"liberal politicians infantilize and enfeeble the very people they purport to help."

Major News Media is now worse than fake, it is plain dishonest. m/r

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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