D2K: Those Lazy Asses from the AP

If you are a lazy person and have no qualms about lying, the perfect career for you is newswriting for the Associated Press wire service.

That's a strong statement, but it's supported by facts. For example, let's look at the reporting of one particular event during the Democratic National Convention: the Monday night Rage Against the Machine concert outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Nearly every major newspaper in the U.S. carried an article on the event, and nearly every article emphasized the "violence of the protesters."

First, let's get the truth from eyewitnesses. The alternative media heavily covered this event for two reasons: 1) there were a lot of alternative media people in the crowd who witnessed the event first-hand from start to finish, and 2) every single one of them was appalled by what happened. From a number of eyewitness accounts, the event played out as follows.

Rage Against the Machine had finished playing and left the stage, and Ozomatli, a local band with an enormous, local, multi-ethnic fan base, were about three-fourths of the way through their set when police behind the stage seized the sound equipment and turned it off. The crowd responded by chanting, in typical concert fashion: "Leave the power on!" One cop grabbed the only working microphone and told the crowd that the concert was now over and everyone had ten minutes to leave. A crowd of over ten thousand mostly young people were boxed in by steel poles and heavy, 12-feet-high chain link fencing, with only one small exit. It was obviously going to take them longer than ten minutes to leave. Nevertheless, the majority of the crowd moved peacefully for the exit.

According to a correspondent from Alternet, who was standing behind the police lines talking to a police spokesperson, a small group (about 15-20 people) were yelling at police for having stopped the concert. A couple of mostly empty, plastic water bottles were thrown over the fence at the police line. One broke and showered some water on a couple of cops. Police response was vicious and immediate; cops fired dye pellets, rubber bullets, and pepper spray pellets directly into the crowd and hit people who had been peacefully trying to leave. Naturally, the crowd panicked and people began to run. More cops joined in and fired more chemicals and rubber bullets into the crowd.

At that point, police opened up a portion of the chain link fence and cops on horseback began to assail the crowd, driving people back and forth inside the enclosure and beating them with nightsticks. The correspondent from Alternet said that she saw four Hispanic kids, who had been trying to leave, driven up against the chain link fence right in front of her and savagely beaten by mounted police, who had no intention of arresting anybody, breaking up any fights, or "keeping the peace." Clearly, the police were the ones who engaged in violence that evening. In response, concertgoers did the only thing they could do to help themselves flee: they climbed over the fence whereever they could get a foothold--thereby providing the media with pictures often labeled as "protesters trying to get over the fence and assail police." The lesson to be learned from this incident is that the L.A. police are clearly uncomfortable when a bunch of mixed-race youth get together to have some fun, and the LAPD response is sheer brutality. The mainstream press response is to interview the cops and write biased news stories.

If you were reading any of the national papers you would have gotten a completely distorted picture of what happened that night. Our two Seattle newspapers both printed edited versions of an atrocious article written by Anthony Breznican, a stringer for the Associated Press wire service.

Breznican begins his article with pure invention: "Hundreds of demonstrators threw rocks and fired slingshots at police, who answered with pepper spray, rubber bullets, and finally a charge on horseback, as street protests turned violent while President Clinton addressed the Democratic National Convention." Nearly every word is a lie; the crowd was composed not of protesters, but concertgoers, a distinction that even TV correspondents didn't make. No slingshots or rocks were in evidence, and this concert was a legal, permitted event, not a "street protest."

We quickly learn where Breznican got his facts--from police sources: "'Today, tomorrow or the next day, or the next day, or the next week, our response will be exactly the same,'" Cmdr. David Kalish, a police spokesman, told reporters gathered on a downtown street..." The quote underscores the unrepentant and intransigent attitude of the LA Police Department, for whom lies and the use of excessive force are a routine part of the job, as anyone viewing the Rodney King beating or the O.J. Simpson trial can confirm.

Breznican continues with the LAPD version, which he naively accepts as gospel: "The trouble began when about 300 of the approximately 8,000 people who had gathered at an officially designated protest site across from the convention hall began throwing pieces of concrete, water bottles, and other debris over the 12-foot fence at police." Again, he gets it wrong. This was a concert, asshole! The trouble began when the police arbitrarily ended the concert before its scheduled ending time. "Pieces of concrete" and "water bottles" (making it sound like glass was thrown, not plastic) attest to the likelihood that Breznican was spending the evening at the bar in his hotel and only arrived on the scene after the fact.

Breznican makes a wimpy attempt at balance. He has Jesse Jackson weigh in with a quote of "unnecessary brutality," but quickly quotes the cop spokesperson saying it was "a measured, strategic response." Near the very end of the article, in paragraph 15, Breznican finally gets around to quoting one eyewitness, a victim of the police brutality that night. Even so, he frames it as an innocent mistake on the part of police who "reacted" to violent protesters: "But when police reacted to Monday's trouble, some innocent bystanders complained that they were caught in the middle. Among them was Tracy Robson, a public school teacher hit in the right shoulder with a rubber bullet. 'We were walking away with our hands in the air, our backs to police, saying "Please don't shoot," when I was hit,' she said as a fire crew bandaged her back."

Clearly Breznican had an opportunity to find out what really happened from people on the scene at the time, and surely Tracy had more to say. But Breznican chose the police version, and filed a typical AP wire service cop-out story.