[Peace-discuss] Fw: [Announce] The News-Gazette Called in for Damage Control in PoliceShooting

[unionyes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Brian Dolinar 
To: Court Watch 
Sent: Sunday, October 25, 2009 4:51 PM
Subject: [Announce] The News-Gazette Called in for Damage Control in PoliceShooting


>From ucimc.org 

The independent media movement started ten years ago to expose the mainstream media’s thin veil of objectivity. Recent editorials about the police shooting of Kiwane Carrington in the local News-Gazette reveal the newspaper’s role in protecting the police and other powerful interests in Champaign. 

On Thursday, October 22, two days after a heavily attended city council meeting and the day of a planned march, the News-Gazette ran an editorial titled, “An Angry Night at City Hall.” The editors assured readers that the police were in the right the night Kiwane, an unarmed 15 year-old African American youth, was shot and killed. “Circumstances point to an accidental shooting,” the editorial confidently states. Officer Daniel Norbits, it continues, “did not intentionally discharge his service weapon during his struggle with Carrington.” 

How is the News-Gazette so certain that this was an accident? Are the editors privy to information that the rest of us are not given? Is Chief Finney secretly meeting with editors of the News-Gazette? Indeed, as Chief Finney has told me in the past, “I talk to who I want to.”

The Champaign police and local authorities have urged patience. Let the Illinois State Police finish their investigation, they say. Yet the News-Gazette is already drawing conclusions, preparing the public to accept the notion that this was a justified death. 

In another editorial, “Talking Past Each Other?” printed on Sunday, October 25, the News-Gazette dismissed complaints of over-policing in black neighborhoods. It addressed the mass police presence outside of the Champaign police station during the Oct. 22 march. The editors relied on second-hand information from Rev. Jerome Chambers, local head of the NAACP, who admitted he was not even at the march. Chambers claimed he talked to someone who said that during the march the police were carrying rifles. I, who was present at the march, never saw any police with rifles or heard such a rumor. Rather than investigate, the News-Gazette posed the question, “Rifles present? You decide.” 

There were reports that eight to ten police were standing in front of the Champaign police station along First Street and had taped off the sidewalk with yellow tape. As Deputy Chief John Murphy told the News-Gazette, the yellow tape, “wasn’t necessarily as subtle as we would like it to have been.”

Additionally, the News-Gazette editors uncritically accepted the police explanation that more 911 calls come from black neighborhoods. “Police said minority neighborhoods,” they write, “suffer disproportionately from crime and they respond to calls for service. They perceive their effort as trying to help.”

Yet members of CU Citizens for Peace and Justice discovered through a Freedom of Information Act request to METCAD, the police radio service, that this was not true in Champaign-Urbana. In one month of 2006, there were 339 calls from Douglass Park, and 374 calls from Garden Hills, while there were 1,124 that came from campustown along Green Street. 

The local News-Gazette, which has a virtual monopoly of the newspaper market in Champaign-Urbana with a daily circulation of more than 100,000 copies, has one again proven their loyalty to the local power structure. They have rushed to handle damage control for the Champaign police in the indefensible killing of Kiwane Carrington.  

BD
-- 
Brian Dolinar, Ph.D.
303 W. Locust St.
Urbana, IL 61801
briandolinar at gmail.com



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


_______________________________________________
Announce mailing list
Announce at lists.communitycourtwatch.org
http://lists.communitycourtwatch.org/listinfo.cgi/announce-communitycourtwatch.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20091025/8be7c243/attachment.html