/07

Reporting the News Like Black Lives Don’t Matter
▻http://fair.org/blog/2014/12/07/reporting-the-news-like-black-lives-dont-matter

The Associated Press (12/5/14), covering that movement, has produced a perfect example of what journalism looks like when black lives don’t matter.

Tom Hays and Colleen Long began their article with a litany of victim-blaming:

Eric Garner was overweight and in poor health. He was a nuisance to shop owners who complained about him selling untaxed cigarettes on the street. When police came to arrest him, he resisted. And if he could repeatedly say, “I can’t breathe,” it means he could breathe.

AP attributes “such arguments” to “rank-and-file New York City police officers and their supporters,” making the case that Garner “contributed to his own demise.” But there’s no one but police and their supporters quoted in the article, so there’s no one to point out the moral pathology of suggesting that killing a “nuisance” is somehow less than blameworthy.

[…]

You don’t get any of those points in the article, because AP didn’t feel any need to quote (or, seemingly, talk to) anyone who thought that the life of Eric Garner was more important than the feelings of New York Police Department officers. Because, one has to assume, to AP black lives don’t matter.