Kudos to Digby for pointing to a Washington Post piece by Karen Attiah:
How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in another country
If we talked about what is happening in Minneapolis the same way we talk about events in a foreign country, here’s how the Western media would cover it. The quotes and those “quoted” in the piece below are fictional.
In recent years, the international community has sounded the alarm on the deteriorating political and human rights situation in the United States under the regime of Donald Trump. Now, as the country marks 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, the former British colony finds itself in a downward spiral of ethnic violence. The fatigue and paralysis of the international community are evident in its silence, America experts say.
The country has been rocked by several viral videos depicting extrajudicial executions of black ethnic minorities by state security forces. Uprisings erupted in the northern city of Minneapolis after a video circulated online of the killing of a black man, George Floyd, after being attacked by a security force agent. Trump took to Twitter, calling black protesters “THUGS”’ and threatening to send in military force. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts!” he declared.
Read the whole thing.
If you wake up and don’t recognize the country you’re living in these days, maybe we haven’t been getting the full picture. Or maybe we’d heard for so long about American exceptionalism, we’d stopped looking at the reality that’s now smacking us in the face.
Remember when we were talking about being ‘woke’ before? Seems like instead of being woke, we’re in a nightmare. WTF happened?
Here’s a bit more from Attiah’s ‘report’:
Ethnic violence has plagued the country for generations, and decades ago it captured the attention of the world, but recently the news coverage and concern are waning as there seems to be no end in sight to the oppression. “These are ancient, inexplicable hatreds fueling these ethnic conflicts and inequality," said Andreja Dulic, a foreign correspondent whose knowledge of American English consists of a semester course in college and the occasional session on the Duolingo app. When told the United States is only several hundred years old, he shrugged and said, “In my country, we have structures still from the Roman empire. In their culture, Americans think that a 150-year-old building is ancient history.”
Again, Read the whole thing. It’s brutal.
Some Additional Thoughts...
If America is looking more and more like a failed state, thank the Republican Party and the dark money behind it. (Libertarianism is anarchy for the benefit of rich people.) Like so many other things, look to Ronald Reagan who declared war on government. (And thank the Neo-liberals who bought into the small government rhetoric in a futile attempt to draw votes from Republican supporters.)
Donald Trump is the end stage of the Reagan Revolution. His government IS the problem. He refuses to lead the country. He refuses to use the power of government for the common good. He creates division. He thrives on chaos. The real looting of the country is taking place from the administration. It’s no coincidence that the only government Trump and the GOP are enthusiastic about is the apparatus of force: the police and the military.
For the party of racism, that’s a natural fit when this has been happening for years. If you want to see how that works out, look to where the violence is versus where the police are part of the community, not an occupying army.
Trump’s war on government also extends to war on the press. Eric Boehlert has the details.
Law enforcement’s relentless and widespread show of aggression towards the news media, where some reporters were pepper sprayed point-blank while laying face down, was likely unparalleled in American history. It’s the type of life threatening attacks that reporters usually only face when covering a foreign war zone. But now it's happening in Trump's America.
“By denigrating journalists so often, he has degraded respect for what journalists do and the crucial role they play in a democracy,” said Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, told the Washington's Post's Margaret Sullivan. And that's exactly the goal of authoritarians — to completely degrade the role of the free press.
For decades, conservatives and Republicans badgered the press over hollow claims of "liberal media bias," as a way to work the refs; to intimidate journalists so that next time there's a close call the GOP gets the benefit of the doubt.
What Trump has spent the last five years doing, since he entered the presidential race in June of 2015, is unprecedented — he's trying to strip the press of its legitimacy. He's been running a textbook authoritarian propaganda campaign to destabilize the free press and he's widening his war on the press at a breathtaking pace. Unequivocally targeting journalists as the “enemy of the people,” Trump has signaled to the party and to the larger conservative movement that it’s open season on the news media.
emphasis added
Read the whole thing. Boehlert has a chilling list of attacks on the press to date. There will be more.
And while all this is happening, the coronavirus continues to spread. One in four American workers are unemployed. It’s also the start of hurricane season — climate change has not been on lockdown. The country isn’t the only thing that’s burning; so is the planet. We are running out of time to get our act together. Tick, tick, tick...
Morning in America has become mourning in Amerika.
Remember in November — if we make it that far…