying: “I grieve for the victims of violence. It is unfortunate that Sheriff Hickman has chosen to politicize this tragedy and to attribute the officer’s death to a movement that seeks to end violence.”

Alberto Rivera, past president of the Mexican American Sheriff’s Association, said public attitudes toward police have changed, and instead of officers getting help from citizens when they are making an arrest, they are being recorded, the article said.

“With all the media going on, and the Black Lives Matter, they’re making cops seem bad and we’re seeing it on the streets,” Rivera said. “It’s gotten worse where with all the media attention, people don’t want to cooperate. When you have a (traffic) stop, they want to record you, and that’s fine we have our cameras too. It’s one of those things like they say, ‘I don’t trust cops.’ That’s the first thing that comes out, ‘How do I know you’re not going to do something to me.’ “

In the Dallas Morning News, an editorial Monday cited a larger issue.

“So this is our world? A 47-year-old man pumping gas in suburban Houston is ambushed and assassinated, for no apparent reason beyond his Harris County sheriff’s deputy uniform?,” it began.

“Another day, another slaying. Today, a criminal suspect is killed; tomorrow, a police officer falls. Moral equivalency isn’t the issue, as much as the numbing drumbeat of death. . . .”

In a separate editorial Monday, the Morning News commented on the death of another civilian in police custody. “Deputies aggressively restrained Joseph Hutcheson moments after the Arlington handyman staggered into the lobby of the Dallas County Jail on Aug. 1. Hutcheson wound up dead, a victim of a tragedy that could — and should — have been averted.

“Surveillance video of the bizarre episode shows a man behaving erratically but not violently. Yet after one deputy wrestled Hutcheson to the ground, another jumped in and, in the process, appeared to put a knee into the man’s neck and throat.

“The Dallas County medical examiner’s office on Monday labeled the death a homicide with ‘combined effects of cocaine and methamphetamine, compounded by hypertensive cardiovascular disease and physiologic stress associated with struggle and restraint.’

“Talk about a seemingly minor incident careening off the rails into a homicide. . . .”

On MSNBC, Beth Fouhy, left, interviews NBC News contributor Raul Reyes and Rebecca Aguilar, vice president of online of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, on the impact of Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’ expulsion from (and readmittance to) a Donald Trump news conference last week. (video)

Editorial Writer: “Birthright Citizenship” Issue Is Personal

“There’s this vintage George Carlin joke,” O. Ricardo Pimentel wrote for the San Antonio Express-News Sunday print edition. Pimentel sits on the newspaper’s editorial board, coordinates a Sunday commentary section and writes a weekly column on public policy. He has also been president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and editorial page editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Pimentel told readers that for him, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposal to revoke birthright citizenship is personal.

“The Vatican had just rescinded the ban on eating meat on Fridays. And two guys, sweating it out in a very hot place after they’ve passed away, look to the heavens and shout up in plaintive, pleading voices, ‘Is it retroactive?’

“I’ve got much the same question for the guy commanding the GOP heights at the moment. Mr. Trump, will your elimination of birthright citizenship be retroactive? And, if it is, will I be one of the ‘good’ ones allowed to return after I’m deported? . . .”

Pimentel also wrote, “Yes, in the words Jeb Bush borrowed from the xenophobes, I’m an ‘anchor baby.’ Wait — he now says he was talking about Asians. Whatever. Get used to the idea, Mr. Trump, you’ll need a constitutional amendment to undo the 14th to get rid of us, whether our roots are Mexican or Chinese.

“My parents — born in Zacatecas and Guanajuato — came to this country separately, met in California, married and had three sons. They gained legal residency sometime after I started school. And before and after, they were, Mr. Trump, paying many of the same taxes you do — though perhaps at a higher rate since they didn’t have tax attorneys. Oh, and though this wouldn’t have stopped you from calling them this, they were never unemployed or criminals. This is actually the norm for immigrants. . . .”

On MSNBC, NBC News contributor Raul Reyes and Rebecca Aguilar, vice president of online of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, discussed the impact of last week’s confrontation between Trump and Univision anchor Jorge Ramos on Hispanics.

“It’s almost impossible” to [overstate] the influence of Jorge Ramos in the Latino community,” Reyes said. He cited a Cornell University study showing that Latinos who consume Spanish-language television were twice as likely to vote as those who did not.

Aguilar said Latino journalists were as professional as any others and not automatically anti-Trump. Nor do they all view their jobs as Ramos does. “Everyone has a different style, everyone has a different approach,” Aguilar said.

