The thinking in news rooms is, I suppose, “After all, somebody’s going to do it. Might as well try to get the upper hand.” When did journalism decide that stirring the pot was responsible journalism?

As the Tamir Rice shooting in Cleveland, discussed here, slowly begins its journey to replace the Michael Brown controversy as Ground Zero for the war on cops, whites and racial trust, one Cleveland news source decided to make a preemptive strike at the 12-year-old boy shot dead for brandishing a realistic pellet gun in the park.  Reporting that Tamir Rice’s father had been convicted of domestic violence multiple times, the story published on Cleveland.com reported that

“People from across the region have been asking whether Rice grew up around violence. The Northeast Ohio Media Group [Cleveland.com’s owner; the group also runs the Cleveland Plain Dealer] investigated the backgrounds of the parents and found the mother and father both have violent pasts.”

I have racked my feeble brain, and I cannot conceive of any relevance this might have to the fact that a police officer used deadly force against a child with a toy gun. Officer Timothy Loehmann didn’t know the boy: if his defense is, as I assume it will be, that the boy had the pellet gun out, didn’t respond to his order to drop it and placed the officer in legitimate fear of his life because the gun appeared real, his biological father’s propensity to abuse women doesn’t help us understand anything. This isn’t just unfair and irresponsible victim-blaming, it is stupid victim-blaming.

Predictably,  the conservative Northeast Ohio Media Group’s report has come in for furious criticism, and deserves every bit of it. We might be at the start of the process of establishing some ethical standards, if only the news media hadn’t received just as furious criticism from Michael Brown activists when it reported Brown’s theft of cigars and assault on a much smaller store clerk minutes before his shooting. That information was relevant. It is the Chicken Little problem: if you declare every piece of negative information relating to a shooting victim as a smear, even if it is relevant (like the Brown assault video clearly was), then legitimate objections when there is a real smear, like this one, have diminished impact.

A Plain Dealer staffer criticized the article in a powerful internal memo:

This is shameful. And that update does not change that fact.
Is this really the type of news organization NEOMG wants to be known as?
Who are the “people from across the region” asking that question? More importantly, how is it relevant to Tamir Rice’s death?
It isn’t. It simply isn’t. And adding a paragraph after-the-fact to try to justify your actions is borderline insulting.
Some in the region also have said race was a factor. So shall we scrutinize the officers’ parents? Perhaps one of their parents belongs to the Klan. Maybe the officer who fired on Tamir was taught as a child to fear all black men. That might be why the officer was quick to fire, “some in the region” might wonder.

Do we all realize that the WORLD is watching this story unfold?? Not just our readers, not just “some in the region,” and not just in North America. The WORLD is watching us. So again I ask, is this what NEOMG stands for?

I am not simply criticizing the reporter. Good journalism is achieved not just through years on the beat or getting clicks. A reporter becomes a good journalist through guidance from his or her editors, the example set by more-experienced peers, and most importantly, through the standards of the organization he or she works for. So, along with scrutinizing this dead child’s parents and the household he grew up in for 12 years, maybe the leaders of NEOMG should examine their own house and the quality of the journalism coming out of it.

Folks, we’re better than this.

Really? I’m not sure the news media is better than this, not just the Plain Dealer. If the liberal-biased media is going to immediately characterize all victims in shootings as harmless, innocent angels, as both Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were described when we first learned about their deaths, thus permanently warping public perception and tilting public opinion against the shooters based on false and prejudicial generalizations put forward by friends and family, then the conservative-biased media will try to preempt them with slanted portraits in the opposite direction.

In either direction, it is wrong: unfair to the shooter or the victim, and definitely unfair to the legal process.

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Pointer: Fred

Source: Clevescene