Obama Says Media Ignored Baltimore Until It Started Burning

[Stuart G]

Source: Talking Points Memo

President Obama told reporters at a White House news conference on Tuesday that the media ignored peaceful protests in the city until violence erupted, and gave his views on the broader problems facing American cities.

"Frankly it didn't get that much attention," Obama said of the peaceful movement sparked by the death of black man Freddie Gray, who died in police custody. "One burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again. The thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way, I think, have been lost in the discussion."

The President added that unrest in cities like Baltimore will not go away until solutions are found beyond law enforcement.

"This is not new, and we shouldn't pretend that it's new," he said.

"If we think we're going to send police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there — without as a nation and society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up communities, and give those kids opportunity — then we're not going to solve this problem," he added.



Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/obama-freddie-gray-media-baltimore

[Human101948]

1. Duh! If it bleeds it leads...

And if it burns it earns even more coverage.

Journalism 101

[VWolf]

4. Correction: For-Profit Journalism 101 n/t

[BeyondGeography]

6. Welcome to DU...His job is not to promote shitty "journalism"

Enjoy your tenure.

[Human101948]

20. Well, thanks, I think.....

Sorry, I don't usually use emoticons. I assume that most will understand that as a criticism of current journos. (As a former journalist, I can say that.) I've been around longer that you might deduce.

[BeyondGeography]

22. Happy to stand corrected

You might go with the emoticons until your post count gets a little higher.

Or I might lighten up.

[Human101948]

23. No problem...

I understand that we are all under suspicion until we reach 10,000 or more.

[Fumesucker]

43. Nope, even 10,000 won't clear you from suspicion

You Better Believe It.

And welcome to DU.

[kairos12]

19. And if it thinks, it stinks.

[calimary]

25. Welcome to DU, Human101948!

Glad you're here! And I see farther down the thread that you're one of those who's been around for awhile, just with a low post count.

Well, welcome ANYWAY! I'm a retired reporter and I remember working in one local TV newsroom where the producer had an iron-clad rule: Flames Led. Burning anything - buildings, hillsides, cars, whatever - always topped the newscast. Because of the visuals. Same thing with blood. "If it bleeds, it leads." It's all about pictures when it's television news.

When I was just starting, I started collecting words-to-the-wise from people with whom I worked, because those words-to-the-wise really spelled out, so simply and definitively, the basics of broadcast journalism. Three basic things. You ask yourself...
1) "What happened?"
2) "Who cares?"
and especially in television as opposed to radio - 3) "What do we see?"

And I saw the stupidest, most comparatively minuscule building blaze LEAD the newscast. Because of the visuals. Never mind if there were other things going on locally that were more important. If they didn't have vivid pictures or footage attached, forget it. They didn't lead. Drama was what you were after. And flames trumped pretty much everything.

[Human101948]

45. A belated thanks to you!

Thank you for confirming my impressions of TV news.

[calimary]

47. Well, that's how it was - and is.

How much coverage have you seen of the crowds of locals and neighbors who are out with brooms and trash bags, trying to clean up the mess and restore what was messed up? Where is THAT footage? Maybe an occasional man-on-the-street quickie with somebody talking about how they've been working and everybody got up and went to the torched stores and mopped up and cleaned and tried to clear away the broken glass and begin to fix the windows? Maybe ONE guy or ONE woman. And then the rest of it is the conflict, the fires, the wreckage, the mobs, the police actions, the tear gas and smoke and fire... "Roll tape!" "Can we see that footage again?" "Cue up the video of that (whatever it is) ...!" "Reaction to last night's (whatever it was)..." So all you see are the flames and fires and clips of out-of-control crowds - some of it aerial footage from the station's helicopter circling overhead. Shit - during the L.A. Riots, HOW MANY TIMES did we see reruns of when Reginald Denny was brutalized? HOW many times did we get to live that over, again and again, when Rodney King was beaten and brutalized and the fires and the smoke and the wreckage and the ...

It's somehow exciting. ACTION! DRAMA! MAYHEM! I remember visiting a location where a scene was being shot for some tawdry movie-of-the-week, another crime drama, and the director chuckled between takes - "Mayhem! It's mayhem! We're making mayhem! It's what it is! Mayhem! It's Fun!"

