47 officers in the US have been fatally shot in the line of duty this year
The CNN Staff
Updated 5:49 PM ET, Thu December 27, 2018
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/12/us/officer-shooting-deaths-2018-trnd/index.html
We’re old school and watch the CBS Evening News during dinner. And when the lead story a few nights ago was the killing of a California police officer, Corporal Ronil Singh, it struck me as a little odd. Not because the tragedy of an officer being shot and killed in the line of duty is not newsworthy (it is), but because such an event – unfortunately – has not been extraordinarily unusual in 2018, as the CNN summary shows. But when CBS continued to lead the Evening News with this story every night since the shooting — in light of everything else going on in the U.S. and around the world — my cynicism antennae began to twitch.
It turns out the twitching was justified. When sheriff Adam Christianson of Stanislaus County (the county in which officer Singh served) was shown with Donald Trump in a roundtable discussion from last May — during which the sheriff decried “sanctuary cities” relative to illegal immigration — it became clear: this story was a perfect vehicle to advance the right’s anti-immigrant meme, especially during Trump’s government shutdown about the “wall”. Trump is flailing and failing, so it’s time for the media to toss him a lifeline by inflaming and muddying the debate by latching onto this story like a pit bull.
Did the other 46 officers killed during 2018 receive the same degree of media coverage? Heck no.
Why didn’t they? Because their killings did not fit the meme. Ergo, my cynical response to the story.
This kind of selective and sensational coverage by corporate media has its roots in psychological manipulation, and is what helped put Donald Trump in the White House. And if “middle-of-the-road” CBS is covering the story so prominently, how do you think Fox News is presenting the story to Trump’s “base”?
And it once again confirms that “liberal media” is just another psychologically manipulative right-wing canard.