Stories on Va. Shooter Say Co-Workers Offered Help

“The rambling, 22-page suicide note written by Vester L. Flanagan II called out a series of tormentors who had made his life unbearable: bosses, co-workers, even high school football coaches more than two decades ago,” Dan Morse and Mary Pat Flaherty reported Saturday for the Washington Post’s Sunday print edition.

” ‘I have a right to be outraged!’ the former television broadcaster, 41, wrote before going on to fatally shoot two former colleagues at Roanoke’s WDBJ7 on live television Wednesday and later killing himself.

“But court records and interviews with more than a dozen former co-workers throughout Flanagan’s career indicated the contrary. He was well-liked when he arrived at TV stations. Older colleagues tried to mentor and support him. Complaints he made were taken seriously by superiors. Even his harshest critics seemed to want him to succeed.

“In Savannah, Ga., co-workers put up with his eccentricities, such as when he wore a clown suit to work on Halloween and when he opened an ambulance door to try to interview a car crash victim strapped to a gurney. In Tallahassee — where Flanagan complained to his news director that colleagues were teasing him for being gay — the director met with staff members and told them to cut it out.

“In the southwestern Virginia city of Roanoke, where supervisors were trying to calm co-workers threatened by Flanagan’s outbursts, they wrote disciplinary memos to him that were framed in the context of trying to work things out.

” ‘It’s not like he didn’t have people trying to help him,’ said Michael Walker, who as weekend producer for WTWC in Tallahassee supervised Flanagan. ‘He was really self-absorbed — more self-absorbed than anyone I’ve ever met.’ . . .” Walker, like Flanagan, is African American.

The Post story was one of several over the weekend that examined Flanagan’s background. They left at least one reader thinking that Flanagan had serious mental issues and lacked a network of support to deal with them. His news managers, on the other hand, apparently did not have the contacts to understand from Flanagan’s previous employers the kind of personality they were dealing with.

“We can probably screen more,” Jeff Marks, general manager of WDBJ-TV, told Erik Eckholm and Richard A. Oppel Jr. of the New York Times last week. They added, “though he went on to speak about how difficult it is to get an honest reference from a former employer. . . .”

Wrong Man’s Photo Circulated as Va. On-Air Shooter

“Sherman Lea Jr. stopped at a gas station on the way to Halifax County for a company picnic Wednesday when he got the news of the murders of two WDBJ-TV journalists,” Matt Chittum reported Thursday for the Roanoke (Va.) Times. 

“On his iPhone, he saw the grainy image of the shooter captured from slain photojournalist Adam Ward’s video camera. “

“Then he saw a candid picture of the suspected killer himself, seated with murdered reporter Alison Parker.

“Lea knew that face. It was his.

“Before Lea, 35, of Roanoke could do anything about it, apparently before Vester Lee Flanagan II was identified by police as the real killer, Lea’s image had crossed the country via social media identified as the murderer.

“He was miles from home in a place where no one knew him and it seemed the whole world had been told he was a wanted killer. For all he knew, he said, people in the gas station where he stopped were pegging him for the guy in the picture they’d seen right at that moment.

” ‘I felt like a sitting duck,’ he said Thursday.

“Lea, a Roanoke civic activist and owner of New Hope Supportive Services, was himself the source of the photo.

“He knew Parker from a story she did about a basketball tournament he and his father, Roanoke City Councilman Sherman Lea Sr., hosted over the winter.

“In April, he ran into Parker and her boyfriend, WDBJ anchor Chris Hurst, and joined them for pizza downtown.

“He tweeted a picture of the three of them with the message: ‘Big slice night cap @bennymarconis with the hometown favorites @chrishurstwdbj and @AParkerWDBJ7.’ Parker later retweeted the photo.

“It’s seemingly impossible to figure out who first found the photo and offered it as the image of the killer with one of his victims, touching off a wildfire of misinformation. . . .”

Lea said Monday on TV One’s “News One Now” with Roland Martin that he feared for his life and that his Facebook “friends” contacted media outlets, urging them to remove photos that identified Lea as the suspect.

Media Coverage of Katrina Said to Fail, Like the Levees

“This time a decade ago, Hurricane Katrina was about to make landfall in the U.S.,” Dade Hayes wrote Friday for Broadcasting & Cable. “What ensued is well known and unfortunately still not fully surmounted — tens of billions in damage and some 1,833 people killed in New Orleans and surrounding areas.

“It will take at least another decade to untangle the many strands of the story — especially the role of governmental branches from the police to FEMA to the Army Corps. of Engineers. But the media coverage of the storm, to many critics, is nearly as big of a failing as that of the levees that let floodwaters run through the streets. It isn’t easy to say this, but the critics have a point.

