Fox News and conservative media has been reporting that black protesters have been hunting white citizens in retaliation for the recent police shooting, including a reporter who said in a YouTube statement that he had to leave the area in fear of being killed. The question is, if these reports are true, why there has been no hate crime reporting or Justice Department investigation. There is also a sharp conflict raised over CNN’s reporting of the statements of Sylville Smith’s sister. The sharp contrast in coverage suggests either exaggeration from one side or avoidance from another. There of course should only be one side in the reporting of news, but this is the latest example of the reason why so many mistrust the media.
The riots began after the 23-year-old Sylville Smith was shot by a black patrol officer. He was armed with a stolen gun and fled from a car during a traffic stop. The loaded gun had been stolen in an earlier burglary. Smith had reportedly an extensive criminal record. The police appear to have have body cameras so we will hopefully be able to learn more about the reason for the shooting, though the officers stated that they fired after the gun was brandished or pointed at them.
Independent journalist Tim Pool received acclaim in his coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He also has reported that whites were being hunted down. While Pool expressed sympathy with the protesters, he stated “For those that are perceivably white, it is just not safe to be here. And that’s why I’m deciding to leave.”
Fox has also shown videos of groups calling for the running down of whites seen on the streets.
None of this means that all or most of the protesters are engaging in racist retaliation. However, the sharp contrast in reporting is precisely why people increasingly view media as pursuing hidden agendas or shaping the news.
Another sharp contrast is found between the Washington Times and CNN. The Washington Times has accused CNN of editing out the words of Sylville Smith’s sister who called for attacks on the suburbs. Instead, CNN reported that she called for peace and no violence.
CNN showed Sherelle Smith telling protesters: “Don’t bring the violence here and the ignorance here.” In both broadcast and Web stories, CNN framed Smith as calling for peace. However, the Washington Times said that CNN cut away before Smith yelled” “Stop burning down shit we need in our community. Take that shit to the suburbs. Burn they shit down. We need our shit. We need our weaves. I don’t wear it. But we need it.”
That is a very different take from the CNN.com article saying that Smith “condemned violence carried out in her brother’s name, saying the community needs those businesses.” More importantly, it is also obvious news if the sister of the victim is telling people to burn down the suburbs. Reporters are not supposed to shape the news. The report it. That is news. It is also legitimate to explore the history of race tensions and segregation in Milwaukee — the underling anger that erupted into the streets. Likewise, it is obviously news if there are racist retaliatory attacks and whites being chased down streets or pulled from cars. These conflicting piece raise troubling questions of how our media has diverged over preferred narratives as opposed to fully reporting all of these elements.
One guy had to stay because he had child custody, and would have to get baby-momma’s permission. The rest hem and hawed. The host and his partner opined that blacks were just scared to leave familiar surrounding.
1. Like everyone else, they assess trade-offs.
2. People who’ve spent their lives living in decidedly suboptimal surroundings have their ways of adjusting. The thing is, there are problems and pitfalls whatever you do with yourself, and if you’ve learned to tolerate your circumstances, birds in hand and all. Most people are satsificers about their life-choices, not optimizers.
True; the number of rioters was in the low hundreds, and most them were unemployable young men with rap sheets.
People in this neighborhood and from neighborhoods nearby participated in the riot, as demonstrated by who got arrested.
There’s an ample population of troublesome people in such places. Young men torching things, women looking for end tables, young men looking for consumer electronics. What George Will said during the 1977 riots in New York, “a cry for help turns out to be a cry for a free color TV”.
That having been said, most people who live there are tertiary sector workers of the familiar type. They’re at home trying to keep out of the fray.
“I think we could keep our ‘theys’ straight. Most of the blacks in Ferguson…”
Not the case in MKE.
People in this neighborhood and from neighborhoods nearby participated in the riot, as demonstrated by who got arrested.
I too am horrified that Soros pays for outside agitators to come in and destroy, but this appears to be MKE blacks fouling their own nest.
“They don’t much care about rank and file blacks unless a rank and file black household contains a young man who gets off robbing convenience stores.”
Absolutely.
Prairie Rose, Myself and many people have sympathy for people trying to get by in the inner city. Those aren’t the ones rioting, looting and burning. They are the ones hiding in their homes, afraid to go outside or to even sit near a window.
I would submit that the first step is obvious: QUIT making excuses for criminal and trashy behavior. Period. Stop it. Don’t vote for any politician who blathers out racism, white privilege, systemic discrimination as an excuse for where blacks find themselves. Period.
