Mainstream Media Is Spreading Lies About Palestine Protests
Rather than acting as a check on the powerful, media outlets like CNN and MSNBC are allowing police to give their interpretation of student Palestine protests with few challenges, even in cases where police are blatantly lying or distorting the truth.
Police storm the UCLA pro-Palestine encampment on May 2, 2024, in Los Angeles, California. (Etienne Laurent / AFP via Getty Images)
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During the summer of protests that followed the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, journalists and readers alike began taking a hard look at how much news reporting relied on police sources. In particular, the standard use of “police said” articles — where the main or only source of information came from law enforcement — was leading the media to publish information that was outright wrong.
In their first media statement on Floyd’s death, Minneapolis police claimed that officers had observed Floyd “suffering medical distress and called for an ambulance”; it was only when cell phone video emerged that it was reported that police were in fact kneeling on Floyd’s neck at the time. To many, it was all too familiar a pattern: five years earlier, the Baltimore Sun had based its reporting on the police killing of Freddie Gray almost entirely on official police statements, downplaying eyewitness reports that officers had thrown Gray headfirst into a van shortly before he died of neck injuries.
