Thread

This one is a little different than usual, but I wanted to break down the news cycle around the police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant.

It might be the worst I’ve ever seen.

A number of outlets rushed to break the news - about a 16 year old girl who was killed by Columbus Police - before we had any details, tying it to the George Floyd verdict.

@nytimes
@washingtonpost
@Slate

Other places raced to get the story out without context, including @BBCWorld, @Newsweek, @Reuters and @thedailybeast, who broke the original story that relied on the account of a relative who proved unreliable.

Then, later that night, the body cam footage of the officer came out. It clearly shows the officer shooting Bryant just as she is about to stab another child.

Stills are below.

At the risk of being uncharitable, it is inconceivable to me that, anything but what the officer did would have resulted in serious harm to or the death of the other girl.

But this point was entirely lost among the reporting and the conversation more broadly.

@NPR’s storytelling here is a classic case of how outlets can set narratives that are too stubborn to yield to updated information.

Look at the number of retweets for the supposed story vs. the updated, more accurate version post-body cam.

Almost a 20x drop-off.

And others included that there was body cam footage but deliberately elide what the video actually shows: a police officer protection a girl who otherwise could well have been killed.

How can @NBCNews, @MSNBC, @Newsweek and @BuzzFeedNews omit this?

I don’t know how you can watch the video and have these be the details that stand out to you if what you’re concerned about is whether or not the officer did the right thing.

@DLamontJenkins
@rolandmcs
@Phil_Lewis_

Other outlets - like @washingtonpost - fell back on the public outrage over the killing.

Is it any surprise that the community is upset when the mainstream media has painted an inaccurate picture of what happened?

Lots of activists jumped on the cause -facts be damned- to push the narrative.

It’s intellectually disingenuous to conflate killing an unarmed civilian & an armed one threatening bodily harm.

When’d that become controversial, @jemelehill, @JamilSmith, @shannonrwatts, @RBReich?

There was also a rush to equate the experience of Bryant with that of Kyle Rittenhouse.

But that doesn’t make sense. This isn’t about apprehending a suspect. It’s about stopping an attempted murder in progress.

@franklinleonard
@SimoneGJohnson
@David_Leavitt

Plenty of people just acted in bad faith. @ProfessorCrunk, @ValerieJarrett, @BreeNewsome & others tried to act like knife fights are a routine part of adolescents.

A 13 year old was stabbed to death by another teen down the street in Cincinnati on Monday. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fox19.com/2021/04/21/they-took-my-baby-parents-say-bullying-led-year-olds-stabbing-death/%3foutputType=amp

And it wasn’t just activists. You had a sitting senator, @SenSherrodBrown, run with this narrative. And @CoriBush in the House.

These are our legislators! Pushing a false story made to look needlessly divisive.

Some people - like Floyd family attorney @AttorneyCrump - just lied about whether or not she was armed.

It’s one thing when activists lie in furtherance of their goals. But when the media is deliberately misleading their audience for the sake of a narrative, it’s an enormous, malignant problem.

@thedailybeast, what’s the goal of this type of reporting? What benefit does the public have from this?

It calls to mind the @KingJames post, which I can’t imagine reading as anything but targeted harassment.

I won’t share the full thing, but when you say “you’re next” and share the image of a police officer in the public crosshairs, how can it be read as anything but a threat?

We’ve got to remember that Ma’Khia Bryant is clearly a victim in all this. Numerous people and systems failed her in her short life to get to this point. That is enormously, irreparably sad.

This thread, about the odds facing kids like Bryant in the foster care system, is depressingly illuminating.

Bryant’s story is tragically familiar. https://twitter.com/jarvis_best/status/1384926645333671939

But suggesting that the problem here is the police is bad faith, as is pretending like any police use of force is illegitimate. This type of push is a recipe for civic disaster (and a world where police forces nationwide see their numbers dwindle dangerously low).

And this isn’t to overlook that we have serious, systemic problems with policing in this country. Many of them intersect with issues of race.

But we aren’t going to get anywhere on any of them by shutting our eyes to the facts of what happened, as @ProfessorCrunk is doing.

We’ve got to tell the truth. Lying to fit the narrative may earn clicks, but it won’t change hearts and minds. And it won’t address the tragedies that led to the death of Ma’Khia Bryant.

And the American people deserve better than to have falsehoods foisted on them by the media.

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