Even those of us who may have been too young can remember it anyway.
The home video, played endlessly on network television as if someone had hit a “repeat” button, showed a black motorist named Rodney King being bludgeoned with police batons over and over and over again. The mainstream media, which was dominated by white liberals just as much as it is today, hyped the tale of racist white cops beating an innocent black driver “for no reason.” For months on end, they ginned up the audience, right up until Los Angeles erupted in to riots after the police officers on the tape were acquitted.
As some of us now know, the tape we saw on TV told only a small piece of the story. There was much more to the Rodney King story, and as the saying goes, the audience “didn’t know the half of it.” The media had edited out the first part of the tape, which showed a blind-drunk Rodney King jumping out of the vehicle and charging at the officers. A shot from a taser gun did nothing to stop King. At that point, the police pulled out batons and began administering blows according to official police protocol, which allowed them to subdue aggressive suspects without shooting them. In the officers’ trial, a police expert testified that every strike was appropriate and allowed the police to fend off King’s attack while sparing his life. (King’s two black passengers cooperated with the police and went home without incident.)
But you didn’t know that, did you?
Thanks to the media hysteria surrounding the Rodney King “beating,” police today are actually more likely to ditch the batons and reach for their guns–just as they did during an altercation with 19-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Thanks, liberal media! Thank you for that. Do any of you actually care about the lives of Michael Brown’s neighbors, or are you going to gin them up into a race riot just so you can get a Pulitzer Prize?
We all know the answer. Just as the media edited the Rodney King tape to tell the story they preferred, they’re refusing to report inconvenient details of the Michael Brown case–such as the fact that the police officer who shot him, Darren Wilson, was “badly beaten” during the altercation and has a fractured eye socket.
Does that mean the shooting was justified? We still don’t know. But that’s the point. The media’s job is to tell us what actually happened, not what they wish would have happened. They failed us in the Rodney King case, and they’re failing us now–and the price is human lives and millions of dollars in damage.