Media and the Fourth Amendment: “A Cop Done Frisked my Sister Nell…”

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This NSA Scandal Is A White People Problem by Tommy Christopher, Mediaite

In case you hadn’t heard, the National Security Agency is Red-Wedding-ing Americans’ freedom by backing up phone records and collecting internet data from overseas (some of which involves communications with Americans), all with warrants, and all of which they need to get extra warrants if they want to look at Americans’ stuff. The horror. While the white media completely freaks out from every possible angle, they’ve been all but ignoring a true abuse of the Fourth Amendment, and saying every stupid thing possible in the process….

What’s ridiculous about this is the proportion of the coverage. According to TV Eyes, the NSA scandal has been mentioned on cable almost 3,000 times in a little over a week, since the Verizon story broke. In a sense, this is commendable, because despite the American people’s clear apathy about this kind of surveillance, journalists have decided that this is important. That’s one of the most important functions that the Fourth Estate can serve.

Would you like to know how many mentions there have been about a story in which the government systematically performs warrantless searches of millions of innocent Americans’ phone records? Two hundred and sixty-seven.

Wait…it wasn’t 267 this past week,it was 30. It was 267 mentions these past three months. Oh, and it wasn’t warrantless searches of phone numbers and call times, it was warrantless searches of actual American people’s persons, their physical, IRL bodies. Conversely, then, journalists appear to have decided that this is not important, or rather, is one one-hundredth as important as the warranted non-searches….

Why is that? It’s hard to tell, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Stop and Frisk policy overwhelmingly affects the privacy of innocent black and Latino people. It’s not for lack of a hot news peg. Even if the merits of the story don’t turn you on, the Obama administration just signaled it will file briefs in support of the plaintiff in a suit against the policy. If the last several weeks have made one thing clear about the media, it’s that the best way to get them to care about government abuse, or anything, is to do it to white people…

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY

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