A Largely Peaceful Police State

On November 30th the LAPD cleared out the LA Occupy encampment with a massive police action that was hailed in most mainstream media outlets as being peaceful and well-conducted.  Being a defiantly mainstream media organization - NPR jumped on the bandwagon of LAPD-love with two features on its November 30 Morning Edition.

One involved Renee Montagne interviewing Frank Stoltze a reporter at NPR affiliate KPCC.  Stoltze described "a massive police operation" that was "a largely peaceful operation" and commented that the protestors were "quite well-disciplined."  Stoltze also claimed that the police action was due to "concerns about public safety' and because "there was some drug use going on."  At that point Montagne interrupted him to say "And drug dealing, I mean there were some stories of you know, you know homeless encampments that had encroached on the encampment." [Of course "some stories" is all the evidence Montagne produces to substantiate such a provocative claim].

The second story featured Inskeep interviewing Frank Stotlze who explained that "in the end there was very little force used...in part because this is a new LAPD."  The interview covered much of the same material as the Renee Montagne piece.

BUT there were a few little problems with this Police State Theater propaganda from LA:

First, the coverage of the raid was restricted to 12 members of a media septic tank pool.  Like the restrictive media pools of the US military these "pools" are meant to tightly control access to what is actually happening and to favorably tilt coverage toward those who set up the pool and grant/deny access to this "pool" - in this case the LAPD.  You would think, just the very concept of the police media pool would raise journalistic concerns - unless your news organization is tiltled toward spinning press coverage in favor of police actions against dissidents.

Second, and most important, a lot of rough and very ugly police behavior occurred outside the coverage perimeter that the media pool had access to, and to those who were arrested once they were out of the range of media pool coverage.  Ruth Folwer of Occupy LA reported on police "kettling," rough tactics, and arbitrary arrests that occurred on side streets around the main occupy crackdown.  Lisa Derrick documented police use of "non lethal" weapons  on non-violent, non-resistant LA protesters. The LA Weekly blog noted the brutal police attack on photojournalist, Tyson Heder.  Patrick Meighan, one of the writers for the popular FOX cartoon, Family Guy, has posted a very detailed description of his first hand experience of the rough treatment meted out to those arrested at Occupy LA.  A very similar picture emerged from Exiled editor, Yasha Levine's description of his treatment by the LAPD.  The Brad Blog gathered evidence of both the deplorable conditions endured by arrestees and the use of police violence against protesters during that "largely peaceful operation" by the "new LAPD" that NPR's Frank Stoltze was so impressed with.

Any organization that claims to be doing journalism would recognize that it has a duty and responsibility to revisit a story/s which future events and facts have shown was so distorted, truncated, and false.  It's bad enough that NPR considers it acceptable to adopt the servile role of reporting from a police-picked/ police approved "pool" - but even more disturbing is its utter lack of follow-up in correcting the misinformation conveyed in that report. Given that we are talking about NPR (which has a fondness for jack-booted police tactics and for the expanded powers of the surveillance state) it really is no surprise at all that NPR has purposely ignored the evidence that their two main feature stories on the police action against Occupy LA were nothing but pro-police propaganda filled with inaccuracies and spin.

If you want to get a sense of the "objective" and "unbiased" attitudes of the so-called journalists who work for NPR and its affiliates listen first to the Steve Inskeep interview story I mentioned above and hear the derision in Inskeep voice as he sneers "OK, so the tree fort is on its way out." [this link has great images and descriptions of that "peaceful" action.]  Even more disturbing is KPCC's John Rabe's editorializing as he interviews pool reporter and colleague Frank Stolze and says [at about the halfway point of the interview]:

"There were a lot of protesters who were saying [Rabe imitates them with snarky intonation] 'This is what a police state looks like.' And it's not what a police state looks like.  They may not like the lines of cops, but nobody was shot down like in say Syria, Egypt, Libya - these are police states; I don't think that helps the Occupy LA's cause by having people shouting dumb stuff like that."     

Suck It Up! from the NPR Suck-ups

The few times I've listened to NPR lately, I've noticed something interesting.  Instead of examining how deliberate US policies and practices of the last 40 years (and most dramatically of the past 10-15 years) have created stunning rates of poverty and extreme income inequality in the US (40th from the bottom out of 140 countries according to the CIA!), NPR is featuring stories that assert that people suffering from the effects of policies redistributing wealth upwards were "spoiled" by having better incomes in the past and need to accept the reality of working harder for less so that the rich can continue to enrich themselves.

