HIghly disturbing behavior by newspaper and Live TV sources in complying with the San Bernardino Sheriffs.
At approximately 7 PM ET, I listened through a police scanner as San
Bernardino Sheriffs gave the order to burn down the cabin where
suspected murderer Christopher Dorner was allegedly hiding. Deputies
were maneuvering a remote controlled demolition vehicle to the base of
the cabin, using it to tear down the walls of the cabin where Dorner was
hiding, and peering inside.
In an initial dispatch, a deputy reported seeing “blood spatter”
inside the cabins. Dorner, who had just engaged in a firefight with
deputies that killed one officer and wounded another, may have been
wounded in the exchange. There was no sign of his presence, let alone
his resistance, according to police dispatches.
It was then that the deputies decided to burn the cabin down.
“We’re gonna go ahead with the plan with the burner,” one sheriff’s
deputy told another. “Like we talked about.” Minutes later, another
deputy’s voice crackled across the radio: “The burner’s deployed and we
have a fire.”
Read on...
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Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
AlterNet's Top Ten Most Popular Stories of the Year
From the dumb things Americans believe to the weirdest things women do to their vaginas.
Below, we've assembled the 10 most popular stories of the year; the articles you read, emailed, and sent flying around the Internet. They cover topics ranging from the bizarre and scary to the hilarious — from the dumb things Americans believe to the weird things women do to their vaginas.
I think Crimbrary posted a couple of these during the year. Tom
Get Angry: The Year’s 10 Best Political Docs
From Eliot Spitzer to Daniel Ellsberg , documentary filmmakers didn’t lack engrossing subjects this year
Thanks largely to personal technology and its discontents, we’re living through a renaissance of activist filmmaking—never before in the history of popular media have nonfiction films been so convenient to execute, so inexpensive to finance and so easy to distribute. Every year oodles and oodles of angry political essay-films come out now, in theaters and/or on DVD and streaming services, on every subject from war to Wall Street to industrial pollution, and no viewer can be blamed for feeling like a drowner in a sea of outrage. But you need see only 10—the best political docs of 2010.
• Inside Job (Sony) As thorough and well-researched and absolutely enraging an explication of the financial meltdown as we’re likely to get (since that seeming obligatory tsunami of thousand-page Grand Jury indictments will never be written), Charles Ferguson’s film is one of several Wall Street exposé docs this year. But it’s the one that needs to be seen, preferably with an Ativan.
•Casino Jack and the United States of Money (Magnolia) Alex Gibney’s portrait of the felon-lobbyist is a lively, action-packed evidentiary affair, and if you didn’t quite understand what Abramoff did when his name hit the headlines in 2006, here’s where you’ll get it all straight. Which is what you should do, because the man’s outrageous career of graft, extortion, fraud, money laundering and possibly murder reveals the essential amorality of our federal circus so clearly that any withering hope you held that we lived in a democracy worthy of the word will be squashed.
I haven't seen any of these yet. But I did get The Most Dangerous Man in America for xmas. Tom
Feds Wanted Private Data on All Visitors to Liberal News Site
By Daniel Tencer, Raw Story. Posted November 11, 2009.
A Justice Department subpoena requesting information on visitors to an independent news site is raising serious privacy concerns.
A Justice Department subpoena requesting information on visitors to an independent news site is raising serious privacy concerns.
A Justice Department subpoena requesting all available information on all visitors to an independent news site is raising serious privacy concerns, and questions about how much information the US government is storing about its citizens' news reading habits.
Privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation has released an extensive report on a "bogus" attempt by a US attorney in Indiana to get Indymedia.us, an independent left-leaning news site, to hand over all the data it had about all the users who visited the site on a particular day.
Further adding to civil libertarians' and privacy watchdogs' concerns is the fact that the Justice Department ordered Indymedia to keep silent about the request.
And have the feds requested any data from any conservative, rightwing hate sites? Tom
Did Paranoid Right-Wing Media Fuel the Pittsburgh Cop Killer's Rage?
By Max Blumenthal, The Daily Beast. Posted April 8, 2009.
Richard Poplawski, the man who allegedly murdered three Pittsburgh cops, was clearly influenced by Fox News's Glenn Beck and right-wing radio.
