An article of mine on how the news media is whitewashing the Air Marshals shooting last week of Rigoberto Alpizar was posted today by Editor and Publisher
The final paragraph: Perhaps if Alpizar had regularly attended Georgetown dinner parties, the media would show more curiosity about his fate. In the old days, Americans were taught that the media would serve as a check and a balance on government powers. The same media docility that helped the Bush administration sell the war in Iraq is still there, now serving Leviathan on the homefront.
Reason Online also posted a slightly shorter version of the piece (which includes links to many of the newspaper editorials quoted).
Media coverups of government abuses is a key theme of Attention Deficit Democracy.
James, I saw your article in Reason. Good job. I was listening to NPR’s report hours after this incident, and I was infuriated by NPR’s willingness to accept the government’s word that Alpizar said he had a bomb as fact without any independent verification, when there’s an obvious motive to lie. You easily could have included NPR reporter Eric Weiner’s gullible reporting in your article. This is what Weiner said when recapping the events that lead to Alpizar’s shooting on All Things Considered: “They were reboarding the flight, it was continuing to Orlando. That’s when federal Air Marshalls confronted this man. He was acting suspiciously, he claimed to have a bomb, Federal Air Marshalls told him to get on the ground. He did not comply”[italics added].
Here’s a link to Weiner’s NPR interview.
I also added a section about Weiner’s statements to the Alpizar Wikipedia entry.
James, if you write another article about Alpizar’s murder, could you please expose this Eric Weiner clown as the government shill that he is?
What more can you expect from perky Ken and Barbie doll journalism? No bomb afterall? That was yesterday’s story.