Is The Liberal Media of America Really That Liberal? A White Liberal Guys Doesn’t Think So!
The shooting of Ashli Babbitt is one of the wildest videos I will ever see in my lifetime.
And I am someone who’s had the internet available to them his entire adult life.
I’ve seen videos like these guys going to work:
Or this White woman giving this wolf a traditional wolf greeting:
The shocking part of the video showing Ashli Babbitt being shot by Capitol Police isn’t the part where Ashli Babbitt gets shot by Capitol Police, (as I mentioned, I’ve been an adult with the internet for a long time, there are a lot of videos of people dying on it, most are not storming a federal building in America): it’s how violent the mob is and how close they are to breaking down the door that is stopping them from entering a hall that contained access to Senators, Congressmen and women, and the Vice President.
And i’m not seeing it anywhere.
I’ve been watching the news for the last week straight – a week that proved “2020” didn’t happen because of the year 2020 – and I haven’t seen this video more than once:
Why would that be?
The New York Times, bastion of neo-liberalism that it is, did a whole big write up on the terrorist, an article that I swore had the flattering title “Who Was Ashli Babbitt?” (“who-was-ashli-babbitt” is in the url of the screenshot below).
In the now titled “Woman Killed in Capitol Embraced Trump and QAnon” The New York Times shows us the personal side of the suicide stormer, even letting the sister of a seditionist, only 48 hours(?) after the most violent act of sedition in modern American history, give a sympathetic telling of her life story and what “upset” her sister into lynchmobbing (yes, the crowd chanted “hang Pence”, and no, you don’t have to hang someone to death to lynch them) her way through the Capitol Building towards a Senate in session.
“My sister was 35 and served 14 years — to me that’s the majority of your conscious adult life,” said Mr. Witthoeft, of Lakeside, Calif. “If you feel like you gave the majority of your life to your country and you’re not being listened to, that is a hard pill to swallow. That’s why she was upset.”
Same source as NYTimes article linked earlier
I find it hard to imagine a major media outlet in the U.S. doing a write up on the personal life of one of the militants/terrorists who stormed the American compound in Benghazi, an attack that killed less Americans than the attack on the Capitol (the death toll from 1/6 has risen to 6).
Especially not hours after the attack.
And then there’s ABC News.
They decided to disgustingly title their expose on Babbitt, “Rioter fatally shot by Capitol police remembered by grandfather: ‘She was an excellent patriot'”.
Yup, the quote from the grandfather is in the title.
Because you can’t bury the lead and if people don’t know that this woman’s grandfather believed in her right off the bat than are we even doing our jobs as ABC newsmen and women!?
Look, a write up on a terrorist to examine the forces that radicalized them? Great.
Only doing that for white people? Days after they stormed the Capitol Building like the British in 1812? That’s the same white people bullshit (I include myself) that got us here.
Here, in these 3 synced panels, is a document (yes, I’m embedding it multiple times in this article) that shows why use of force was needed: Capitol Police being overrun by a seemingly endless mob of white insurrectionists, their backs against the wall, the mob just about to break through the final barrier in between them and law enforcement.
So if news outlets are really so liberal, why are their write-ups sympathetic to White supremacists?
In all their liberal zeal why aren’t they jumping at the chance to share – repeatedly, ad nauseum – a video showing proof of how violent the attack from right wing extremists on America’s capital was?
Bu-bu-but Both Sides Though!
The headline of this article, whose byline, just underneath, reads, to an onlooker, a very-probably white man’s name, can be taken, on its surface, as a defense of the Right.
I can hear the argument for it now, an argument that could fit under my headline without changing a word,
CNN not constantly re-running the death of Ashli Babbit is proof that the liberal media is exaggerating the American phenomenon of Black men being killed by police!!
Fucking Newsmax next week probably
This argument ignores the irony that, if 1) the liberal media is trying to get people worked up about people of color (primarily, Black men) being murdered by police, and 2) you agree that, to achieve that end, liberal media shares videos of people of color (primarily, Black men) being murdered by police, that 3) you are agreeing that seeing video of people of color (primarily, Black men) being murdered by police is SOMETHING TO GET WORKED UP ABOUT.
