Mugged (20 page)

Those are not the words of someone who is comfortable around black people.

For comparison, here’s Maddow describing a white male guest: “Chris Hayes, Washington editor of the
Nation
, it’s always good to see you.”

But at least MSNBC hosts never confuse Chris Hayes with any other white guests. On October 21, 2009, MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer introduced Jesse Jackson as “Al Sharpton.” (At least it wasn’t
Reggie
Jackson.) Then, on November 8, 2010,
Hardball
host Chris Matthews called Representative Elijah Cummings “Congressman [James] Clyburn.” If that had happened at Fox News, the power would have been cut.

Managing not to confuse Harris-Lacewell with any other black people, Matthews once introduced her by saying he was really going to listen to her because “I do find it interesting. No, I mean it. I mean it. I mean it, Melissa. I want to listen because I do find a lot to be learning here.”
⁷

If ever there was a metaphor for charges of racism being a scam pushed by white liberals for their own advantage, it was pasty white fruitcake Keith Olbermann inventing a bogus claim of racism in an attempt to eliminate his main rival.

Agriculture state school graduate Olbermann (major: Communications) spent weeks of his MSNBC show demanding that Fox News fire Bill O’Reilly for criticizing a radio-show caller who said she knew someone who told her that Michelle Obama hated America. O’Reilly said he’d need more than that, adding that he had sympathy for public figures such as the Clintons and Obamas, adding:

No black person noticed anything untoward in O’Reilly’s comments, but luckily they had Keith Olbermann to speak on their behalf, based on his having zero experience with black people. Olbermann heard the word “lynch” and immediately thought of the Klan.
Keith, you’re all that stands between democracy and fascism. Take the rest of the week off.

It was absurd to take any offense at all, but Olbermann twisted a figure of speech into an actual threat and claimed that the phrase, “I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts” was a threat to lynch Michelle Obama—provided O’Reilly could get the goods on her. Olbermann had heroically converted O’Reilly’s
telling a caller she was nuts into, “I’m waiting to lead a lynch party, but I need the evidence—HURRY UP!”

Not everyone who wasn’t popular in high school has to spend the rest of his life seeking revenge, but Olbermann refused to accept that. With feigned incredulity, night after night, he would update his viewers:
You won’t believe it, but miraculously O’Reilly still has a job.

I have an explanation, Keith: You are a gigantic fruit.

In a strange coincidence, Bill O’Reilly happened to be Olbermann’s time-slot competitor at 8 p.m. and O’Reilly was walloping him in the ratings.

Night 1, Keith Trying to Get His Main Competitor Taken Off Air:

“…the obscenity, the moral obscenity involved in a national discussion of whether to launch a lynching party against the black woman married to the black man running for president.”

“…[A] fair observer concludes this man is not color blind, he is not reckless with language, he has that insidious kind of low grade prejudice that we see in ordinary American society still, low grade prejudice against black people.”

And then, the main point:

“I mean, do people have to then start—never mind talking to him—but talk to people who are keeping him on the air? Call Westwood One, the radio proprietors of his show, or his boss at Fox News, Roger Ailes or the advertisers and say get rid of the guy, suspend him, whatever…”

Night 2, Keith Trying to Get His Main Competitor Taken Off Air:

“Our runner-up, racist Bill O’Reilly: His remark on a radio show was simple and straightforward and honorable. ‘I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence.’ He has neither been fired nor suspended.”

Night 3, Keith Trying to Get His Main Competitor Taken Off Air:

On this occasion, Olbermann brought in a very special guest, carried on a litter and fanned with giant palm fronds by dwarves in loincloths: the
Reverend Jesse Jackson. Keith acted as if he had landed the Jackie Kennedy interview three days after JFK’s assassination, but Jackson just seemed puzzled by Olbermann’s histrionics.

