You Have To Be A Lowlife To Want Riots

Do the media people distorting the Dexter Reed story want more riots in America? It looks like it.

Reed was out on pretrial release for three counts of illegal gun possession and other violent crime charges when he opened fire March 31 on Chicago police at a traffic stop. It was a seatbelt violation, and from the looks of it, cops had run his tags and knew with whom they were dealing.

Media reporting has zeroed in on the number of shots fired—96. For some context, though, Reed wounded an officer, one of 11 on-scene. And he attempted to drive off during the escalating encounter. He made himself a deadly threat to the officers, instead of keeping his window rolled down or exiting the vehicle, which he is clearly and repeated told to do.

They had a duty, not a choice, to neutralize the threat to themselves and the community, which means this is nothing like cases where an unarmed man is shot, or the wrong person or apartment gets hit. Police get the criticism they deserve in some of those cases.

Dexter Reed is the reason Dexter Reed is dead.

Yet, clearly there is an effort to make him into another George Floyd, or Amadou Diallo, and not just by “activists”. We would expect them to try.

No, there’s some pretty obvious work being done by leftist media to paint Dexter Reed as a martyr, and fan the flames of some TV-friendly riots… just in time for the election.

In a perfect world, we would be getting more sophisticated at probing and reporting this kind of story, learning from past mistakes going back to Ferguson and beyond. There would be remorse for irresponsible and misleading framing of those events, along with the sober realization that a 40-second TV package can kill just as surely as a gun can.

Instead, because there never was accountability for 2020’s (mis)reporting, we are seeing more of the same, instead of something better.

And so, it is hard to avoid concluding that some in the media want more riots and chaos.

They used to say, of local TV news, “if it bleeds, it leads”.

That didn’t mean drawing the blood themselves.