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Why we chose not to air an @NPR piece about the New Mexico Civil Guard, and to instead run an interview with a Native American scholar about media coverage of the militia group + context about White vigilante violence in NM... a thread. https://www.kunm.org/post/dont-try-humanize-fascism-view-media-coverage-militiamen
(full transparency: veteran reporter @radiomarisa is the brains behind this idea and the reasoning that I'll lay out. I fully agree, and made the call as news director.) 2/
First off, you can still read & hear the NPR story by John Burnett, a longtime correspondent for them in Austin. NPR also tapped him for an interview about the shooting the day after, tho he was not present. @KUNMnews reporters were. 3/ https://www.npr.org/2020/07/06/886586653/new-mexico-leaders-to-militia-if-you-want-to-help-community-stop-showing-up-arme
Not being here, @radiobigtex gets some details wrong. There were definitely not "300 angry protestors" near the statue. We estimated 50-100. We're not clear that police watched "from afar," as he says. Also, we've never heard anyone local refer to this as the "Old Town melee." 4/
to be clear, Marisa and I were both present at the June 15 protest and shooting. We saw how national media the next day repeated police misinformation & glossed over their militarized tactics on the unarmed crowd. I pitched @NPR a follow-up interview with me. They rejected it. 5/
Burnett's story also lacks context. About the shooting: people aren't just asking why police didn't intervene earlier, they're asking why they treated the crowd as hostiles instead of witnesses, using chem weapons & less-lethal rounds. & being rough/rude to victims' parents. 6/
About armed militias in NM: They've been antagonizing protestors since June 1. NMCG threatened to protest at both Red Nation & KUNM offices after our 1st story aired. Marisa, who waited at the station with a recorder, felt it was an attempt to intimidate us out of reporting. 7/
A key story for us, for weeks, has been to what extent militia groups are connected to law enforcement (story below). The @ABQJournal reported that Civil Guard members include police and corrections offices. Burnett doesn't mention any of this. 8/ https://www.kunm.org/post/armed-civilian-groups-patrol-abq-protests-raising-questions-coordination-police
Burnett's story is an example of what goes wrong with "helicopter" or "parachute" journalism, which @NPR engages in all the time. We didn't feel it added anything to our prior coverage of militia groups including the Civil Guard, which you'll find here: https://www.kunm.org/term/militia
The story allows militia members to deflect claims of racism by pointing to their new Brown member, a tactic @radiomarisa points out is exploitative at best, and also often racist. In considering whether NMCG's leader is racist, it fails to mention he has a swastika tattoo. 10/
OK and on top of issues with his reporting on this story... John Burnett was called out last week by a former colleague at @KUT for making racist comments. No accountability, no apology, she says. 11/ https://twitter.com/DaLyahJ/status/1276209236012347403
He was also called out for seemingly poaching another journalists' story about immigrant detention centers, back in 2017. https://twitter.com/brendapsalinas/status/1276256156030242823
While in ABQ, Burnett also interviewed UNM Native American Studies professor @melanie_yazzie about the Oñate statue. She told us his Qs were uninformed & racist, he cut her off, ended early, and his behavior toward her was overall disrespectful. 13/
That's not why I asked Yazzie to interview about the Civil Guard coverage. She's an expert on Native American history in NM, co-founder of The Red Nation that's been targeted by militia groups, was involved in protests that NMCG has patrolled... 14/
...and the history she mentions, about White vigilante violence against Native Americans in SW border towns, is a crucial part of understanding why the threat of violence from these armed militia groups is so real and frightening here. 15/15
*the threat of violence is so real for Brown and Black folks, specifically. who, as @radiomarisa pointed out, were almost entirely left out of that NPR story.
