December 22, 2014

Even for Fox, this is pretty damned outrageous. The local affiliates tend to be more rational than the national Fox channels, but this is just unthinkable. Via Gawker:

Last night, Baltimore's WBFF aired a video of protesters chanting "kill a cop"– evidence, it claimed, of murderously violent rhetoric on the part of anti-brutality protesters in Washington, D.C. The only problem? The protesters weren't chanting "kill a cop" at all, and there's video evidence to prove it.The current national pastime appears to be constructing elaborate ways of laying responsibility for recent police shootings at the feet of anti-police-brutality protesters. This, of course, is bullshit. Faced with the daunting task of shifting blame for broad and escalating distrust of police away from the murderous bastards themselves and onto mostly non-violent activists, our insanely cynical news media has been forced to dig deep into their bag of tricks.

The rhetorical line has it that the all-too-recent lack of unequivocal support for police actions up to and including the murder of unarmed civilians in broad daylight has put rank-and-file cops at grave risk. Well you can just imagine how much more vulnerable they are when reckless cop-hating rioters take to the streets and actively call for the murder of police! Why, just listen to these hate-mongers!

What you are hearing there is a protester in Washington, D.C. shout the following chant:We can't stop!We won't stop!'til killer cops are in cell blocks!

Not a particularly provocative chant, all things considered: protesters are announcing their intention to continue organizing until murderous police officers are put in jail. Fair enough!

That is, until Baltimore's local FOX affiliate got their hands on this video. Here's their interpretation of it:

We can't stop!We won't stop!So kill a cop!By cutting away from the video mid-chant, FOX's segment paints protestors as explicitly calling for the murder of police. They've depicted a non-violent protest about accountability for police brutality as a bloodthirsty mob.

What's significant about this act – other than the fact that it is intended for and will be gobbled up by psychotic paranoid racist conservative white people as evidence of the inherent criminality of black people – is that the woman leading the chant is Tawanda Jones, the sister of Tyrone West, who was murdered by Baltimore City Police on July 18, 2013. The West family's quest for justice for this crime has been overwhelmingly ignored by the city of Baltimore – after 73 weeks' worth of "West Wednesday" actions, the family has still not even been given Tyrone's full autopsy report.

H/t Nicole Belle.

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