Keep Watching the News, But Be Very Skeptical of Everything You Are Told
By Jack Dunphy May 21, 2017
It took a few years of police work to turn me into a discerning consumer of news. My family had subscribed to the Los Angeles Times
as I grew up, a practice I continued as I went off to college and later
joined the Los Angeles Police Department. The paper’s left-of-center
leanings didn’t much concern me at the time as I, after coming of age in
the days of Watergate and President Nixon’s downfall, and after being
indoctrinated at a Jesuit high school and in college, shared many of
these same leanings.
Then I
became a cop, a job that offered an unequaled view of the many ways
liberal politicians infantilize and enfeeble the very people they
purport to help. It was on this Road to Damascus journey that I also
learned to read and watch the news with a critical eye. I was working in
South Central L.A. in a time of escalating gang violence, and even as
it reached horrific levels it was largely ignored by the Los Angeles Times
and other local media. And when crime was covered, it was most often in
a way that made the police seem at least as responsible as the
criminals for what ailed the city.
This was especially so in the Los Angeles Times,
whose reporters and editors – even its editorial cartoonist – seemed to
harbor a grudge against the police in general, the LAPD in particular,
and police chief Daryl Gates most of all. I found that as I read the Times’s
stories about the LAPD, the facts were invariably presented in a light
that was more favorable to police critics than the police themselves. If
any nuance was implied, the benefit of the doubt was always given to
the crooks, never to the cops. This was most obvious to me when I read
stories about incidents in which I had been involved. I once watched a Times
reporter working through the crowd that had gathered after a racially
charged incident in South Central L.A. Though I was within earshot as
she interviewed people who expressed reasonable opinions on what had
happened, when the story appeared the next day it was the loudest, most
obnoxious, and most ignorant voice in the crowd who was quoted. The
story itself wasn’t false, or “fake news” in today’s parlance, but it
was incomplete, presenting only one version of events when others had
been given to the reporter. This could only have been by design.
It has been with this experience in mind that I have read newspapers and watched television news ever since.
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