When I was at the AP, I remember the news editor sending the reporter off to Vegas to cover the Consumer Electronics Show - and it was "get the gee-whiz. We wanna see lots of gee-whiz." For print, photo, and broadcast. What do we see? It's a play upon one of what seems to me is basic human nature. In the old real estate commercials it used to be about "lookey-loos." People who'd just come in and look around because they wanted to look around but they weren't in the market actually to buy anything. Consider your average traffic accident. What happens immediately afterwards? People slow up as they drive by so they can ogle. Then you're in some monster traffic jam because all the idiots out there just had to slow down so they could see something. See what? Oh, maybe blood. Carnage. Dismemberment. Stuff you'd actually, instinctively, want to avert your gaze away from. But you've just gotta look. What about the fight on the playground during recess? Suddenly you've got gawker's block there, too - kids crowding around hollering "FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!!!!" Hell, even Chris Matthews does that, professionally! That shameless lummox even admitted it on camera once, as he confessed to some guest - "I like the FIGHT. I want a FIGHT! I like to see the FIGHT!" Like some ten-year-old out on the playground who wants to see the one kid knock the other kid down on the ground and draw blood.

STUPID. SHAMEFUL. EMBARRASSING!!! RIDICULOUS. And feeding the lowest common denominator.

SHIT I wish we could all just grow up a little.

[yeoman6987]

26. Absolutely

No one discusses the good most people do. Only negative. Always been the same and won't ever change especially with 24/7 news.

[Quantess]

40. You said nothing even remotely wrong.

Some people are wound up tightly.

[okaawhatever]

2. Yep Pretty much nailed it. nt

[Stuart G]

3. You are correct, Obama nailed it...nt

[Dont call me Shirley]

5. PO needs to instruct DOJ to begin fixing the systemic problems with the out-of-control cops.

Buckit List.

[Jefferson23]

7. I am so glad he said this, perfect. n/t

[Baitball Blogger]

8. He's right, of course.

As police brutality increased our institutions kept ignoring all the signs that the situation had become intolerable.

[woo me with science]

44. Obama has aggressively expanded police militarization.

Militarization of our police departments is a *bipartisan* effort of corporatists in both parties, right along with mass surveillance, the assaults on journalism, and the persecution of whistleblowers. The programs and legislation that are turning our police departments into paramilitary forces come through Homeland Security and the Pentagon, and are being used to suppress and intimidate dissent, exploit communities, and fill lucrative private prisons with slave labor as the nation is corporatized and Americans are made into a nation of low-paid wage slaves.

Both parties are complicit in this outrage. See the links below. Real change requires pushback against corporate politicians who are enabling this militarization, and that includes both corporate Democrats and Republicans.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

The entire Democratic leadership opposed Grayson amendment to stop arming cops with DOD weapons
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025390424

Police Militarization (including the Obama administration's role)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/06/aclu-police-militarization-swat_n_2813334.html

It's almost certain that if the police agencies cooperate, the ACLU will find that the militarization trend has accelerated since Kraska's studies more than a decade ago. All of the policies, incentives and funding mechanisms that were driving the trend then are still in effect now. And most of them have grown in size and scope.

The George W. Bush administration actually began scaling down the Byrne and COPS programs in the early 2000s, part of a general strategy of leaving law enforcement to states and localities. But the Obama administration has since resurrected both programs. The Byrne program got a $2 billion surge in funding as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, by far the largest budget in the program's 25-year history. Obama also gave the COPS program $1.55 billion that same year, a 250 percent increase over its 2008 budget, and again the largest budget in the program's history. Vice President Joe Biden had championed both programs during his time in the Senate.

The Pentagon's 1033 program has also exploded under Obama. In the program's monthly newsletter (Motto: "From Warfighter to Crimefighter&quot , its director announced in October 2011 that his office had given away a record $500 million in military gear in fiscal year 2011, which he noted, "passes the previous mark by several hundred million dollars." He added, "I believe we can exceed that in FY 12.”

Then there are the Department of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism grants. The Center for Investigative Reporting found in a 2011 investigation that since 2001, DHS has given out more than $34 billion in grants to police departments across the country, many of which have been used to purchase military-grade guns, tanks, armor, and armored personnel carriers. The grants have gone to such unlikely terrorism targets as Fargo, N.D.; Canyon County, Idaho; and Tuscaloosa, Ala.

WOW... Went Looking For Connections Between Ferguson And ALEC... Found This Piece Of The Puzzle...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025413841

The exploitation of Ferguson I: In 2013 the town issued over 24,000 arrest warrants..
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025404667

The exploitation of Ferguson II: The Seamy Underbelly Of Ferguson Starts To Appear
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025416747

The exploitation of Ferguson III: Ferguson Feeds Off the Poor: Three Warrants a Year Per Household
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025428157

The final ACLU report on militarization of police in America
https://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/war-comes-home-excessive-militarization-american-police-report

"Operation Urban Shield"...Training our Police, Fire, First Responders..in Military Tactics
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025412909

[Baitball Blogger]

46. I am aware of it.

Without meaning too, he gave institutionalized racism everything it needed to expose itself as an intolerant, corrupt process.