Quickly getting straight to the heart of the matter—firing O’Reilly—Olbermann hinted that a boycott might be just the thing, asking Jackson: “What do you think is appropriate? I mean, is this a dismissal-level event? Is it suspension; is it a sponsor boycott, or what it is right now, which is nothing?…Has Fox responded sufficiently, in your mind?”

And would it be appropriate to award me fifteen share points in the ratings to punish O’Reilly?

Even Jackson was perplexed by this relentless pursuit of O’Reilly, saying at one point: “I guess it’s not for me to say it, but it is a burden upon the FCC.”

Melodramatically, Olbermann closed with, “The Reverend Jesse Jackson, joining us from Atlanta. I’m sorry it was under these circumstances, but it’s always a pleasure to speak with you, sir.”

Months later, he was still harping about O’Reilly’s plot to lynch Michelle Obama—provided he could get the goods on her. Alas, O’Reilly was not fired, but Olbermann was.

Liberals were always self-aggrandizing blubberbutts patronizing blacks. After the OJ verdict, the rest of the country just stopped being interested.

The apotheosis of liberal race-mongering and excuse-making was the Rodney King televised tape and consequent Los Angeles riots.

There will always be barbarians ready to strike at civilization. What the media did with the Rodney King tape was the equivalent of bearbaiting the outlaws. Much like the NBC producers editing the 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case to falsely portray the shooter as a racist, people at Los Angeles’s KTLA television network edited the Rodney King tape to make it look like a senseless act of police brutality against an innocent black man. In fact, what the public saw was the officers’ final efforts to subdue a deranged suspect after all other methods had proved futile.

News producers at KTLA deliberately cut the first thirteen seconds of the videotape, revealing only the last sixty-eight seconds of an eighty-one-second tape. Even the full tape obviously wouldn’t have captured the police officers’ entire ordeal with King, but it would at least have given some context—such as showing King’s last lunge at one of the police officers.

KTLA won a Peabody Award for its presentation of the tape.
¹
I hope it was worth nearly burning Los Angeles to the ground. The people at that TV station who made the decision to edit the tape are responsible for fifty-four dead human beings, thousands of injuries and a billion dollars in property damage.

King was a violent ex-con on parole, though by all accounts he was perfectly charming as long as he hadn’t been drinking. But he had been drinking a lot the night of March 2, 1991, when he decided to go for a drive with two friends. Even five hours after his arrest, his blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit.
²

Melanie and Tim Singer, a husband and wife team on the California Highway Patrol, spotted King’s Hyundai flying down the 210 freeway, and tried to pull him over. For nearly seven miles, King led the Singers on a
high-speed chase at speeds clocked at up to 115 miles per hour and 85 miles per hour in residential neighborhoods.
³
King later explained that he had tried to outrun the cops because “I was scared of going back to prison and I just kind of thought the problem would just go away.”
⁴

The chase ended when King shot through a red light, nearly causing an accident, and came to a stop. In addition to the Singers, the first officers at the scene were Sergeant Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseno, Timothy Wind and a rookie cop, Rolando Solano. Everyone’s adrenaline was pumping, a condition reflected in the policemen’s motto: “You run, you get beat.”

Tim Singer approached the car and ordered the three occupants to exit the vehicle and lie on the ground. King’s black passengers did so. They went home without a scratch that night.

While Tim Singer frisked the passengers, Melanie Singer approached the car and told King to get out. Reluctantly, King did so, but instead of lying on the ground, as instructed, he proceeded to dance and babble to himself, wave to the police helicopter hovering overhead and then began to meander about, crouching, kneeling, getting on all fours at one point, laughing and smiling.

Seeing King reach behind him, and thinking he might have a gun, Melanie Singer drew hers and told King to keep his hands away from his backside. In response, King grabbed his posterior and wiggled it at her. He also made a clicking noise, a prison gesture of disrespect.
⁵

So the officers knew King had been in prison and, given his behavior, they were beginning to suspect he was high on angel dust (PCP). As one of King’s passengers later told the jury, “he was acting strange.”

