Monday, August 10, 2015

What? Media Writes Crappy Headlines, Film At Eleven!

It's been particularly frustrating lately, especially here at home with the race-baiting headlines and the stark manipulations from the press.

I'll start with the national news, one that I think is pretty demonstrative of the typical way these things happen, and one that #1 has elucidated very effectively today (8/10/15).

Donald Trump said yet another stupid thing after the Republican Presidential Candidate's debate last Thursday, expressing his feelings about the moderator, Megyn Kelly pretty inarticulately (shocking!) and I have to tell you, that based on the tweets, FB posts, and headlines, for three days, until this morning, I thought he said this:

"She had blood coming out of her whatever"

Because of quotes like this from this CNN article: "Donald Trump's feud with Megyn Kelly escalated Friday night when he said the Fox News host had "blood coming out of her wherever" at this week's Republican debate, resulting in swift condemnation from conservatives and a major political event pulling its invitation to him." 


When, in fact, he said ""You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes," Trump told CNN's Don Lemon on Friday night. "Blood coming out of her wherever." (same article as above)

Watch the link and you'll see he was just struggling to get some words out and move on to the next topic. Trump is a personality, a loud, brash, self-aggrandizing creature of the American culture. I have no regard for him, never have, he's the type of Cait-kardashian-Kanye-honey boo boo-reality ilk that is a scourge upon our species, much less our culture, but he's getting totally hosed on this.

Sorta.

His poll numbers are up, so who gets the last word on this?

He has defended his remarks specifically that it's the hearers that implied something he didn't infer. Good for him.

Other stuff.

Ok, our local Fox affiliate has used this headline about a "19 year old college football player that was black and was shot by a police trainee": 
Trainee officer shoots unarmed college football player
The AP article begins: "An unarmed college football player was shot dead at a suburban Dallas car dealership by a trainee police officer during a middle-of-the-night burglary call. The death of 19-year-old Christian Taylor has raised some of the same questions as other recent police shootings involving unarmed suspects."

The article is so bad that I can't stand to read it, but it never explicitly states that the "victim" was committing a crime at the time (allegedly) but is sure to get some speculation from his father. This CNN article is better, using the AP story as its basis (or did the Fox affiliate edit it down to garbage? good question) getting around to the things he did that attracted police attention, but needlessly linking the Ferguson shooting of a year ago in attempt to paint it as racial (even though the Justice Dept came to the opposite conclusion).

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!


Lastly, a University of Cincinnati cop killed a guy the other week, and he's being dragged through the mud. I'm not going to defend him, because he had no reason to shoot the guy. I have a couple of observations, of course.

If you watch the video, he wasn't being confrontational, or jerky in any way to the guy he stopped. The guy was being a little low-grade difficult, but it escalated in a flash when he told the guy he wanted him to get out of the car. We had just seen both of the officer's hands, so the speed at which he ended up pulling his gun and shooting it is shocking.

Why? I have an answer for that, I think with all the anti-police media attention over the last year especially (thanks to the drive-by media's Ferguson fiasco) coupled with the targeting and killing of cops including one here in Cincinnati, cops are on edge. It's causing the rate of cops killing people to spike rather than decrease because they are rightly SCARED.

Now, to the specifics of the case, I think that he's going to get off on the murder charge because the tape doesn't show what he may or may not have suspected, smelled, or seen in the car as he talked to the victim who was, as it turns out, in addition to the legitimate reasons for the stop and questioning (no front plate, no driver's license on him), had a bottle of "air freshener" to cover the scent of the drugs and cash that was in the car.... Which is why the guy was a little evasive, didn't want to get out of the car, and did, in fact start to attempt to flee before he was needlessly shot. 

Let me repeat that: needlessly shot. He was a guy doing bad things, but the officer should not have shot him. 

His family placed flowers as a memorial on the campus of my alma mater, which is interesting as I don't think he was ever a student there, so why memorialize him there? Because the officer that killed him was a UC cop? I just think the location is weird, that's all, clearly the family should so something to memorialize him regardless of the the circumstances of his death. Allowing it on the campus, though, I think is an error as he was in possession of pot and cash; driving without a license in his possession; driving without a front plate at the time of his shooting. If that makes me some kind of monster, I can live with that.

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