Anyone that gives a damn about black Americans will fight for this cause. And everyone else should jump in at any moment because these kind of abuses tends to expand.

[redruddyred]

9. this is exactly why this man was elected.

he gets it.
disregarding his disturbing associations w/ sachs, etc, I think he's done a lot of good. maybe that's what he needed to do to win the office.
now let's fix campaign finance.

[candelista]

10. Who ignored Baltimore?

Not just the media. I voted for Obama in 2008 because I thought he might do something for black people. Well, I was naïve.


Baltimore riots, 1968.

http://diy.didiroesmana.com/trends/-riot-in-baltimore

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

13. What did you expect him--BY HIMSELF--to do? Please do tell. And be specific!!

Tired of people expecting Obama to save the world, then shitting on him when he can't cure cancer, eradicate poverty and unemployment, stop drugs and "black-on-black" crime.

[candelista]

14. No, you be specific. Tell me one thing he has done to help black people.

I can't think of any. Everything seems to be for Wall Street.

[renegade000]

21. How about some of the big ticket items:

- Overseeing DOJ inquiries into police misconduct against black communities throughout the country, including Baltimore (as indicated in the remarks of Loretta Lynch -- the first African-American, female head of the DOJ, appointed by Obama). You think a Republican run administration would be doing this?

- Reducing the amount of Americans without health insurance, with the most significant improvements in the hispanic and black communities (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/29/upshot/obamacare-who-was-helped-most.html?_r=0). This is not to mention the subsidies the lower-income members of these communities will be receiving from the ACA for there health insurance.

[Larry Engels]

24. :)

Appointing Holder, and now, Lynch, helped black people? Bwahahahaha!

What the ACA does for black people remains to be seen. They were not the target beneficiaries.

Can't you think of something else? Really!

[jeff47]

29. Wow....I nominate this for dumbest post ever.

Appointing Holder, and now, Lynch, helped black people? Bwahahahaha!

Yes, the appointments themselves were the only thing mentioned. There was no actions.

Oh wait, that was exactly the opposite of the situation.

What the ACA does for black people remains to be seen. They were not the target beneficiaries.

Really? The primary target of the ACA were people too rich for Medicaid, yet too poor to afford their own insurance. That group has a lot more minorities than the overall population. Medicaid expansion is where the vast majority of "newly insured" got coverage.

Can't you think of something else? Really!

Well, you've yet to intelligently respond, so I really don't believe any more "thinking" is required.

[candelista]

34. Wow that's a nasty headline!

Not feeling well?

[jeff47]

35. No, just tired of people vomiting forth chunks of stupid coated in ignorance. (nt)

[candelista]

42. One vile, vicious, headline after another.

What is your problem? And why would anyone pay attention to you? I won't.

[jeff47]

48. So...you don't pay attention by replying twice?

Uh-huh.

Feel free to put me on ignore.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

30. Sure. Ready?

One of the first actions the president took was to address racial disparities in justice system, particularly related to minimum drug sentencing. You see, black and brown folk are disproportionately arrested for (alleged) drug possession at far greater rates than the larger community. Not to mention the unequal weight given to crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine when it comes to sentencing and time spent in jail.

Here's another: Aid to black farmers. Hardly made a blip on the radar, but the president finally began the work to provide aid and recompense to black farmers, especially who are discriminated against and cheated out of their land and money.

Not direct impacts, but HUGE positive outcomes for minorities and the poor - Stimulus package kept the economy from falling apart, with many manufacturing, low- and semi-skilled jobs coming back to the cities; expansion of health care insurance; Executive Order to increase the minimum wage; school loan repayment reform; relief for low-income homeowners. Again, is not a "what has he done for black people," but the impacts of these decisions greatly affect the black community.

Actually, I'm not sure what a "black people" policy is. There are social and economic conditions that disproportionately affect black, brown and poor people. Any remedy or attempt at a remedy, when it is positive, affects these populations in positive ways.

But if you were expecting Obama to swoop down from the sky and cure poverty, unemployment, stop gun violence, and eradicate other social and economic ills that afflict the black community--I'm not sure if you were expecting him or God.

[Cha]

36. You have no credibility with me whatsoever on the President. You're always ignorantly dumping on him

with your cheap pot shots.

But, when it comes to vlad putin.. you're right there protecting him.

