Mediawatch's weekly catch-up with Lately. This week Colin talks to Karyn Hay about reporters caught in the crossfire and others copping blowback from the upheaval in the US - and musical echoes of flashpoints in the past.
Reporters cop it from US cops
Linda Turado in hospital after a rubber bullet hit her in the eye Photo: screenshot / Twitter
Journalists covering the US protests have been targeted by militarised police officers and the actual military police - and the protesters themselves.
Across the US journalists have been targeted by police, faced arrest, detention, and violence, including being pepper sprayed and shot by rubber bullets.
One of the headline-grabbing cases was freelance journalist Linda Tirado struck in the left eye by a rubber bullet fired by police in Minneapolis.
She had to be helped to the hospital by strangers in the crowd and now has a difficult recovery ahead and not being able to work.
She later told BBC World News she wouldn't let the injury stop her from telling people's stories.
She has an interesting backstory when it comes to overcoming adversity in journalism.
Back in 2013, she wrote a long comment on now-defunct website Gawker which went viral - and later became an essay she wrote about the effects of poverty.
“I was trying to explain, on a human level, how it is that people make what look from the outside like awful decisions,” she said in it.
One was not having dental surgery she could not afford after she was hit by a drunk driver years earlier - and her damaged teeth held her back getting good jobs, she believes.
She asked for money for that online, and to turn it into a book and “speak about this in any medium or venue that I can access . . . at every opportunity.”
Linda Tirado in 2014. Photo: screenshot
She raised more than $60k on GoFundMe platform in 2014. The book is Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America.
The Huffington Post dubbed her the “woman who accidentally explained poverty to the nation” but she got a lot of online hate and scepticism about whether she was genuinely poverty-stricken.
Time called it ”impressionistic rather than strictly factual” - and she herself acknowledged she’d “had many privileges as well as many bad breaks.”
But that was really the point of her story - how you can fall from middle-lass to under-class in the US when your supports fall away.
“The idea that she’s been running a scam that others have uncovered is absurd,” The Nation magazine concluded in a 2013 profile of her called Linda Tirado Is Not a Hoax.
Now she is in need of help again, but so far, a crowdfunding effort on the same online platform has raised only $750 of the hoped-for $30,000.
Disappointing - considering the amount of coverage her injury and her plight has received.
(BTW: good short fact-check / background on rubber bullets here)
Taika's take triggers weak stories
One of the most-shared viral videos from the news was an impassioned impromptu plea for calm carried live on TV in Atlanta from activist rapper and and civic leader Killer Mike.
He urges angry people not to “burn your house down” but to “plan and strategise” politically.
When Taika Waititi shared it on Twitter and urged people to listen to it all, some responded by saying he had no place telling black people how to respond (which he did not do).
Predictably, local news sites ran stories like Taika Waititi brutally criticised for 'policing' black people's anger- and also the Independent in the UK.
Echoes of the time he once told an overseas music reporter New Zealand was “racist as f***” - and anyone from the PM down who asked to comment on it was then described as “wading into the controversy.”
At the time it took four days for people to notice he’d made the supposedly outrageous comment - and there was no outcry when he said the same thing (less crudely) in a popular local documentary movie two years earlier.
Photo: screenshot
Stuff’s story this week on Taika's tweet - with no byline - did at least run a few quotes from the speech to add a little context.
Another interesting take on Killer Mike's speech came from an Irish economist in The David McWilliams Podcast.
"When Rappers deploy the language of Presidents and Presidents deploy the language of Rappers - lootin' and shootin’ , you know America is in trouble."
Musical echoes of past racial strife
Last Sunday the escalation of the BLM protests coincided with the SpaceX launch in Florida, attended by Trump and Pence with lots of patriotic flag-waving.
There was a hilarious moment when Fox news reporter / cheerleader reporter back in Washington was trying to introduce a recorded bit of Trump speaking - but it didn’t play back in the studio and in the silence you could hear the protesters in DC chanting “I can’t breathe.”
The coincidence of the rocket launch and the protests made me think of the musical poem Whitey on the Moon by Gil Scott Heron in 1970, highlighting billions in taxes spent on moon missions while urgent social needs went unmet in the US.
I wasn’t the only one.
Guardian correspondent in Washington David Smith made the same parallel in a piece called Trump wants America looking at the stars as he drags it through the gutter
“Civil rights protesters marched on Cape Kennedy, as it was then, on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, arguing that the vast sums spent on the space program could lift millions of African Americans out of poverty. The musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron’s Whitey on the Moon highlighted the disparity.”
Another one to make the same musical comparison was James Pethokoukis, editor website of the pro-free enterprise American Enterprise Foundation
“When a newsy space launch happens at the same time as historic civil unrest, people are bound to ask if the former is, at best, an unhelpful distraction from the latter. That certainly was the case in the 1960s with the Apollo program and those billions being spent on the space race,” he wrote.
But under the headline It's OK to be thrilled about that SpaceX launch he said “a thriving space commerce sector, something only markets can bring to fruition . . . (and) is another small step to a more prosperous tomorrow.”
James is not so thrilled now.
"I feel modestly less confident in this headline than I did 2 hours ago," he tweeted after watching the protests intensify on Sunday.
Since then he has tweeted and retweeted a steady stream of stuff critical of Trump's handling of all this and the damage it is doing - including video of that Channel 7 Australia crew getting beaten up by the cops in the weekend:
“Here’s how this scene was viewed live in Australia. One of America’s closest and most dependable allies. I’m speechless,“ he said.
Music blog the listening post also highlighted Whitey on the Moon as a song for today - and a Marvin Gaye song called Inner City Blues on the 1971 album What’s Going On?
"Crime is increasing / Trigger happy policing / Panic is spreading / God know where we're heading / Oh, make me wanna holler . . . "
The closes the album “What’s Going On?” hailed for capturing the turmoil of the time in America.
On his podcast this week David McWilliams - the Irish economist - said the album echoes what's happening today 50 year later.
He goes on to discuss the moment in history we are in now - potential for political and economic reset and a better life.
He says we’re becoming aware of things we don’t need anymore like pricey commercial property - and Trump.
Tweet of the day . . .
from Newsroom's Lynn Grieveson - who takes great photos:
Challenging to photograph The Outdoors Party rally speech about the tyranny of 5G and cell towers manoeuvring around all the party supporters live-streaming it on their cellphones ♀️♀️♀️
— Lynn Grieveson (@LynnGrieveson) June 3, 2020