Video of people being shot by police is upsetting. But when journalistically important, should be shared.
Seeing people get murdered by police – shot when not posing an imminent threat and knowing that we apply “imminent threat” much more quickly to the actions of people of color (primarily, Black men) – over and over and over and over again, is a lot more complicated.
Or, at least, it should be.
White Man Disclaimer
Sure, this is problematic territory for a white man. And though I think more White males identifying as men should talk about race, I will state what should be obvious: I can only speak from my perspective.
There is a debate about whether the sharing of media which shows the murdering of, primarily, Black men, has any value beyond that of digital lynching souvenirs.
Even if the news media and the millions who share these horrific videos are sincere about their intent to inform, are their efforts getting the desired result? Instead of transforming policing, the ubiquity of these images may be reinforcing pernicious narratives that black lives do not matter, while affirming the actions of people like Amy Cooper and law enforcement officers like Derek Chauvin who killed George Floyd
Melayne Price, for The New York Times
On one hand: seeing is believing.
As a white guy, without these videos I have no idea these routine murders of, primarily, Black men, are happening. It’s not something I’ve ever seen, it hasn’t happened to anyone I now. No one I’ve ever known or met has ever told me one story, even second or third hand, about this happening to someone they know.
Does that mean I should know more Black people? Yes.
Should someone have to hear these things from people of color personally to learn of them? I would hope not, for many reasons.
To quote Ta-Nehisi Coates, also knows as ” to cheat at writing”,
Whiteness thrives in darkness. It has to—because to assert itself in full view, to admit to calling a congresswoman a “fucking bitch” to her face, is to have one’s own “manners and morals” degraded. A thousand Eric Garners will be tolerated, so long as they are strangled to death in the shadows of the American carceral system, the most sprawling gulag known to man.
Vanity Fair
If you think the media isn’t showing the death of Ashli Babbitt because there was “a lot going on that day”, I would argue that I haven’t seen another video – than the one I’m sharing multiple times in this post – that more strongly makes the argument that the storming of America’s Capitol Building on January 6th, 2021 was a violent insurrection.
So, on one hand I agree with Coates: whiteness thrives in darkness.
I know through my own experience that seeing Michael Slager shoot Walter Scott in the back, plain as day, as casual as cruel, had a powerful effect on my understanding of the world.
I also know that I saw the video of Michael Slager murdering Walter Scott as I was getting out of the shower at my gym. In our locker room was a television that, until it quit working, was set to news channels more often than not and was set to a news channel the day that the video of Walter Scott’s murder circulated widely.
I sat there, drying off, getting dressed, combing my hair, watching a Black man get murdered, over and over and over and over…the reporters replaying the act as casually as the police officer committing it.
Stop sharing the videos of George Floyd’s murder !!!! https://t.co/7sMsi4ZoPt
— 𝓺. (@tidalectics) May 26, 2020
How is the systemic not-airing of the death of Ashli Babbitt – with all its journalistic value – anything but proof that repeatedly showing the murders of, primarily, Black men, ad nauseam, is a form of pain porn? Or at the least, born of a toxic mix of indifference and excitability?
Again, Melayne Price,
Why do these videos have to be on a constant loop on every news show and across social media platforms? We are now inundated with footage. I saw a cable news network with multiple screens showing different shootings all at once — a high definition wall of black death. By now, we know the scripts. We are keenly aware of the plot. Even the language has become codified. “I can’t breathe.” “I don’t have a gun.” “You’re going to kill me.
Is the death of Ashli Babbitt’s no-show on the predominantly white, underwhelmingly liberal platforms of CNN and MSNBC not proof that they value White life, at least, differently than black life?
And doesn’t American History 101 tell us that when White people’s lives and Black people’s lives are treated “differently” it usually doesn’t turn out too good for Black people?
That separate has never been equal in America?
What would exempt media outlet’s decision making processes – on which videos to air – from the context of American history?
I started to write a tweet about it, realized that my anger and the complexity of American racial relations wasn’t going to fit in a tweet, than remembered I write a blog every week.
Call A Coup A Coup Even If It Sucks
Yes, it was a coup the way idiots would coup.
It was the Breitbart crowd’s Bay of Pigs. It was the dog catching the car, if the dog killed 6 people in the car; the military equivalent of the blind being led by the cosplaying.