As Singer approached King with her gun drawn, the senior officer, Sgt. Koon, ordered her to back away. He didn’t want to risk a fatal encounter.
⁶

Following proper procedure, Koon began with verbal commands for King to lie down, but the suspect ignored him, continuing his peculiar behavior, laughing and talking to himself. Next, Koon ordered the four officers to swarm King, two taking his arms and two taking his legs, in order to handcuff him. But King tossed all four officers off his back like rag dolls. Later that night, Powell told a fellow officer—by now, there were a few dozen on the scene—“I was scared. The guy threw me off his back. I thought I was going to have to shoot him.”
⁷

At that point, the officers were convinced King was on angel dust, a specific fear for cops because “dusted” perps seemed to have superhuman strength and to be impervious to pain. King’s two passengers, Bryant Allen
and Freddie Helms, later testified that they thought King was on angel dust that night, too.
⁸

Koon shot King with a Taser dart, which got a howl out of King, but not much else. He shot a second dart, and this one seemed to work at first—but not for long.

The video being shot by a random citizen, George Holliday, from a nearby apartment balcony, began here.

Instead of being subdued by the second Taser dart, King leaped up and lurched toward Officer Powell, drawing his first smack with a metal baton.

But the public never saw that.

Unable to subdue King with four men and two darts from a Taser gun, the police were running out of options. LAPD policy prohibited officers from using the choke hold on suspects and discouraged them from struggling with “dusters.” So that left the batons.

Following a by-the-book procedure for subduing aggressive suspects without killing them, the three more senior officers began hitting King with their metal batons, under the supervision of Sgt. Koon. If King moved, they whacked him. It was only this part of the confrontation that KTLA allowed viewers to see, repeated on an endless loop on TV.

In all, the officers hit King more than fifty times with metal batons. Finally, they double-handcuffed him, the procedure for suspects on PCP, and put him in an ambulance to the hospital. King and the officers were all alive. When Koon first heard that the arrest had been captured on videotape, he said: “This is great! They got it on tape! Now we’ll have a live, in-the-field film to show police recruits. It can be a real-life example of how to use escalating force properly.”
⁹

At the officers’ trial, expert defense witness Sergeant Charles Duke analyzed the baton strikes blow by blow, saying each one was appropriate. But you would have had to sit through actual legal evidence presented in a real courtroom to know that. The jury did, and acquitted the officers.

Nearly everyone who saw the full tape agreed that the thirteen seconds helpfully edited out by KTLA dramatically changed their impression of the incident. That may not seem like much, but, in 2012, fewer seconds were cut by NBC from the 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case—and yet that tiny edit completely altered the meaning of the call. Seeing the six foot four, two-hundred-forty-pound Rodney King rising like a phoenix and charging at Officer Powell would have done a lot to explain the officers’ fear of him.

On ABC’s
Nightline
, the forewoman of the state court jury, Dorothy
Bailey, told Ted Koppel that when she first saw the King video on television, “I was revulsed.…I thought they were hitting that poor man too hard and too long.” But during the trial she said she discovered that “there was a great deal more to this case than the small bit of video that had been shown on television.”
¹⁰

Roger Parloff, a liberal lawyer and legal reporter who sat through most of the first trial, wrote an article in the
American Lawyer
concluding that the jury’s verdict was correct. Even though he had actually seen the trial, Parloff said, he was afraid to tell the truth: “I can’t remember a time when I have ever felt so hesitant to say what I believe.” Here was a member of the media worried about the media. “After all,” he said, “imagine if the media were to summarize [my] article the way it summarized the trial.”
¹¹

Lou Cannon, who covered the trial for the
Washington Post
and later wrote a book about it, said the full recording was “vital” to understanding why the first jury acquitted the officers. He said he had “assumed that the videotape of the King beating would assure conviction,” but not after seeing the full tape.
¹²
After watching a two-hour summary of the trial on videotape, the renowned economist Walter Williams, who is black, denounced “the news media’s dereliction and deception” in its presentation of that tape.
¹³