In the United States since summer of 2021, television news shows have shown many video reports of blacks being killed by police. The killings have been followed by protests in the streets of American cities in the form of peaceful gatherings, riots, looting, vandalism, and killings of, sadly, mostly blacks.
What sparked this unrest? You might snap, “Police brutality against black Americans. Duh.”
Not so fast. I got a clue to what I think is the real, underlying cause of the unrest after regularly watching NBC Nightly News With Lester Holt.
There, on a fairly regular basis, I heard reports of police killing people, and every single one of those reports was of police killing an African American. Not once did I hear Lester Holt report police killing a white.
These “black-only” reports are, to me, a serious and deliberate omission of the fair and balanced reporting that might have produced an outcome very different from the often violent protests, destruction, and killings that we’ve seen far too often now.
The following is an example of fair-and-balanced reporting’s calming effect:
Suppose you had a boss who barged into your office almost daily and berated you on trivial errors you made in your work. Might you not soon feel singled out and picked on by someone who apparently hated you as a person?
Suppose one day you complained about the boss mistreating you to a co-worker who has been at your employ much longer than you have.
The co-worker laughs. “Pay no attention to her. She does that to everybody.”
What a relief!
Yet cops do indeed kill blacks disproportionately to the their race. In sheer number, though, they kill nearly twice as many whites.
You’d never know that from listening to Lester Holt and virtually all the other liberal media.
I suspect thousands of blacks think no white is ever killed by police.
Blacks are disproportionately killed because they disproportionately commit crime. And they disproportionately commit crime because they disproportionately suffer oppression. (In sheer number, whites commit more crimes—68.9%.)
Wouldn’t fair and balanced reporting on police killings have been a wonderful, healing approach to explore? If the liberal media had explored it—had painted a balanced picture right from the very beginning, while acknowledging the oppression of blacks—we would not, I believe, have seen the riots and the killings.
Instead, the media chose to put their destructive anti-cop narrative ahead of fairness and objectivity to give the impression they are “helping” blacks.
The liberal media’s narrative not only seeks to show that cops are evil, but also makes sure you clearly understand that these evil cops killing blacks are white.
Never mind that a “new peer-reviewed study of fatal police shootings says that white officers are not more likely to shoot and kill minority suspects.” (NPR.org: https://archive.ph/Vvrz6)
I have never seen on Mr. Holt’s news show a video or audio report of a black cop shooting a black. Yet black cops are not less likely than white cops to shoot blacks. …”Just hiring more black cops will not mean fewer black people get shot. And that fits with what implicit bias trainers say.” (NPR.org: https://archive. phiVvrz6)
How do you explain this omission, Mr. Holt?
So it seems Mr. Holt’s and the liberal media’s narrative is both anti-cop and anti-white. That would make Mr Holt a racist.
How do you sleep at night, Mr. Holt, knowing you have brought down so much ruin upon mostly black Americans in the name of “helping” them?
(Typical of many cities: Police shootings in Philadelphia have been declining for years, from a high of 59 in 2012 to 12 in 2018.)
A consequence of “Defund the police”: “America’s Police Exodus”
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