We White people (especially college educated liberals) must fight all temptation to think less of the insurrectionists just because they failed.
To take them lightly would be to take them Whitely (sorry).
To dismiss these clowns as the clowns they are would be to treat the violence of right wing Whites the way their violence has always been treated: minimalized, swept under the rug in White people’s rush to stop feeling uncomfortable, in our reflexive retreat to the blissful ignorance our privilege affords us.
We cannot call these insurrectionists shitty cosplaying pansies who live with their moms and are scared of girls for any other reason than to make them feel stupid.
Right before Babbitt is shot a distinct voice says, “knock it down”, speaking of the door, and later (possibly the same distinct voice) says, indigently, “those are just flash bangs”.
When you bring zip ties and god knows how many guns, when you crush police in doorways as you pepper spray them, calmly telling them to “just drop your gun” and “go home”, implying that your conquering of the American capital is all but complete, when you are violently attempting to stop the counting of the votes of a democratic election you are committing sedition.
One of the craziest aspects – “crazy” in the way that the crashing-waves-culmination of problems resulting from systems bursting at the seams with corruption became blamed on a year, “2020” – is that the shooting of Ashli Babbitt was arguably an appropriate use of force, in that, the officers shot one person instead of shooting into the crowd, one shot that successfully drove the crowd back.
Certainly, Babbitt should not have been able to get that far. And no one but White people would ever be allowed to, but these white terrorists were not going to stop. They were going to “knock it down”.
In Conclusion: Questlove
When people look back on the events of the first full week of they will most likely overlook another event that occurred: a young man being (falsely) accused of stealing a phone, and then assaulted, in a Hotel lobby.
The woman who was caught on video falsely accusing the 14-year-old son of a popular Black musician of cell phone theft has been charged with two counts of attempted assault, New York police said.
The boy’s father, jazz trumpeter Keyon Harrold, posted a video on December 26 taken with his phone that shows the woman making claims against his son at the Arlo SoHo boutique hotel.
“The lady in this video assaulted my 14-year-old son and me as we came down from our room in the @arlohotels Arlo Soho to get breakfast,” Harrold wrote in an Instagram post.
CNN
I will leave Questlove’s response to Gayle King’s interview of Soho Karen via Instagram below, as another argument for the power of sharing media that shows the violent racism Black people in America face everyday, knowing this is not the end of the argument, nor intending it to be, knowing that “I don’t know” but still believing that we White people need to talk about Whiteness, even if clumsily (practice makes perfect), not overly relying on people of color to constantly explain their struggle, to exhaustively dig up their traumas for our benefit, knowing that while we talk amongst ourselves we must also be listening – and be grateful to be listening – when Black men share their experience:
A lot to unpack here w this Mia Ponsetto clip…a lot. She doesn’t call Keyon (Sr or Jr) by name so “the Son” or “the Father” might as well be objects. Almost went the “alone in NYC is scary” route. Then tried the “but I’m 22 & we make mistakes” (the other McDonald’s clip she did the “well I’m Puerto Rican so I can’t be racist” method) or the “I was out of my head” thing, EVEN tried to reframe “I got hurt too” as if there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary of her actions accusing someone of something with zero basis (& the white elephant in the room is she did not answer “why were THEY singled out?” out of everyone encountered)
but that “ENOUGH!”
that right there? THAT’S what make me —-B😡ILING MAD.
It’s only for half a second but it cuts deep. It’s a condescending, rude action that we as black people always have to deal with. @gayleking kinda joked about it but she felt it too.
“ENOUGH!”
It’s no coincidence the unpacking of our lives is going down this way (this instance, the events in dc, the pandemic, BLM, MeToo—-everything that has risen to the surface in the past 5 years——I know a lot of people wanna hang on to the common thread of “this isn’t who we are” or “we are better than this”
A lot of you have to ponder & rephrase it now…
“This is who we’ve been?”
Can you imagine what went unchecked without the cell phone camera? This didn’t just start now….or 2011…..or back in 91 w Rodney King………
This has BEEN going on & no one believed it.
More to come…..🤷🏾♂️
I love how you break things down. Very relatable!