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CNN Crew Released After Minn. Arrest

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CNN Chief Zucker Intervenes With Governor
Black Journalists Think, ‘It Could Have Been Me’

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Zucker Intervenes With Governor

Officers arrested CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his team, covering the violent protests in Minneapolis over the police killing of George Floyd, then later released them. Minnesota’s governor apologized, CNN reported Friday.

“CNN president Jeff Zucker spoke with the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz on Friday morning . . .,” the network said.

“Walz said he ‘deeply apologizes’ for what happened and is working to have the CNN team released immediately.

“Walz described the arrests as ‘unacceptable,’ said CNN’s team clearly has the right to be there, and said he wants the media to be in Minnesota to cover the protests.”

Elisha Fieldstadt and Maia Davis wrote for NBC: “CNN in a report also noted that Jimenez is a black Latino. ‘A black reporter from CNN was arrested while legally covering the protests in Minneapolis. A white reporter also on the ground was not.’

“The white reporter, Josh Campbell, told a CNN anchor that he did not know whether race played a factor in Jimenez’s arrest, but that he was ‘treated much differently.’ . . .”

CNN reported earlier, “Here is how the situation unfolded:

“At 5:09 a.m. local time, CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez was reporting live on an arrest happening in the area near a city police department precinct that protesters had burned and officers had abandoned overnight.

“About a block away, a fire was burning at a different, four-story building that had contained restaurants. He was standing in front of a long line of police officers in riot gear.

“Shortly after his crew captured the arrest on camera, the police officers moved towards Jimenez and his crew, asking them to move.

“Jimenez told the officers he and his three colleagues were part of the same CNN crew and calmly identified himself with his CNN identification card.

“Jimenez was then heard as telling the officers:

” ‘We can move back to where you’d like. We can move back to where you’d like here. We are live on the air at the moment. This is the four of us. We are one team.

“Just put us back where you want us. We’re getting out of your way. So, just let us know. Wherever you’d want us, we will go. We were just getting out of your way when you were advancing through the intersection. Let us know and we’ve got you.”

“At 5:11 a.m., two officers in riot gear stepped up to Jimenez and said ‘you are under arrest.’

“Jimenez calmly asked why was he under arrest.

” ‘Why am I under arrest, sir?’

“He was then handcuffed and led away by the police, as the camera kept rolling.

“Shortly after that, CNN photojournalist Leonel Mendez who was with Jimenez said he and the rest of the crew were also being arrested.

“The camera then showed Jimenez’s producer Bill Kirkos being handcuffed taken into custody.

“Shortly after that, the camera, which was still rolling, was taken away from the crew. .. .”

Also on Friday morning, Essence magazine announced that Senior Editor Yesha Callahan was interviewing George Floyd family lawyer Benjamin Crump. “She will then speak to the victim’s best friend, Stephen Jackson, immediately afterwards. Click here to tune in now,” the notice said. 

Black Journalists Think, ‘It Could Have Been Me’

“After Hurricane Katrina, a study was done looking at how black people viewed black victims versus how white people viewed white victims in similar circumstances,” Danielle Belton (pictured) wrote Friday for The Root.

“The study revealed that the stronger a person identified with being African American, the more likely they were to feel empathy for another black person in peril.

“Being a reporter, blogger, editor, broadcaster or any kind of journalist does not imbue you with the ability to turn your humanity off, white or black, but black people — who can’t get a get-out-of-racism free card no matter their education, socio-economic status, background or zip code — are acutely sensitive to stories like these. The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and George Floyd — all at the hands of either white vigilantes or state-sponsored violence — take a toll.

“Never mind the threat of death-by-cop levied at bird-watcher Christian Cooper by a white woman, Amy Cooper, in New York City’s Central Park. It’s hard to look at things like this, including the arrest of CNN reporter Omar Jimenez, and not think ‘This could have been me’ or ‘This could have been someone I love’ -— because it can and it has been.

“. . . We at The Root are fortunate in that we can comfort each other and find solace in our shared pain, but so many other black journalists at predominantly white-run media outlets don’t have this luxury — of someone asking if they are OK. Of someone asking, ‘do you need to take time off?’ Of someone suggesting therapy or some other support to get through the crisis.

“Because often, to white people, this is just another news story. For us, this is our lives…and our deaths, displayed for public consumption, often without context or understanding. . . .”

In 2015, Gene Demby of NPR’s “Code Switch” wrote on a similar subject. His piece was headlined, “How Black Reporters Report On Black Death.”

‘Bro, They Wanted to Kill That Man, Bro’

May 28, 2020

CNN ‘Get’: Witness to George Floyd Killing
Central Park Bird Watcher Declines Vengeance
Two More Cases of ‘The Black Man Did It’

(more to come)

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CNN ‘Get’: Witness to George Floyd Killing

​
CNN provided gripping, emotional television Wednesday as Donald Williams, an eyewitness to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, gave his minute-by-minute account to viewers of Chris Cuomo’s “Cuomo Prime Time.”

The interview was followed by a segue into Don Lemon’s “CNN Tonight,” in which Lemon began with his own emotion-laden thoughts (video) to Cuomo and to viewers.