[rhett o rick]

11. I am very glad he said that. I hope his DoJ is looking to help out. nm

[Enthusiast]

28. The neighbor's truck was playing a country music station—loud.

The "News" came on. The newscaster said, "Black gangs are planning to unite and attack the police nationwide."

What will come from this misinformation? Will the already idiotic fucking cops become even more trigger happy? The meme is being pushed by right wing media.

[leveymg]

31. There are RW pols and media who want to start a race war.

Now's the perfect time for one to break out, in their demented little heads.

[Enthusiast]

32. This is a bad scene.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

12. I agree with this, but my problem is that he needs to make it plain that the vast majority

of people are protesting in peace, not violence!!! The peaceful protests are being ignored, Mr. President and "White" America!!

[Cha]

37. He did, LS.. Full Transcript..

With respect to Baltimore, let me make a couple of points. First, obviously our thoughts continue to be with the family of Freddie Gray. Understandably, they want answers. And DOJ has opened an investigation. It is working with local law enforcement to find out exactly what happened, and I think there should be full transparency and accountability.

Second, my thoughts are with the police officers who were injured in last night’s disturbances. It underscores that that’s a tough job and we have to keep that in mind, and my hope is that they can heal and get back to work as soon as possible.

Point number three, there’s no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. It is counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting, they’re not making a statement — they’re stealing. When they burn down a building, they’re committing arson. And they’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities that rob jobs and opportunity from people in that area.

So it is entirely appropriate that the mayor of Baltimore, who I spoke to yesterday, and the governor, who I spoke to yesterday, work to stop that kind of senseless violence and destruction. That is not a protest. That is not a statement. It’s people — a handful of people taking advantage of a situation for their own purposes, and they need to be treated as criminals.

Point number four, the violence that happened yesterday distracted from the fact that you had seen multiple days of peaceful protests that were focused on entirely legitimate concerns of these communities in Baltimore, led by clergy and community leaders. And they were constructive and they were thoughtful, and frankly, didn’t get that much attention. And one burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again, and the thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way I think have been lost in the discussion.

The overwhelming majority of the community in Baltimore I think have handled this appropriately, expressing real concern and outrage over the possibility that our laws were not applied evenly in the case of Mr. Gray, and that accountability needs to exist. And I think we have to give them credit. My understanding is, is you’ve got some of the same organizers now going back into these communities to try to clean up in the aftermath of a handful of criminals and thugs who tore up the place. What they were doing, what those community leaders and clergy and others were doing, that is a statement. That’s the kind of organizing that needs to take place if we’re going to tackle this problem. And they deserve credit for it, and we should be lifting them up.

Point number five — and I’ve got six, because this is important. Since Ferguson, and the task force that we put together, we have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals — primarily African American, often poor — in ways that have raised troubling questions. And it comes up, it seems like, once a week now, or once every couple of weeks. And so I think it’s pretty understandable why the leaders of civil rights organizations but, more importantly, moms and dads across the country, might start saying this is a crisis. What I’d say is this has been a slow-rolling crisis. This has been going on for a long time. This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.

The good news is, is that perhaps there’s some newfound awareness because of social media and video cameras and so forth that there are problems and challenges when it comes to how policing and our laws are applied in certain communities, and we have to pay attention to it and respond.

What’s also good news is the task force that was made up of law enforcement and community activists that we brought together here in the White House have come up with very constructive concrete proposals that, if adopted by local communities and by states and by counties, by law enforcement generally, would make a difference. It wouldn’t solve every problem, but would make a concrete difference in rebuilding trust and making sure that the overwhelming majority of effective, honest and fair law enforcement officers, that they’re able to do their job better because it will weed out or retrain or put a stop to those handful who may be not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

Now, the challenge for us as the federal government is, is that we don’t run these police forces. I can’t federalize every police force in the country and force them to retrain. But what I can do is to start working with them collaboratively so that they can begin this process of change themselves.

And coming out of the task force that we put together, we’re now working with local communities. The Department of Justice has just announced a grant program for those jurisdictions that want to purchase body cameras. We are going to be issuing grants for those jurisdictions that are prepared to start trying to implement some of the new training and data collection and other things that can make a difference. And we’re going to keep on working with those local jurisdictions so that they can begin to make the changes that are necessary.

I think it’s going to be important for organizations like the Fraternal Order of Police and other police unions and organization to acknowledge that this is not good for police. We have to own up to the fact that occasionally there are going to be problems here, just as there are in every other occupation. There are some bad politicians who are corrupt. There are folks in the business community or on Wall Street who don’t do the right thing. Well, there’s some police who aren’t doing the right thing. And rather than close ranks, what we’ve seen is a number of thoughtful police chiefs and commissioners and others recognize they got to get their arms around this thing and work together with the community to solve the problem. And we’re committed to facilitating that process.