On April 6, two days after the 22-year-old Richard Poplawski allegedly murdered three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a radio host named Alex Jones settled in before a microphone in his studio in Austin, Texas to do some damage control. "The mainstream media has certainly enjoyed tying me into this story," Jones complained. "They're attacking me and saying I'm delusional and there's no New World Order The Second Amendment, what the country's founded on--it's all my fault!"
Read on...
Richard Poplawski, the man who allegedly murdered three Pittsburgh cops, was clearly influenced by Fox News's Glenn Beck and right-wing radio.
On April 6, two days after the 22-year-old Richard Poplawski allegedly murdered three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a radio host named Alex Jones settled in before a microphone in his studio in Austin, Texas to do some damage control. "The mainstream media has certainly enjoyed tying me into this story," Jones complained. "They're attacking me and saying I'm delusional and there's no New World Order The Second Amendment, what the country's founded on--it's all my fault!"
Read on...
There Will Always Be Blood: True Crime Writing
By Lorna Scott Fox
March 18, 2009
Who reads stories of true crime? One imagines a furtive audience of sad saps and sadists, trench-coated lurkers and wan shut-ins. Friends reacted with funny looks when I tried to share my pleasure in True Crime: An American Anthology, forcing me to offer a defensive recital of the names on the back cover. Who writes them, then? Bloody deeds are as American as Jesus or money, and often connected to both. Yet it comes as a surprise that so many notable Americans--most, but not all, best known for their fiction--were apprenticed in murder reportage or cultivated a thoughtful sideline in the subject. Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, even José Martí grace the first third of this anthology of fifty pieces. The roster of writers from the twentieth century includes H.L. Mencken, James Thurber and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as Truman Capote and James Ellroy, amid fascinating pros and hacks, forgotten "murder fanciers" and brilliant dabblers.
Thus the charm of the book is that it appeals to both the culture vulture and the plain old vulture in us, while constructing an oblique, perverse history of America. From the day in 1630 when Pilgrim Father John Billington was regretfully hanged for murder so that the new land of Plimoth Plantation could "be purged from blood," blood continued to be spilled in lavish quantities. Observers recorded the spillage from every angle, and the public lapped it up. The collective guilt that cements this ritual is summed up by editor Harold Schechter in his introduction. As Plato, Freud and Durkheim agreed (although one may feel it still hasn't sunk in), "violent lawbreakers make it possible for the rest of us to adapt to the demands of normality by acting out, and being punished for, our own unacknowledged impulses." For catharsis to occur, society needs to read all about it. Here is some of the best that was ever read, in one thick hardcover tome you could brain someone with.
Read on...
March 18, 2009
Who reads stories of true crime? One imagines a furtive audience of sad saps and sadists, trench-coated lurkers and wan shut-ins. Friends reacted with funny looks when I tried to share my pleasure in True Crime: An American Anthology, forcing me to offer a defensive recital of the names on the back cover. Who writes them, then? Bloody deeds are as American as Jesus or money, and often connected to both. Yet it comes as a surprise that so many notable Americans--most, but not all, best known for their fiction--were apprenticed in murder reportage or cultivated a thoughtful sideline in the subject. Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, even José Martí grace the first third of this anthology of fifty pieces. The roster of writers from the twentieth century includes H.L. Mencken, James Thurber and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as Truman Capote and James Ellroy, amid fascinating pros and hacks, forgotten "murder fanciers" and brilliant dabblers.
Thus the charm of the book is that it appeals to both the culture vulture and the plain old vulture in us, while constructing an oblique, perverse history of America. From the day in 1630 when Pilgrim Father John Billington was regretfully hanged for murder so that the new land of Plimoth Plantation could "be purged from blood," blood continued to be spilled in lavish quantities. Observers recorded the spillage from every angle, and the public lapped it up. The collective guilt that cements this ritual is summed up by editor Harold Schechter in his introduction. As Plato, Freud and Durkheim agreed (although one may feel it still hasn't sunk in), "violent lawbreakers make it possible for the rest of us to adapt to the demands of normality by acting out, and being punished for, our own unacknowledged impulses." For catharsis to occur, society needs to read all about it. Here is some of the best that was ever read, in one thick hardcover tome you could brain someone with.
Read on...
Fear and Punishment in Sweden: Exploring Penal Attitudes
Demker, M., A. Towns, G. Duus-Otterstrom, and J. Sebring. Punishment and Society 10, 3 (2008): 319-332.
