Mocking critics have long said the CNN acronym stands for “Communist News Network.” Now they may feel vindicated. In a shocking display of reportage that many observers would characterize as journalistic fraud, the network has been whitewashing Ferguson protester violence. In fact, one New York Post writer minces no words when describing CNN’s “coverage” of the Missouri riots: Its reporters are simply “lying when they say Ferguson protests were ‘peaceful,’” she says.
Naomi Schaefer Riley opens her Post article writing, “Here’s a quiz for you folks in the media: What happens if you’re out doing ‘man on the street’ interviews but none of the men on the street fits your ‘narrative’?
If you’re CNN, you stop interviewing them.”
“Narrative,” by the way, has become a popular word the last several years. It means “story.” And you’ll hear things such as “That’s the narrative the party is trying to advance” or “His claim just doesn’t fit the narrative.” In CNN’s case, says Riley, the truth doesn’t fit its narrative.
So you get everything but the truth. CNN claims that “‘most people here [in Ferguson]’ are ‘peaceful protesters,’” writes Riley, but the network can’t seem to find any actual peaceful protesters to interview. So it instead relies on “expert” interviewees such as religious leaders to explain how a riot is actually a protest and what its true message is. Never mind that the CNN crews have often seemed to have trouble even finding a peaceful spot among the protesters to conduct their interviews. And when a car is aflame behind the professional spokesman for “the (peaceful) cause,” it does sort of detract from the “narrative.”
As to this, Riley relates a true Wizard of Oz, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” incident:
On Tuesday night, CNN correspondent Jason Carroll was reporting, “Most of the protesting we saw in front of the Ferguson Police Department tonight was peaceful.” Then as he started trying to explain the fires burning behind him, he was approached by three of the protesters, who proceeded to get in his face and yell at him because he was promoting a “certain narrative” — the police narrative. “You don’t understand!” one screamed.
Anchor Don Lemon quickly went elsewhere, saying he was worried about Carroll’s safety. When Lemon returned to Carroll later in the broadcast and asked him what the men were saying to him, Carroll refused to say. The reporter was stonewalling because, he explained, these men didn’t “represent” the peaceful protesters who were really the story.
Neither did the “knuckleheads.” That’s how CNN correspondent Van Jones — the ex-Obama administration “green czar” who once called himself a “communist” — described the arsonists, vandals, rioters, and other assorted miscreants who have lit Ferguson on fire. As Riley put it, he urged the audience to ignore the “‘few knuckleheads’ who later became a ‘bunch of knuckleheads’ who ‘started a bunch of nonsense.’” Of course, some of these knuckleheads have torched dozens of buildings and at least as many cars; other knuckleheads have smashed windows and attacked people, including an infirmed elderly man with oxygen tanks; and another knucklehead murdered 20-year-old DeAndre Joshua assassination-style.
Further attesting to CNN’s bias, Riley points out that while the network was eager to broadcast the Brown family’s earlier call for peaceful protests, its “experts” questioned whether Brown’s stepfather’s act of standing on a car and screaming “Burn this b**** down!” was newsworthy. Some might say they cannot imagine anything more newsworthy, yet this example of a double standard has a lot of competition. The media couldn’t give enough ink to the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by community watchman George Zimmerman, with NBC even doctoring a 911 audio to make Zimmerman appear a bigot and stoke racial unrest. Yet when a black man named Roderick Scott shot unarmed 17-year-old white teen Chris Cervini to death in 2009 in Greece, N.Y., and was later acquitted of all charges, the media was wholly uninterested; it didn’t matter that, unlike with Zimmerman, Scott was a martial-arts competitor built like a linebacker and admits Cervini never laid a hand on him (this isn’t to imply the jury verdict was wrong).
Then there are the continual attacks on whites by black mobs, universally ignored by national media, which are well documented by author Colin Flaherty in his book White Girl Bleed a Lot.
Of course, CNN isn’t the only station peddling Ferguson falsities. One example from just yesterday involved pundit Rich Lowry on Meet the Press. As American Thinker’s Carol Brown describes the appearance, “Other than Lowry, the [TV] panel consisted entirely of liberals. (I guess he was the token non-progressive-communist-liberal-Democrat that these panels sometimes feature to make themselves feel like they’re fair and balanced….)” And here were some of Lowry’s comments:
[L]et’s not pretend this particular incident [Michael Brown’s death] was something it wasn’t. If you look at the most credible evidence, the lessons are really basic: Don’t rob a convenience store. Don’t fight with a policeman when he stops you and try to take his gun. And when he yells at you to stop with his gun drawn, just stop.
At this point, fellow panelist Andrea Mitchell cut in, exclaiming “Whoa!” As Brown put it:
Before Lowry got to the end of his statement, everyone on the panel started making faces, interrupting, waving their arms around, and nearly jumping out of their chairs.
It was just that hard for them to hear the truth.
The truth. The narrative. More and more the media are giving us the latter. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain — even though he tells the tale. As Riley advised, press the TV’s mute button and block out the narrative. The Ferguson images tell you what really happened.
Photo: AP Images
