Do you support Truthout’s reporting and analysis? Click here to help fund it this week!
Once again, the media have stumbled upon a case of law enforcement malfeasance, printed the police’s official line and falsely insinuated that Occupy was somehow involved in a killing.
The case, in which a San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) officer shot a 32-year-old Oakland man, Pralith Pralourng, to death, garnered articles from Bay Area media sources consisting of little more than the account offered by SFPD Chief Greg Suhr. Huffington Post’s dispatch included this scintillating clue to the thrilling whodunit: “Occupy SF pointed out that the shooting occurred blocks from their encampment, but it’s unclear if the movement is related to the incident.”
Hmmm … suspicious. In fact, the only way Occupy SF was involved in the shooting was by beating Huffington Post and the rest of the press to the scene. Huff and every other news outlet was stuck reporting its stenography of Chief Suhr’s tortured claim that a cop shot the suspect as he lunged at her with a box cutter, whereupon, the cop shot him twice in the chest, then handcuffed him “for safety reasons” and then uncuffed him and performed CPR. Meanwhile, Occupy SF activist Robert Benson had already gotten people on film testifying that they had seen the man shot while handcuffed.
This is not only the Ockham’s razor explanation for a man with cuff marks shot to death with two bullets to the chest, but also something of a sore spot for Bay Area law enforcement. In 2009, footage of Bay Area Rapid Transit police officers shooting one of Pralourng’s fellow Oaklanders, 22-year-old Oscar Grant III, while in police custody spread on the Internet and sparked huge community backlash. Despite this history, The Huffington Post raises its eyebrow not at the chief’s official account, but at the activists with the superior journalism.
This is just the latest in a mounting series of insinuations by the liberal press that Occupy activists around the country are lethal. A week earlier in New York, a brief sensationalist headline orgy ensued when cops fed the press an “OWS Murder Link!” The story, sourced to police, held that a chain used in the Fare Strike (on which Truthout has previously reported) contained traces of DNA found at the scene of an eight-year-old unsolved murder. Turned out it was a lab error. Whoops.
In February, The Huffington Post’s headline “Horrifying Murder in Berkeley – Is Occupy to Blame?” also turned out to be complete bunk. The story faithfully reprinted the Berkeley, California, Police Department’s (BPD) excuse for turning up late in response to a 911 call: they were “being reconfigured in order to monitor a protest,” according to a BPD spokesman. Andy Stepanian of The Sparrow Project tweeted photos backing up his contention that “there was no police presence” on the march. After much hounding, The Huffington Post eventually corrected the record that it was not the “community,” as the report had previously read, but “police” who blamed Occupy for the murder.
In case after case in which the police blow it – failing to respond promptly to an emergency call, tainting lab results and now killing a guy – the media write the reports police tell them to and hints wind up in the copy that Occupy protesters are involved.
Police in Cleveland and Chicago have already drawn gullible protesters into bogus plots in order to charge them with terrorism. The criminalization of dissent will require considerable media cooperation and it continues to seem as though the media are willing to do their part.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy