By LEO Affairs Staff
By now, most law enforcement officers are used to it. In fact, they expect it from certain news outlets. But whether it comes from the ownership, management, or the journalists themselves, a deep hatred of law enforcement is seeping through the coverage of almost all officer involved stories that are run.
Just this morning, the family of a 17-year-old who was killed by a police officer after assaulting the officer, is filing a lawsuit against the deputy and county where the incident took place. The officer has been been cleared in the incident, but that didn’t stop the outrageous headlines from coming forth. Below is a screen grab from CNN.com, which ran with the headline, “Cop kicks phone out of teen’s hand, shoots 7 times.”
Now, CNN is far from the only one to do this, but let’s take a look at some of the other instances where their coverage was outlandishly anti-police.
First, there was the Michael Brown shooting last August which sparked the national debate, where CNN quickly condemned the officer and used their platform to spread massive amounts of misinformation, like the lie that Michael Brown had his hands up in the air and was trying to surrender when he was shot and killed.
Without empirical data to show a direct correlation other than a few instances, we’ll leave it to you, the reader, to determine if coverage like this has led to the spike in targeted killings of law enforcement officers all over the country this year. But let’s stay on track.
Back in June, after an attack on the Dallas Police HQ, CNN anchor Fredricka Whitfield called the gunman’s actions “courageous and brave” for shooting up the police station.
Not to be outdone by her colleague, anchor Brooke Baldwin thought she’d add US war veterans to CNN’s hit list, by declaring that veterans who join police departments are basically going to war with minority communities when she said, “some of them are coming back from war, they don’t know the communities, and they’re ready to do battle.” Baldwin apologized to US Veterans afterward, but of course, not to police.
We could point to several other incidents with CNN, including coverage of the Eric Garner case and the Black Lives Matter movement, but we’ll stop here. The topic of the day is the lawsuit filed by the family of 17-year-old Deven Guilford so we’ll leave you with some of the headlines we came across this morning from various news sources.
Keep in mind that no wrong doing was found on the part of the officer, the incident was recorded by the officer’s body camera showing Guilford attacking the officer, and you can make your own judgement on whether the media has culpability in not just the recent targeting of LEOs, but also the rise in false accusations of racism and profiling, and the rise in the number of people who think they do not have to comply with an officer’s lawful commands.