“Imagine if that was me on the ground how you would feel as a friend, as someone I spend a lot of time with,” (transcript) ​Lemon said to Cuomo. “Imagine how people around this country feel when their friends like you, both of us are a different background. When their friends say nothing. When they do nothing. Except send out a tweet or say, man, that’s terrible. I can’t believe that happens. And then when they see everyday racism, they don’t stand up for it.

“Imagine how that feels to people of color in this country. It feels terrible. Is that really being a friend? I’m not saying you specifically, you understand what I’m saying. You know what I’m saying. . . .”

As Yahoo summarized it, “Williams, a bystander at the arrest that would ultimately lead to the death of George Floyd while in police custody, spoke with CNN’s Chris Cuomo Wednesday night where he recounted what he witnessed Monday night.

“In the video in which Floyd can be heard telling Minneapolis police officers that he couldn’t [breathe], Williams can be heard pleading with an officer to take his knee off of Floyd’s neck. Floyd was on the ground in handcuffs at the time with an officer kneeling on his neck. Floyd’s family says that what happened to him was murder on the part of the police, and Williams says that’s exactly what he witnessed.”

After describing the scene, Williams said, according to CNN’s transcript, “Bro, they wanted to kill that man, bro. Like helping get hunted (ph) bro, they didn’t speak, they didn’t say nothing. They — they’re abusing his eyes, bro. The man had his — his knee on his chest, bro. He knew what he was doing.

“His shimmy’s in my man’s neck, bro. He knew what he was doing. Just like having a Jiu-Jitsu choke, if I’m here, and I’m shimmy, I’m shimmy, I’m shimmy, I’m shimmy, boom, my choke’s on you.

“I told him it was a blood choke. He knew it was a blood choke. He looked at me when I said it (video). He put his head down. He did not make any more gestures, did not say any other thing.

“And the two other cowards that was on the other side of the — the car, I didn’t know nothing about. I didn’t know about it till I got videos in my social media and things like that.

“So, there was an intent to smother my man, and kill my man, and I seen it. I seen it in his eyes. I seen it in his demeanor. And I seen it in their movement.

“And Officer [Tou] Thao, he didn’t partake in it, but he had control on what was going on, on the other side of that car, for me not to see what was going on, because the people that know me personally, know how I am.

“And I’m very good. I’m a controlled athlete. I’m a controlled person. You know, I have different levels to who I am. And I showed my controlness out there in front of the world.

“I got letters, notes, from lots of people that know me from growing up in the City that said I was the most controlled they ever seen in my life, hasn’t seen another man that looked like me, that felt like me, that got the same complexion as me, lose his life, to another man that had no senses.

“He had no feeling. He had no remorse. He had shit in him. He had no feeling. I don’t even think he had a heart at that moment. And he’s going to feel that for the rest his life, just like I’m goi​​ng to hear my man say this, ‘I can’t breathe, I want my mama.’

“And I’m coming to find out that this man who died, two years on a date that his mom died, I’m a mama’s boy, bro, so like that shit hurts me deep down inside, bro, and like something needs to be done or something needs to be done. …”

A CNN spokeswoman did not respond to an inquiry about how the network booked Williams.

Christian Cooper

Central Park Bird Watcher Declines Vengeance

Christian Cooper, a Harvard-educated New York senior biomedical editor and former comic book editor, wants others to show the type of grace to Amy Cooper, no relation, that she didn’t want to give to him Monday morning in Central Park, David Moye wrote Wednesday for HuffPost.

“As documented in a now-famed viral video, the 41-year-old white woman called police on the 57-year-old Black birdwatcher after he asked her to put a leash on her dog in an area where such restraints are required.

“On the call, Amy Cooper said ‘an African American man in Central Park … is recording me and threatened myself and my dog.’ She continued, ‘Please send a cop! Immediately!’

“After the encounter went viral on social media, Amy Cooper voluntarily gave her dog back to the group she had adopted it from and then was fired from her job at Franklin Templeton, an asset management firm. Her employers said the company does not ‘tolerate racism of any kind.’

She also has been targeted with a barrage of criticism and attacks, including death threats.

Christian Cooper told CNN’s Don Lemon on Tuesday that he didn’t want to make a situation worse and said as offensive as the woman’s actions [were], people should remain civil.

“I am told there has been death threats and that is wholly inappropriate and abhorrent and should stop immediately,” he said. “I find it strange that people who were upset that … that she tried to bring death by cop down on my head, would then turn around and try to put death threats on her head. Where is the logic in that?

Amy Cooper apologized to Christian Cooper in a public statement.

Desiree Guerrero added for Out magazine Tuesday, “Aside from being an avid birdwatcher, Cooper also happens to be a trailblazing queer comic writer.

“As a former editor for Marvel, he is known as a pioneer in the comic world for creating the character Yoshi Mishima, the first gay male character in a Star Trek comic and the first gay human ever within the Star Trek universe. With Yoshi, Cooper explored themes of discrimination, obviously something he’s no stranger to in his own life. He also has written stories for Ghost Rider and Vengeance comics. . . .”