This ain’t the 1800s where 20 poor little immigrant girls live in one room, and who start prostituting at age 12 to get food, and can’t help getting pregnant. Today, there is free birth control, and food stamps. And free schools.
All the excuses and enabling does is take the focus away from personal responsibility.
Squeeky Fromm
Giro Reporter
People did not ask to be born out of wedlock into a poor and uneducated and too often unpredictable household.
I’m afraid most first-born children of any description are born out-of-wedlock. I think about 30% of these are legitimated by post-partum marriages. A large minority of the young are born into families which never form properly. That’s not good, but it’s not an insuperable problem re dependency or crime control. We can achieve great improvements re both without a cultural counter-revolution (though such a counter-revolution would be agreeable).
How do such things change? No processed food supported by WIC or food stamps, with increased $$ for food? Mandatory parenting classes for anyone under the age of 18 who give birth?
Food subsidies are not good policy, but that’s a weak to non-existent vector re the establishment and maintenance of public order. ‘Mandatory parenting classes’? Well, that will provide employment for women with MSW degrees. Not sure what else it will do and such ministerial functions transgress the boundary which should be maintained between state and society.
They don’t want sympathy.
What they want is unclear; their rage is chaotic, their demands arbitrary, their methods inchoate.
Tribal madness.
I think we could keep our ‘theys’ straight. Most of the blacks in Ferguson were lower-middle class or propertied working class. These people were largly homeowners who were being injured financially by the trashing of the place. The media went out of there way to ignore them completely. Blacks of this class seldom if ever have the megaphone in their hands and their interests remain unarticulated. The vandalism and undocumented shopping was the work of outsiders abetted by a few locals living in subsidized housing (e.g. Michael Brown’s insufferable mother). Some of it was sorosphere rent-a-crowd. It was an Alinskyite alignment of interests between the media, the black grievance industry (Sharpton, Crump / Julison), and the sorosphere which ruined much of the commercial real estate in Ferguson and residential property values to boot. These people are evil.
As far as I’ve ever been able to see, black politicians care about chronic dependents and criminals and care about school administrators and the like. They don’t much care about rank and file blacks unless a rank and file black household contains a young man who gets off robbing convenience stores.
KCF,
Whether they want it or not, sympathy should be felt, at least to some extent.
People did not ask to be born out of wedlock into a poor and uneducated and too often unpredictable household. There are certainly detrimental attitudes hurting people and perpetuating problems.
How do such things change? No processed food supported by WIC or food stamps, with increased $$ for food? Mandatory parenting classes for anyone under the age of 18 who give birth?
I would agree with you that their concerns are unclear; there is no articulate MLK now.
The discrimination, oppression and segregation is well documented, historically, legally and scholarly. !0 seconds online would offer at least 10 different and accepted sources.
I’m impressed with the work some of my colonial and early federal ancestors did clearing land and getting (prosperous) farms up and running. I’m impressed with the Civil War service of some of my ancestors from that era. I’m impressed with that and happy to claim them as my own. I did not actually do any of that or suffer any of that myself.
Disagreeable living conditions for blacks over time is a weak vector influencing contemporary problems (except that certain almost pre-articulate dispositions can be theoretically attributed to history). The effort my great-great-great grandfather put into clearing land does not explain the back trouble from which I suffer.
The institutional culture of law enforcement and the courts in the Southern United States prior to about 1971 was wretched, for the most part, but that does not tell us why there are disorders in Wisconsin five decades later. The degree to which blacks were systemically short-changed regarding schooling there and then (most severely in areas only lightly populated with blacks and re the state research universities) may have more abiding influence, but that would be manifest in measures of human capital, not in urban disorder (and note the research of James Coleman, the first installment of which was published in 1966; the degree to which blacks were short-changed is commonly overstated and the effects are well overstated).
True, Art Deco, but those ideas offer insufficient opportunities for graft.
The chronically unsolved problem, in contrast, is a goldmine.
The legacy of oppression, discrimination and cops killing Black citizens?
Just to point out, about 8,000 blacks die by homicide in a typical year in this country. The sum of killings by police officers (per the Bureau of Justice Statistics) is about 360 in a typical year, of which half are not black. About 2% of all blacks who die by homicide are killed by police officers, and not many of these cases are questionable. We know not many are because rabble rousers make hay about cases that fall apart, and do so more often than they can re cases which are sustained on inspection. They have these mishaps because they do not have many cases which illustrate the point they’re trying to make.
If by self-segregation one means being forced into decrepit buildings and neighborhoods due to historical and federal polices of segregation, discrimination and oppression.