Sweden is often portrayed as a hold out from ‘penal populism’, with a comparatively non-punitive population that prefers preventive and non-custodial sanctions to imprisonment. But while the Swedish public is still less punitive than many others, there is evidence that it has become more punitive, and less content with Swedish penal practice, over time. Trying to add to the understanding of the causes of toughening penal attitudes, we proceed to investigate the importance of media consumption for Swedish penal attitudes. We find a correlation between tabloid consumption and punitiveness. We end by a speculation that locates this finding in the wider context of an individualized, victim-centred discourse of crime.
Interesting article on the influence of the media on punitive attitudes. Available online to the U. of T. community, or in print at the Centre of Criminology Library
Sweden is often portrayed as a hold out from ‘penal populism’, with a comparatively non-punitive population that prefers preventive and non-custodial sanctions to imprisonment. But while the Swedish public is still less punitive than many others, there is evidence that it has become more punitive, and less content with Swedish penal practice, over time. Trying to add to the understanding of the causes of toughening penal attitudes, we proceed to investigate the importance of media consumption for Swedish penal attitudes. We find a correlation between tabloid consumption and punitiveness. We end by a speculation that locates this finding in the wider context of an individualized, victim-centred discourse of crime.
Interesting article on the influence of the media on punitive attitudes. Available online to the U. of T. community, or in print at the Centre of Criminology Library
Shock Value: A Comparative Analysis of News Reports and Official Police Records on TASER Deployments
by Justin Ready, Michael D. White and Christopher Fisher, in Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management v.31, 1, (2008): 148-170
Abstract
Purpose – This paper sets out to encompass a comparative analysis of news reports and official police records of TASER deployments from 2002 to 2005.
Design/methodology/approach – The methodology involves a content analysis of all LexisNexis and New York Times articles involving police use of the TASER during the study period (n = 353). Regional (New York Times) and national (LexisNexis) news reports describing police use of the TASER
are compared with police reports of all TASER deployments by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) during the same timeframe (n = 375).
Findings – Descriptive statistics and logistic regression are used to compare the data sources with respect to: the circumstances in which the weapon is deployed; the characteristics of the suspects involved in the TASER incidents; and the significant predictors of continued suspect resistance and repeated use of the TASER by an officer.
Research limitations/implications – The paper examines official police records on TASER deployments from one police agency. This limits the ability to generalize the research findings to other police agencies that have adopted different practices and policies regulating the deployment of CEDs.
Additionally, the content analysis includes only articles in the mainstream print media.
Practical implications – The paper concludes with a discussion about some myths associated with news reports on police use of the TASER, and their potential impact on both public perception and police practices.
Originality/value – To date, research has not systematically compared media representations of the TASER with official reports on police deployments of the weapon. That is the focus of this paper.
The media have been accused of generating myths about the Taser use, thereby feeding into public controversy and outrage. The findings of this study indicate that, by and large, the media have not been guilty of sensationalism.
This article is available online to University of Toronto students, faculty, and staff, and in print at the Centre of Criminology Library.
Abstract
Purpose – This paper sets out to encompass a comparative analysis of news reports and official police records of TASER deployments from 2002 to 2005.
Design/methodology/approach – The methodology involves a content analysis of all LexisNexis and New York Times articles involving police use of the TASER during the study period (n = 353). Regional (New York Times) and national (LexisNexis) news reports describing police use of the TASER
are compared with police reports of all TASER deployments by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) during the same timeframe (n = 375).
Findings – Descriptive statistics and logistic regression are used to compare the data sources with respect to: the circumstances in which the weapon is deployed; the characteristics of the suspects involved in the TASER incidents; and the significant predictors of continued suspect resistance and repeated use of the TASER by an officer.
Research limitations/implications – The paper examines official police records on TASER deployments from one police agency. This limits the ability to generalize the research findings to other police agencies that have adopted different practices and policies regulating the deployment of CEDs.
Additionally, the content analysis includes only articles in the mainstream print media.
Practical implications – The paper concludes with a discussion about some myths associated with news reports on police use of the TASER, and their potential impact on both public perception and police practices.
Originality/value – To date, research has not systematically compared media representations of the TASER with official reports on police deployments of the weapon. That is the focus of this paper.
The media have been accused of generating myths about the Taser use, thereby feeding into public controversy and outrage. The findings of this study indicate that, by and large, the media have not been guilty of sensationalism.
This article is available online to University of Toronto students, faculty, and staff, and in print at the Centre of Criminology Library.
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