“Cooper, 57, a Harvard graduate who works in communications, has long been a prominent birder in the city and is on the board of the New York City Audubon Society,” Sarah Maslin Nir reported for The New York Times.

Cooper told Nir, “I am one of the few male African-Americans who birds the [Central Park] Ramble regularly. And I have always been aware that if I am crawling around behind a shrub trying to catch a glimpse of that rare bird, holding a metal object in my hands, I will be perceived differently than a white man if police come across that scene.”

Nir continued, “the legacy of these kinds of confrontations looms large, according to Professor Katheryn Russell-Brown, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law.

“’It was particularly a punch in the gut for a lot of people,’ Professor Russell-Brown said. ‘It ties into and taps into a long history of white women, in particular, falsely accusing black men of crimes that leads to great harm.’

“Professor Russell-Brown is the author of ‘The Color of Crime,’ in which she explores the phenomenon of the ‘racial hoax’ in which people fabricate crimes perpetrated by people of another race.

“ ‘This is deeply offensive,’ she said. ‘Particularly as we are in a climate writ large of the expendability of black and brown lives in the midst of Covid-19.’ . . .’ ”

WMAZ-TV in Macon, Ga., reports on the strange turn of events involving a carjacking and kidnapping claim. (video)

Two More Cases of ‘The Black Man Did It’

At least two more cases of false claims that a black man committed a crime have surfaced in the last week, but media organizations don’t seem to be making too much of them. There were times when it was otherwise.

Jesse Washington wrote in 2009 for the Associated Press, “The Black Man Did It lie last made news as recently as October, when a John McCain volunteer claimed a 6-foot-4 black man carved a B into her cheek (For Barack, evidently). Charles Stuart told it in 1989 after he killed his wife in Boston. Susan Smith told it when she drowned her sons in 1994 in South Carolina. Unknown numbers of black men were hanged for it back when lynching was a common practice. “And those are the ones we heard about. Law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown documents 67 racial hoaxes in the period between 1987 and 1996 in her book ‘The Color of Crime.’ . . .”

Now we have cases in Miami and in Macon, Ga.

In Miami, Patricia Ripley, who initially claimed her severely autistic 9-year-old son had been kidnapped, ultimately admitted she was to blame for the child’s death at a canal. She said, “he’s going to be in a better place,” police said.

On Saturday, deep in a Miami Herald story by David Ovalle and Charles Rabin, the Herald reported, “It was Thursday night when Ripley called police with a dramatic and bizarre tale: A light-blue car forced her car off the road near a West Kendall Home Depot. Two black men were inside. One of men jumped out, she told Miami-Dade police, and demanded drugs.

“When she told them she didn’t have any, the man — armed with a knife — took the child, her cell phone and a tablet and drove off. . . .” Ripley said one of the men might have been wearing cornrows.

Ripley is Hispanic. The story closed with a quote from the police director. ” ‘For her to place blame of her crime on another community, it’s just as well another crime that was committed. It’s very disappointing,’ Miami-Dade Police Director Alfredo Ramirez told reporters Saturday.”

The same day, TheGrio, a black-oriented website, put the racial angle in its headline: “Florida woman who lied that Black men kidnapped son admits to drowning him, Miami cops say.”

In Macon, Christopher Keys, a white schoolteacher and youth pastor, claimed that two black men had carjacked and kidnapped him at a CVS pharmacy. Keys, who is married to a woman, made the claim after he had been with a man in a motel room, was robbed and then arrested on a charge of solicitation of sodomy.

The Telegraph in Macon did not report any racial considerations because it did not know of them, according to Blake Kaplan, regional executive editor for the McClatchy newspapers and general manager of the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss.

“The focus of the story was on Keys’ arrest for solicitation and the circumstances surrounding it, not the initial Facebook post the sheriff’s office referenced in their release.” That statement was dated May 21 and headlined “Clarification Of A Social Media Rumor.”

“It was our understanding that the sheriff’s office didn’t believe the carjacking and robbery occurred, so we did not investigate or report the details of the story attributed to Keys,” Kaplan told Journal-isms.

Likewise, Sgt. Linda Howard, spokesperson for the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office, messaged, “We were not aware of racial implications until you called and said there was per, the internet.”

The source of the comments about Keys’ discredited carjacking story was a Macon area woman who posted on Facebook an account of what Keys had told children in his church class, said the woman, who asked not to be identified because, “I’m getting enough hate mail.”

She said her post had been shared 900 times and that she had been called a racist and anti-LGBTQ, both untrue, she said. She was interested only in warning people about the safety concern at that CVS, she said.

But the Facebook post was also shown on Macon television station WMAZ and included her name. Receiving more hate mail, much of it from out of state, she asked the news director to redact her name, which the station did, she said.

It turns out that there had been a robbery attributed to two black men at the CVS store, she said, and Keys might have adapted that story as an alibi for himself.

Howard said that although the story of black men carjacking and kidnapping Keys proved to be fictitious, the African American that Keys allegedly solicited via craigslist did rob him, and had an African American accomplice, Howard said.

Those robberies are under investigation, according to the sergeant.

(More to come)

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