Welcome to the Free World.
Over so many generations, people have fought, lobbied, compromised, died, and voted to create what we call "rights". These rights are the foundation of western society, spanning most famously back to the Magna Carta, and more recently the American Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Now, what do you do when exercising your rights causes someone else harm or infringes upon their rights? I have been noticing a pattern lately, and I have no idea what to do about it. Ever since I found a method of making my opinions public, I have been a critic of the media. The pen truly is mightier than the sword, but how do you get the media to sheathe that pen? There have been several instances in our lifetime of the media destroying lives, most recently George Zimmerman and gun seizures following the flood in High River. There were also several cases of police officers under fire over use of Conductive Energy Weapons (Tasers).
George Zimmerman killed a kid named Trayvon Martin. It was an awful thing that happened, and Zimmerman has to learn to live with what he's done. He was acquitted of his charges, which means that the Court of Law found him not criminally responsible for the kid's death. He may still be morally responsible, but that's between him and his own conscience. The media jumps right on top of this by giving so much airtime to people who disagree with the verdict. The entire populace seems to be up in arms that he was found Not Guilty. There's a pretty good chance that you have an opinion on the verdict yourself, but make sure you came to the conclusion through appropriate means. Did you read all the Court transcripts? Did you examine the evidence and witness testimony? Do you actually have training and experience in making sense of these things? Or, do you have an admittedly uneducated opinion swayed by the media? Even though the Court of Law found Zimmerman to be in the clear criminally, the media was swayed the Court of Public Opinion to find him guilty anyways, and he will never be able to show his face where he might be recognized again. To make it worse, the media has pretty much ensured that everyone in North America knows Zimmerman's face. During the Zimmerman trial, some white lady kidnapped a black kid and burned him to death with a blowtorch. That didn't get very much attention, but the Zimmerman trial sure did.
Another high profile case of the media swaying the Court of Public Opinion was the death of Robert Dziekanski. These officers that were called to deal with this situation had very little information. They knew there was a guy who was causing a disturbance, and they may have had the information that he probably wasn't armed. They showed up to a guy screaming things they couldn't understand, and throwing stuff around. He was obviously not in a state where he was capable of intelligent communication. The police who showed up on scene used a universal sign for "stop doing what you're doing," They pointed weapons at him and started yelling at him to get on the ground. He didn't calm down, so making the snap decision that it wasn't safe to approach into a reachable zone, they deployed their CEW to incapacitate Dziekanski so that they could control him. There were all sorts of theories thrown about surrounding his death, but if I recall correctly, his actual cause of death was some sort of cardiac distress. The problem was not the deployment of the CEW. The problem was not the responding officers beating him to death. The problem wasn't even Positional Asphyxiation (when a suspect is left restrained on his front and cannot breathe), which seemed very possible because 4 officers were restraining him. In hindsight, could it have been done differently? Probably. Did the officers make the best decision they could with the information available to them? I have very little doubt. Is it unfortunate what happened to Dziekanski? Immeasurably so. The media started jumping all over not just the officers, but the use of CEW's, too. Every officer that uses a CEW has to go through training, which involves having a CEW used on him/her. If it was really that dangerous, that practice probably would cease, as we don't use guns on each other in training. A police officer's duty belt has on it: a gun with which they can kill you, OC spray to burn the shit out of your face, and a baton to beat you into submission. If I'm ever out of control, I pray that they use the CEW to disable me instead of the other tools on their belts.
While managing the near destruction of my hometown of High River, someone decided to send inspectors into every building in town to grade its habitability level before people were let back in. You can't just send inspectors into people's homes, so they were accompanied by Mounted Police officers. There is still a lot of controversy surrounding this whole situation with more information coming to light every day, like a lot of houses were left unlocked, but Mounties kicked in the doors anyways, without taking the time to check the doorknob. While checking out houses, the police seized a lot of firearms from unoccupied residences, citing a need to secure unsecured weapons. That makes sense to me, right? The police destroyed your door, which had secured your weapons. Now that they've caused your weapons to be unsecured, they secured them for you. It definitely seems to me that this decision was made for the right reasons. However, the media gets a hold of it, and it becomes a huge issue about unreasonable search and seizure, and even got as ridiculous as disarmament under a Police State, which is just stupid.
The purpose of my writing this blog entry was not to get people involved in the debate of each individual issue. I cited these issues and my opinions on them simply to illustrate what can happen when the media stops reporting the whole story, and swirls everything into a huge controversy to sell newspapers/web hits. This is not a call to legislate how the media reports stories. That would be government censorship, and that's wrong. I do want to call on all major media outlets to keep reporting every side of the story equally, rather than just the side of the story that's going to rile up the most people. That is the difference between responsible journalism and disrupting the peace.
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