Two recent features caught my attention:

• One was on Friday's ATC and reported on the suck-wages ($11 an hour) for mill work in Maine (BTW, $11/hr for a 40 hour week comes out to $22880 a year) which is frankly squat (and the six-figure script readers at NPR know that very well).  
• The second story was on Saturday's ATC and looked at unemployment and debt among recent college grads.

The Maine mill work feature had a few comments from residents about how low current wages are and how difficult it is to support a family on them, but the report was dominated by locals with such comments as:

"They're spoiled. They're spoiled. They got so used to the bigger paychecks. They don't know how to live without.....it's better than nothing, she says, which is what she had as a kid...Folks today, she says, need to learn how to make do with less."

and

"This might be a good thing for this town. They've had things easy for a long time. They've got all of these toys. They have the snowmobiles, they own a camp. You know, it's - people, I think, should pare back anyway in what they do. You know, a little attitude adjustment, you know?"

The NPR reporter on this story, Tovia Smith, offers her editorial approval of these attitudes, commenting that "It's a kind of bravado that's not uncommon up here in this cold, northern corner of New England, where folks are as hardy as they are frugal, and making do is a kind of badge of honor."

The Saturday story on college grads scoffs at students who study "softer and more qualitative majors" such as literature, psychology, etc., and simply accepts that the university experience should be a kind of trade school experience aimed at landing a well-paying job.  Not a word about the importance of a free (or even affordable), liberal higher education to the health of any democratic society.  Instead of spending any time investigating why student debt has skyrocketed and who is benefiting from this scam, NPR's Jackie Leyden ends her report with this condescending bit of wisdom:

"So maybe it comes down to changing your expectations about what life is really all about..." 

Indeed!

Police Brutality Shielded by NPR

Anthony Bologna - NYPD thug

(Update below)
As readers have commented in the Q-Tips section below, NPR is following the rest of the police state media in offering ZERO on-air coverage of the Occupy Wall Street actions in NYC that were launched on September 17, 2011.  This is especially galling now that the police have resorted to basic thuggery against peaceful protesters and have targeted the relatively small and spirited demonstrators with dozens of frivolous arrests.

Activists have identified one of the chief perpetrators of police violence - Anthony Bologna (see graphic above) - and since the NYPD website gives the places where citizens can demand that action be taken against this criminal in uniform, I thought I'd post it here for anyone wanting to email, mail or call:

"The IAB Command Center office is open for complaint, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A complaint may also be called in by phone to (212) 741-8401, by E-Mail to IAB@NYPD.org, or By postal mail to Occupant, P.O. Box 1001, New York 10014; to the Internal Affairs Bureau, located at 315 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013 or in person at any Police Department facility." 

FAIR asks the obvious question of how the media would cover Tea Party extremists in a similar scenario, but - regarding NPR - one doesn't have to wonder: just take a look at some of the enhanced promotions that NPR has given to them.

Given the assault on many of our constitutional liberties and the rise of paramilitary tactics by police forces around the country when confronting dissent, one would think that liberals and progressives would be calling for a boycott of NPR for its near complete lack of investigative work on any abuses of power by US police, military, or corporate forces.  Unfortunately, as in the past, the opposite seems to be the case with individuals and organizations like Free Press reacting to proposed funding cuts to NPR with this kind of misinformation that I recently received in an email:

"Taking down NPR and PBS has been a decades-long goal of political extremists in Washington who are threatened by public media’s brand of facts-based investigative reporting." [my emphasis added] 

Josh Stearns
Associate Program Director
Free Press Action Fund 

If one wants to make the case for preventing government spending cuts to NPR because it represents a victory for the take-no-prisoners brown shirts of the right that is one thing, but to claim that NPR offers anything resembling "facts-based reporting" is such delusional thinking that it would be funny if the reality weren't so downright depressing.

Update, September 28 - NPR's newest tool Ombudsman weighs in on NPR's censorship.  He decides it's not a problem...surprise!

"As ombudsman, I don't weigh in on daily news judgment unless its totally egregious or part of a long term trend, and this one is neither. But the complaints have validity, too."