“Take the issue of race, so inextricably a part of the events on the ground but yet so often handled clumsily, if at all, by those capturing the scope of the slow-motion tragedy to TV viewers. In our current climate of Ferguson and videotaped police shootings, race remains a bedeviling, thorny part of society, but it is prominent in coverage. Not so, for the most part, during Katrina. . . .”

Military Writers Honor Package on Troops’ “Moral Injury”

This virtual reality prototype is designed to help troops confront and talk about morally challenging situations in wartime. It was created by University of Southern California psychologist Albert “Skip” Rizzo, a specialist in virtual reality at the school’s Institute for Creative Technologies. (video)

A “powerful, fascinating, thoroughly reported, humanized and particularly well-written, well-produced three-part multimedia package examining the prevalence, complexity and impact of ‘moral injury’ that plagues so many who have fought sought since 9/11″ won a top award from Military Reporters & Editors, the group announced Monday.

The Joe Galloway Award went to David Wood of the Huffington Post.

“Moral injury is a relatively new concept that seems to describe what many feel: a sense that their fundamental understanding of right and wrong has been violated, and the grief, numbness or guilt that often ensues,” Wood wrote in his introduction to the series. “However we individually feel about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, these enduring moral wounds, to young Americans who fought on our behalf, must be counted among the ultimate costs.”

One section of the package reads, “The moral injury of Sendio Martz involved neither killing a child nor disillusionment with the mission. It was the weight of command responsibility, and the guilt and shame he feels for having been unable to bring all his guys home safe.

“Martz is a stocky man, soft-spoken with a gentle manner. Haitian-born, adopted and home-schooled by religious American parents, he’s got a pretty firm grip on moral values and personal responsibility. That made him a good squad leader, responsible for the lives of a dozen or so Marines. . . .

“It was a young Afghan boy, Martz found out later, who detonated 40 pounds of explosives beneath Martz’s squad. He was one of the younger kids who hung around the Marines. Martz had given him books and candy and, even more precious, his fond attention. The boy would tip them off to IEDs and occasionally brought them fresh-baked bread. One day, as Martz’s platoon walked a routine patrol, the boy yanked a trigger wire from a hidden position. Whether he had been a secret enemy all along or whether some incident had turned him against the Americans are questions Martz wrestles with to this day.

“But the effects of the blast were immediate. . . . .”

Sharpton to Keep Same Salary for Doing One Show Weekly

The Rev. Al Sharpton says that when he shifts from five-day-a-week “PoliticsNation” to one show weekly at 8 a.m. ET Sunday, “MSNBC will continue to pay him the same reportedly seven-figure salary for one-fifth of his previous work,” Lloyd Grove reported Friday for the Daily Beast.

Grove also wrote, “Sharpton said his goal is to compete with NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union, Fox News Sunday and other such programs to make and break news — with guests as diverse as Obama administration Cabinet officials and hip-hop mogul Jay-Z — although that newsy ambition might be hampered by his plan to tape the show on Fridays rather than do it live on Sundays.

“Sharpton, 60, said anchoring a nightly program along with a three-hour radio show every day — to say nothing of traveling the country to put his stamp on various political and social controversies in troubled communities on behalf of his advocacy group — had been taxing of late.

” ‘I always put myself under more pressure than anybody because at the end of the day, I always want to be successful, so that I’ve got a platform for the causes I represent,’ Sharpton said . . .

” ‘I have a contract,’ he said, adding that it runs ‘for a good while,’ but declining to specify how much longer.

“He added: ‘I’m as happy as I could be.’ . . .”

Six Black Women on Covers of September Magazines

“In another first for African Americans, six black women have made it to the covers of September’s all-important magazine covers: singers Beyoncé and Ciara are on Vogue and Shape, actors Kerry Washington, Amandla Stenberg and Willow Smith are on Self, Dazed, and i-D; and American Ballet Theater’s principal dancer Misty Copeland is on Essence,” Kristal Brent Zook wrote Sunday for the Guardian.

“Tennis star Serena Williams graced the August cover of New York [magazine]. They make up a cornucopia of beauty and talent, all positioned to sell what has traditionally been the most profitable monthly issue for consumer magazines.

“But why now? It’s been 50 years since Donyale Luna became the first black model to appear on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, prompting advertisers in southern states to pull their business from the publication and angering the magazine’s owner William Randolph Hearst. A year later she became the first black woman to grace the cover of Vogue. In the meantime a lot — and little — has changed. . . .”

Zook also wrote, “Seven covers does represent something fundamental about fame right now — there are a lot of big-name black celebrities making waves right now — what it says about the magazine industry is more prosaic. Magazine covers need to sell and the magazine industry has finally convinced itself that black celebrities can do that. . . .”

Short Takes

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