So the heads of our COPS agency that helps with community policing, they’re already out in Baltimore. Our Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division is already out in Baltimore. But we’re going to be working systematically with every city and jurisdiction around the country to try to help them implement some solutions that we know work.

And I’ll make my final point — I’m sorry, Mr. Prime Minister, but this is a pretty important issue for us.

We can’t just leave this to the police. I think there are police departments that have to do some soul searching. I think there are some communities that have to do some soul searching. But I think we, as a country, have to do some soul searching. This is not new. It’s been going on for decades.

And without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in these communities, what we also know is that if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty; they’ve got parents — often because of substance-abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education themselves — can’t do right by their kids; if it’s more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead, than they go to college. In communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men; communities where there’s no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks — in those environments, if we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem. And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual.

If we are serious about solving this problem, then we’re going to not only have to help the police, we’re going to have to think about what can we do — the rest of us — to make sure that we’re providing early education to these kids; to make sure that we’re reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prisons; so that we’re not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a nonviolent drug offense; that we’re making investments so that they can get the training they need to find jobs. That’s hard. That requires more than just the occasional news report or task force. And there’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now in that.

Now, I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities, and so we’ll try to find areas where we can make a difference around school reform and around job training, and around some investments in infrastructure in these communities trying to attract new businesses in.

But if we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant — and that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped. We’re paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they’re important. And they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence.

That’s how I feel. I think there are a lot of good-meaning people around the country that feel that way. But that kind of political mobilization I think we haven’t seen in quite some time. And what I’ve tried to do is to promote those ideas that would make a difference. But I think we all understand that the politics of that are tough because it’s easy to ignore those problems or to treat them just as a law and order issue, as opposed to a broader social issue.

That was a really long answer, but I felt pretty strongly about it.

http://theobamadiary.com/2015/04/28/the-presidents-remarks-on-baltimore/

[murielm99]

15. That is what we noticed, too.

Peaceful protests are lucky if they get a sixty second segment on the news.

[Tarheel_Dem]

16. And he's exactly right. I just heard the dumbest comment from an NPR host, I think I've ever heard.

He basically says because there's a "black" president, "black" mayor, "black" police chief, "black" a.g., they should be able to fix a decades old system of racism that's built into the very fabric of this country. If only we had known, we could've eliminated racism, inequality, solved the education problem, and the all the rest on Inauguration Day 2009. Oh Happy Day!

[Myrina]

17. When folks realize they've got nothing to lose ... they've got nothing to lose.

Jobs are gone. Education is gone. Healthcare is iffy. Home ownership is a longshot.
Drugs? We got lots of those. Treatment? Notsomuch.
A way to feed your family? $7.25/hr and here's a bus schedule & an application for Food Stamps which just got cut.

So now we're going to harass you, follow you, beat you, hell - kill you - and what are you gonna do about it?

Capitalists are reaping what they've sown.

[Sunlei]

18. President Obama thats why police must be recorded at work 24/7. no recording, no charges!

It is not the medias 'job' to protect citizens from police brutality.

[leveymg]

27. Obama is finally letting out his inner "angry Black man" who tells it like it is.

Interesting timing the skit he performed at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Left the overstuffed audience at the Hilton gape-jawed and confused. Did I really hear and see that? Must have been all the wine, right?

All this proves how hopelessly lost in their champagne bubble the MSM really is. If they can't speak truth about it, it stays ignored until they can't anymore.

[McKim]

33. Yes, Unfortunately the Only Way Black People Get Help is After Riots

Yes, unfortunately, riots are one way for African Americans to get more benefits and programs. After the LA Riots and other riots across the nation in the 1960s we had The War on Poverty. Sadly, this is one way for people who have been marginalized, beaten, murdered,
impoverished and imprisoned to get attention for their difficulties. Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.I feel for the African Americans in Baltimore and I am a white ally to local African American causes.

[NuclearDem]

38. I would say "it bleeds, it leads"

But since nobody gave a shit about Freddy until after the riots started, I think in the case of African American communities it has to be "things burn, heads turn."

[KamaAina]

39. The whole country has by and large ignored Baltimore for many years

except as the set for Homicide and The Wire.

Disclaimer: Native son here.

[romanic]

41. Sad but true.

Riots wiped out the message of the funeral and peaceful protests. I hate that violence and fires in black neighborhoods get attention but not peaceful marches.