There were never any federal policies of much consequence promoting residential segregation. There have been inchoate complaints about New Deal era policies re public housing or eligibility standards for FHA mortgage insurance, but that’s about it. The most coercive policies you’ve had which induce residential segregation would be restrictive covenants on deeds. I don’t believe these were ever universal and they’ve been unenforceable in a court of law for nearly 70 years.
Segregation mandated by law prior to 1971 largely concerned schools and space in commercial establishments. The overwhelming majority of the public ca. 1938 were antagonistic to residential integration. You didn’t need much in the way of formal statutory law to induce residential segregation because people did so voluntarily (aided, regrettably, by restrictive covenants and bouts of shunning and violence).
The buildings are ‘decrepit’ as a consequence of the preference architectures of both owner and lessor, as well as the incentives induced by property taxes and neglect of building code enforcement and the neglect in the enforcement of rental agreements. Not many people are ‘forced’ by circumstance (much less subject to compulsion) to live in slums. The slums are the deal which suits them better than alternatives. Public policy adjustments to improve the built environment would include ending the imposition of property taxes on slum neighborhoods and taxing transitional neighborhoods at half the general rate; instituting small income levies to replace lost property tax revenue; better law enforcement in slum neighborhoods (reducing general disorder, reducing the retreat of commercial enterprise, reducing vandalism, and reducing the non-compliance with rental agreements which has knock-on effects on the built environment); setting priorities in building code enforcement and cracking down hard on generative problems (see Mark Hinshaw on this question); extra sanitation patrols to hoover up trash and sandblast graffiti off the sides of buildings); liquidating public housing authorities; and ending rent control.
“do nothing to increase people’s sympathy for the plight of people living in the inner city.”
They don’t want sympathy.
What they want is unclear; their rage is chaotic, their demands arbitrary, their methods inchoate.
Tribal madness.
Hi po,
A black friend of mine lived on the north side of Chicago when she was in college (she was from out of state). She was surprised when black Chicagoans said to her–why do you live on the north side? That’s not where blacks live. She was aggrieved at the self segregation because she had always found she could live anywhere she wanted to.
Also, “No mention about Milwaukee being one of the most segregated cities in the US?”
That does not justify the woman telling people to go burn down the suburbs. No one should be burning or destroying anything. Those actions do nothing to increase people’s sympathy for the plight of people living in the inner city.
“The discrimination, oppression and segregation is well documented, historically, legally and scholarly.”
Meaning you have no evidence at all, just received wisdom you assumed was true.
That is, lies held dear by true believers.
We’re not talking about 1861, but 2016.
Provide proof that blacks are currently being forced to live in those neighborhoods.
Name the current federal policies that segregate them to those neighborhoods.
Name the “historical” policies that continue to segregate them to those neighborhoods.
What oppression is currently occurring, exactly? Be precise. Give examples.
What discrimination is currently occurring. Be precise. Give examples.
@Po
Here is a reflection of your liberal ideology:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CqE_i05UMAAhoaF.jpg
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
@KCF
Darn straight! There aren’t any chains in Milwaukee holding people to that neighborhood. FWIW, the black illegitimate birth rate in Milwaukee is 82%. Plus, Jews in the ghettos of Europe still respected education and when given the chance, flourished! Supposedly they run the United States! 🙂 (Hmmm. Note to self: Go get your Jewish tribal papers ASAP, so you can help run the media, Hollywood, the Supreme Court, and banks!)
Anyway, Tommy Sotomayor had a show last night where he talked to some black Milwaukee residents and they were laughing their a$$es off at the Hair Weave Sister, and frankly just calling the rioters and gang-bangers the N words. He asked several of them why they didn’t just leave Milwaukee, particularly in light of the black name for the city, Killwaukee? One guy had to stay because he had child custody, and would have to get baby-momma’s permission. The rest hem and hawed. The host and his partner opined that blacks were just scared to leave familiar surrounding.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
” the way Jews self-segregated in Jewish ghettos all over Europe…”
Another lie.
Most of that was compulsory, which is not true for blacks in Milwaukee.
“…forced into decrepit buildings and neighborhoods due to historical and federal polices of segregation, discrimination and oppression.”
How are they “forced”?
Provide proof that blacks are being forced to live in those neighborhoods.
Name the federal policies that segregate them to those neighborhoods.
Name the “historical” policies that continue to segregate them to those neighborhoods.
What oppression is occurring, exactly? Be precise. Give examples.
What discrimination is occurring. Be precise. Give examples.
That is, you’re lying.
Michael Brown’s mom needs to get after that black cop in Milwaukee.