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Why does the media focus on looting?

Not many stories about looting. Plenty about how the deceased was intentionally trying to injure himself, but not so much about the looting.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Yes they need to simply accept that the police will get away with it as they have in the past, and that anything they do will simply make the police look better. But don't get angry because of the pointlessness of your lives and deaths, that would be wrong.
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No one has said this. Criticizing the actions of the rioters is in no way shape or form arguing for continued police misconduct. This is exactly the same type of thinking that leads people to accuse others of excusing the rioters by explaining the factors that help lead to rioting.

Of course there are people arguing for excusing the police misconduct. There are people arguing for excusing the rioters burning down a senior center. You for instance are. However, criticizing either group's actions are is not in and of itself doing that.
 
16.5 said:
Not many stories about looting. Plenty about how the deceased was intentionally trying to injure himself, but not so much about the looting.
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Funny how that keeps happening. Somebody should figure out what it is about black people that makes them suicidal around cops.
 
Travis said:
How is the Warsay uprising analogy bizarre? People in both cities lived in constant fear of those that ran their cities who were abusing and degrading their respective populations that they deemed as subhuman. One rose up against them and got slaughtered the other is now finally at long last mounting appropriate retaliatory actions and it is dismissed by the pejoratives "riots" and "looting".
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Patently ridiculous.

There is no meaningful similarity between the Warsaw uprisings and the understandable but primarily greed fueled criminal looting in Baltimore.

There is no meaningful similarity between the actions of the oppressors in Warsaw and the police in Baltimore.

There is no justification for the rioting and looting in Baltimore than mitigates it to the point that it is reasonable to call it "appropriate".

"Riots" and "looting" are not pejoratives when applied to the rioting and looting in Baltimore.
 
Travis said:
Well allow me to get on my soapbox.

Revolutions are nasty and messy. And in a perfect world we wouldn't even need them. But debased and oppressed minorities frequently need them to enact any meaningful change. The elephant in the room we don't want to acknowledge in America is that peaceful protests are now and pretty much always have been a huge waste of time.

No meaningful reform happened in New York regarding gay rights until the Stonewall Riots. In San Francisco the police department made pretty much zero effort to understand their growing gay population until the riots following the trial for the murder of Harvey Milk. The Los Angeles police department thought of race relations as merely a PR problem until the 1992 riots. Only after people got legitimately scared did anyone try to do anything to address the systemic problems they had largely ignored until then.

Fear, it seems, is the only way to actually get people already entrenched in power to change their ways.

Suppose, as an analogy, that you lived in a society where (to borrow something here) people are divided up into castes of short ears and long ears. You grow up your entire life as a long ear knowing that the short ears run everything. Corporations create algorithms to identify names associated with long ears and so discard without even reading most resumes sent in by long ears. Long ears don't get shown the same houses by realtors. They get charged higher interest rates for loans if they can even get them. The police murder them with seeming impunity giving lip service to "sensitivity training" whenever they get caught red handed.

If the short ears would try to reform things maybe things would improve. But they don't. Instead the same problems persist like a festering sore that they hide away hoping no one will notice it. But one day things will be pushed too far. And the result, to put it mildly, will be destructive.

When revolutions come those that might have even been on the side of the oppressed might be caught up in the tide of violence. Was everyone put to the guillotine in France actually guilty of crimes against the peasantry? Almost certainly not. But that is the way these things go.
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Funny,that has been the exuse that mass murderers in power from Hitler to Stalin to Mao have used.
 
Travis said:
Ah, yes. :)



In a way I agree. I keep waiting for someone to really do something...well revolutionary. Sack a police precinct, kill everyone and string the bodies from lampposts. That would get some real reform real quick.
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I used to have some respect for your opinions.Not anymore.

I am really afraid the rise of the Tea Party..whom I dislike a lot...has now caused an equivalent to rise up on the left.
 
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Travis said:
This is something that always bugs me. Once again our nation's police murder someone and a city rises up against them. But all the media wants to talk about are looted stores. That's like covering the Warsaw uprising and only talking about how much it will cost to clean up all the bricks laying scattered about.

Is the media just lazy here or is this part of an agenda?
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The media likes sensationalism but...
The media was talking about the case before the fires and looting.

BTW Glad to see you are withholding judgement until all the details are out.
 
dudalb said:
I am really afraid the rise of the Tea Party..whom I dislike a lot...has now caused an equivalent to rise up on the left.
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If by 'equivalent' you mean 'rioting and looting and burning', then what you should really be afraid of is the rise of the left. And also of course the Tea Party is in no way equivalent to what has risen up in Baltimore
 
theprestige said:
If by 'equivalent' you mean 'rioting and looting and burning', then what you should really be afraid of is the rise of the left. And also of course the Tea Party is in no way equivalent to what has risen up in Baltimore
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I think he's talking about Travis's over-the-top rhetoric, comparing Warsaw and Baltimore.
 
Biscuit said:
The question was 100% legitimate.
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No one, and I mean no one, who read or watched the news in the week leading up to the riots can legitimately claim that there was no press coverage.

That is just plain ridiculous.
 
dudalb said:
I used to have some respect for your opinions.Not anymore.

I am really afraid the rise of the Tea Party..whom I dislike a lot...has now caused an equivalent to rise up on the left.
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I haven't seen a political component to the protests over alleged police brutality anywhere in America. Certainly no political party has been formed over it. I see no connection to the rise of the tea party.
 
Biscuit said:
a lady was asking an MSNBC reporter why there was no media in Baltimore for a week of peaceful protests but after one night of riots and looting the entire nations media shows up. The reporter fumbled for a bit before throwing coverage back to the studio.

It's kind of sick the way they are lurking around just waiting for some violence to erupt. The number of times they have talked about violence and the lack of fans at a baseball game far outshines their discussions of the event that lead to all of this.
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I didn't see any threads here about Freddie Gray until the riots started.
 
mgidm86 said:
The same thing that people here are accusing the news media of doing - not caring much about it until the story gets "big enough".
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To be fair, the media arguably have an obligation to bring attention to important news.

We're just killing time, shooting the breeze about whatever strikes our fancy on an online forum.

When the media brings attention to an important story, they have the ability to contribute to needed change.

When we talk about recent events, the world tends to keep on spinning.

I'm not sure the two situations are particularly comparable.
 
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