{"id":257943,"date":"2016-07-25T08:50:25","date_gmt":"2016-07-25T08:50:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/at-rnc-media-put-a-happy-face-on-suppression-of-speech\/"},"modified":"2016-07-25T08:50:25","modified_gmt":"2016-07-25T08:50:25","slug":"at-rnc-media-put-a-happy-face-on-suppression-of-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/at-rnc-media-put-a-happy-face-on-suppression-of-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"At RNC, Media Put a Happy Face on Suppression of Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"WKYC:<\/a><\/p>\n

Cleveland’s NBC<\/strong> affiliate praised the city’s police chief for “an approachable toughness and a firm friendliness.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cNews media could either be our ally or our enemy\u2014we wanted them as an ally,\u201d Laurie Pritchett said<\/a> in a 1985 interview about his strategy as police chief in Albany, Georgia, during Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s desegregation efforts in 1962.<\/p>\n

Pritchett famously ordered his officers to enforce the city\u2019s segregation laws nonviolently and arrest as few protesters as possible. He knew that if he had acted as other police departments had\u2014like Bull Connor\u2019s dogs and firehoses in Birmingham (1963) and Jim Clark\u2019s Bloody Sunday in Selma (1965)\u2014news media would show the country how brutally oppressive police were, inspiring greater public support for King\u2019s cause. In short, he beat nonviolent protesters at their own game by exploiting the media.<\/p>\n

At the Republican National Convention this past week, none of the fears<\/a> about a violent disaster bore fruit. Journalists<\/a> and private citizens who worried about Ohio\u2019s open-carry gun policy<\/a> and the recent increase in public tension between cops and protesters were relieved that the week passed without a single gunshot fired or tear gas canister thrown. Like Pritchett\u2019s officers in Albany, police in Cleveland\u2014whose department was found to have practiced a pattern of excessive force and civil rights violations in a Justice Department investigation<\/a>\u2014exercised restraint compared to how police have handled protests in Ferguson (military trucks, sound canons, tear gas, rubber bullets<\/a>) and Baton Rouge (hundreds of arrests<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Just as Pritchett expected in 1962, media jumped to praise law enforcement. “Credit where it\u2019s due: The police nailed it,” Vox<\/b> staffer German Lopez (7\/22\/16<\/a>) wrote. In a list that reads like a police officer\u2019s handbook, he offered three detailed explanations for why the police \u201cnailed it\u201d:<\/p>\n

1) Cops often outnumbered protesters: \u201cThis allowed police to consistently surround and isolate troublemakers as they arose, leaving those who acted peacefully almost entirely alone\u201d;<\/p>\n

2) Police \u201cplayed it smart\u201d: \u201cThey never used chemical agents like tear gas, which could have angered the crowd and provoked people to try to fight back. They mostly relied on crowd control tactics and set up barriers\u2026to limit how big protests could get and how far they went\u201d; and<\/p>\n

3) \u201cSmart preparation\u201d: \u201cPrior to the convention, officials put up fences across downtown that blocked certain streets, sidewalks and alleys, forcing you to walk much further than you would otherwise need to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe takeaway is that deescalation and prevention really can work to keep things calm,\u201d Lopez reasoned. The likely reason all this \u201cprevention\u201d and \u201csmart preparation\u201d \u201ckept things calm\u201d is that they had a chilling effect. When would-be protesters see a monstrous wall<\/a> surrounding the center of downtown Cleveland and cops dressed like Christian Bale\u2019s Batman<\/a>, many opt to stay home\u2014a desired outcome for city officials who hope to stifle as much criticism and protest as possible. Suppression of free speech by nonviolent means is what Lopez means when he congratulates cops for \u201ckeeping things calm.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis week, the police have been unflinching in their niceness, at least from this reporter\u2019s observations,\u201d the Washington Post<\/b> (7\/21\/16<\/a>) reported. The New York Times <\/b>(7\/22\/16<\/a>) produced a two-and-a-half-minute-long video profile headlined \u201cPolicing the GOP Convention.\u201d<\/p>\n

WKYC <\/b>(7\/22\/16<\/a>), Cleveland\u2019s NBC<\/b> affiliate, offered more gushing praise in a piece titled, \u201cCity, Nation Praise Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Clevelanders are heading into the weekend on a high after hosting another successful large-scale event. The city is making positive headlines for its beauty and hospitality, not the terribly negative predictions some had for the week of the Republican National Convention. A lot of that is thanks to the leadership of one man.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cChief Williams led the charge with an approachable toughness and a firm friendliness\u2014huge reasons we feel the pride we do today,\u201d the story continued in the reporter\u2019s own voice. \u201cChief Williams led a security plan that was equal to the task and worked, turning doubters into believers.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a separate story that described the RNC as \u201csuper-successful,\u201d a WKYC <\/b>reporter (7\/22\/16<\/a>) \u00a0wrote, \u201cMany people are calling Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams the RNC’s MVP,\u201d without quoting a single source.<\/p>\n

King learned in Albany that police could control his movement in a way that didn\u2019t look bad. Although there weren\u2019t any photos of demonstrators getting their head bashed in on the front pages of newspapers, police were still able to suppress the movement, which ultimately failed to end the city\u2019s segregation laws.<\/p>\n

Similarly, media are cheering police \u201crestraint\u201d at the RNC because it controlled protesters in a way that didn\u2019t look bad. While only 24 people<\/a> were arrested and the most contentious event was a flag-burning<\/a>, police suppressed free speech in a way that didn\u2019t look like \u00a0suppressing free speech.<\/p>\n

When police gradually pushed protesters<\/a> out of Cleveland\u2019s Public Square on the second day of the RNC, it was done in the name of \u201ckeeping everybody safe.\u201d But the result was a repression of protests. This politically shrewd form of policing sells well in the media, but we must still calculate the cost in free expression.<\/p>\n

\n

Gunar Olsen studies political science at Fordham University, tweets at @GunarOlsen,<\/a> and covered the RNC from his hometown of Cleveland at his blog GunarOlsen.com<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cleveland’s NBC affiliate praised the city’s police chief for “an approachable toughness and a firm friendliness.” \u201cNews media could either be our ally or our enemy\u2014we wanted them as an ally,\u201d Laurie Pritchett said in a 1985 interview about his strategy as police chief in Albany, Georgia, during Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s desegregation efforts in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-257943","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}