Laws For Us. More Like Suggested Guidelines For Them? The New York Daily News ran the story in their typically sensationalist way. They described the man as a “brute” and a “thug” and described the incident in lurid detail and begged for readers to help ID the coward who attacked the woman and “ran away smiling.” The problem? The man turned out to be an off-duty NYPD police officer and the New York Daily News, like almost every other media outlet in the country — liberal or conservative — has a completely different set of rules for covering police officers accused of committing a crime. By the next day, the story had been cleaned up. To say that the media insulates officers from criticism is not an an exaggeration. What’s more, the way the media absolves officers of wrongdoing gets more troubling than that. And infinitely subtler. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has often noted, for example, how the phraseology of stories about police leans in the favor of the officers. Rather than give the cops agency, the media typically describes their actions in the passive voice: “There was an officer-involved shooting” rather than the more specific, “an officer shot a person.” Likewise, an officer “discharged his weapon,” which is a pretty generous way of writing “fired his gun at someone. addictinginfo.org/2015/01/04/heres-how-differently-the-media-covers-an-assault-before-and-after-learning-it-was-done-by-a-cop/ ~gw/#OccupySeattle
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 23:59:45 +0000
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