Police arrest Getty photographer Scott Olson in Ferguson.
Olson was covering protests after the shooting death of Mike Brown.
When a federal law enforcement officer
tasered one of Cliven Bundy's sons in the Nevada desert, conservatives agreed: The Bundy Ranch standoff was an enormous story that demanded 24x7 coverage from the media.*
But now that a Ferguson police officer shot and killed an unarmed teenager, conservatives are singing a different tune—they think the media should shut up already. Take New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for example:
Speaking at a town hall in Long Branch, Christie said "TV anchor people ... are making a spectacle" of the police shooting that killed an 18-year-old black teenager and sparked unrest in the Missouri town.
And
conservative pundits too...
...including MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who suggested that [arrested Washington Post reporter Wesley] Lowery should have been more compliant with the demands of law enforcement.
And:
In a post for Hot Air on Tuesday, Noah Rothman argued that “the press is no longer serving as objective chroniclers of the proceedings.”
[...] Matt Lewis, a blogger at The Daily Caller, agreed with Rothman and also wondered about the careerist motivations that might drive some journalists’ coverage.
“[I]f you were an overly-ambitious, and perhaps quixotic, young reporter or blogger,” he wrote, “wouldn’t it make sense to intentionally become part of this sort of story — especially if you thought the risk-reward ratio was favorable.”
There are a million different reasons that's crazy, but here's the most fundamental one: The only reason cops are arresting reporters in Ferguson is that cops there want to arrest reporters. It's not like these reporters are going on looting sprees—they're just doing their jobs. And yes, it's news when reporters get arrested for doing their jobs.
And it's not just the reporters that are getting arrested. When CNN's Jake Tapper reported a couple of nights ago that police in Ferguson were showing excessive force—using miitary-grade semi-automatic weapons to patrol peaceful protests—he was delivering the news, not making it. If you're a conservative and you don't like hearing stories about the police using excessive force, don't blame the people telling those stories: Blame the police using excessive force.
::
*Of course, they shut up once Bundy exposed himself as a hardcore racist, but that's a different story.