The killing of Renee Nicole Good is tragic and awful. That should be a non-controversial statement about this violent death of a woman shot in her car by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
The job of every news agency is to provide the truth. That means accepting, and reporting, that it can take time for facts and context to come to light. We don’t know exactly what happened, what any party involved was thinking, or why the agent made a split-second decision to shoot.
Readers and listeners have been sending me social media posts filled with conflicting claims based on newly released videos from different vantage points — a constant reminder that new information can change or enhance our understanding of any news event.
But in the attention economy, nothing is more powerful than fury. It gets people to click, share, watch, read, and listen. It fuels the Big Media machine. Think of it as “anger aggregation” or the “rage economy.”
That helps explain why a clip titled “A Cold-Blooded Murder” is racking up views on YouTube. It shows MS NOW host Chris Hayes on Stephen Colbert’s late night show describing the incident as “what looks to many people who have viewed the videotape as a cold-blooded murder.”
On his own show, Hayes said that a clip of the shooting — the first clip, which people all over the world have been watching — “shows what really happened.” Assailing the Trump administration for claiming that Good was a “domestic terrorist” looking to attack ICE agents with her car, Hayes added, “You just watch the video and you can decide what you believe.”
No. This is the exact opposite of what we need from the news. The one brief video he was referring to doesn’t tell us “what really happened.” No one should decide what they believe based on it.
That goes both ways, of course. No one should be describing Good as a “domestic terrorist” based on the Trump administration’s claims. This administration lies constantly about all kinds of things.
But while “mainstream” media giants often call out right-wing media for treating Trump talking points as truth, they virtually never call out left-wing media like MS NOW (formerly MSNBC).
When killings aren’t called ‘murder’
It’s also worth noting that a quick search of transcripts, with help from an AI tool, shows no sign that Hayes said Americans view the killing of National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom as “cold-blooded murder.”
For that matter, there’s also no sign he used the word in discussing the killings of a Jewish woman in Colorado, and a Jewish and Christian couple who worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC. In both cases, the attackers screamed a murderous rallying cry of the political left, “Free Palestine.”
So much more to say on this, and the next episode will address it. What do you want to know? Paid subscribers: Share links you want fact checked, thoughts, ideas, and more, in the comments or directly to me via the link below.
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