Media successfully spark more riots, even though no one is sure what really happened in Charlotte

Here was the first thing you heard from every journalist rushing to be among the first to tell the story. "Police shoot unarmed black man." Then there were other early-emerging stories, like the one that claimed the "unarmed black man" was retreating and had his hands up, but they shot him anyway. You know the media. This is what they're hearing, it fits their narrative of racist killer cops, and more importantly, it will bring about the one thing they want more than anything else in this world: Race riots! So off they go with the early reporting. Never mind the cops' side of the story. Never mind if those first things you heard turned out to be true. Run with it first and keep an eye on where things go.

We see where they've gone:

The demonstrations began peacefully, with some people chanting “black lives matter” and “hands up, don’t shoot.” News reports and posts on social media later showed police in riot gear firing tear gas and rubber bullets at the demonstrators and some people smashing out the windows of police cars. Early Wednesday morning, protesters shut down traffic on Interstate 85. Some protesters opened up the backs of tractor trailers, took out boxes and set them on fire in the middle of the highway, WSOC reported. The station spoke to one truck driver who said people stole cargo from her trailer. Police reportedly used flash grenades to break up the crowd and had cleared the highway by early morning. A few dozen other people broke down the doors of a nearby Walmart, then disbursed when police arrived, according to WSOC. Police said 12 officers were injured during the demonstrations, one of them hit in the face with a rock. At least 11 people were taken from the demonstrations and treated for non-life threatening injuries, hospital officials told WSOC.

Way to go, media. You just sent 12 cops and 11 other people to the hospital. Jerks. But there's more to the story, which I'm excerpting from the Washington Post, and it shows just why the media need to stop jumping so quickly on the racist-white-cops-kill-unarmed-black-man narrative when they don't really know if that's what happened:

Officers were looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant at a complex near the University of North Carolina on Tuesday afternoon, when they found Scott, 43, sitting a vehicle in the parking lot, police said in a statement. Scott, who was not the suspect they were seeking, got out of the car holding a “firearm,” then got back in the car, according to police. As officers approached, Scott again emerged from the car with the firearm and “posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject,” police said. The officer who shot Scott is also black, police told The Washington Post.

So was Scott armed or not? And if he got out of the car, why did he get back in? Was he told not to get out in the first place? Was he given specific orders he did not follow? You might remember that some weeks back I also had an encounter with the police, and it was similar in that they were looking for someone and they thought I might be the guy, but it turned out I wasn't. My experience that day was that, regardless of whether you're guilty or innocent, they're going to give you very specific instructions and you'd better follow them. When they tell you not to put your hands in a certain place, that's actually for your own protection because they don't want to have to react even to the hint of a threat. That doesn't necessarily mean the police did everything right in Charlotte, or that Scott did anything wrong. It just means that we need answers to all these questions before we start calling it some sort of racial incident or anything else. But the media never wait to get that information. At the first hint of an incident that might fit their narrative, they just run with it, and the next thing you know people are going to hospitals with riot injuries. Let there be no doubt: These riots are caused by the news media, who are irresponsibly feeding a largely false narrative about racist thug cops shooting black people for no reason. And even though there may be isolated incidents in which this does happen, they are in no way indicative of the larger law enforcement or criminal justice system. But every time one of these jump-the-gun stories is published, it feeds the delusions of the Colin Kaepernicks of the world who take every single one of them as gospel fact, and indict the entire nation as a result. I hate the media. They are intentionally stirring up violence and racial strife. The day cannot come soon enough when every single of them goes out of business because Americans neither trust nor bother with them anymore.

Dan Calabrese——Bio and Archives

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