I'm not an person that's easy to rile up.
There are
few things in this world that genuinely and wholeheartedly piss me
off, but the past year CNN has managed to do that time and time
again with their reporting techniques and etiquette. They showed
Trayvon's body multiple times on their station, they showed Mike
Brown's body in the streets multiple times over, they depicted
Ferguson protesters as rioters and looters time and time again, and
now in their latest transgression, they show Walter Scott's actual
murder and subsequent actions. These events were broadcasted on
national TV in many restaurants, airports, bars, homes, stores,
basically any place with a television because CNN is considered the
only thing that can be watched by the masses in general, including
children.
I studied
Mass Communications in college, for my brief time there, and there
was one discussion that I had with Dr. Mitchell that was pretty eye
opening when I was debating on whether or not if I wanted to pursue
that direction in life. From that conversation I realized how media
was really controlled by those who set out to control it. Now back
then I was a kid, I didn't really put that much thought in it beyond
the fact that I didn't want to be a part of something that doesn't
really report what's going on in a fair light and controlled by
those who gained from said manipulation of the news. Typically media
has been used to control public opinion, for those who don't know
that's when the media uses Propaganda to sway public views on topics
that could potentially cause unrest. These techniques have been
around since we could speak and subsequently elevated with every
advance in technology, and it seems to be at its worse now.
I was
standing at work with two of my coworkers, both females. We were
talking and laughing in the break room, the normal routine for
lunches. But once we caught a glimpse of what was playing on the
television in the background, our moods because somber, then slowly
that of anger. For twenty minutes, twenty long minutes, we had to
watch them play over and over and over again the death of Walter
Scott. Not the images, not the audio, not even the censored version,
but the actual clip of the officer shooting and the subsequently
handcuffing his dead body. There was a silence for about five
minutes as we tried to process exactly what we just watched, and
shortly thereafter my coworker said something that almost every
single African-American feels this day, "they treat us like some
kind of zoo animal on display and when we don't act right, we're put
down in an inhumane way".
The fact
that they never showed one beheading by Isis looped or one of the
bodies shot in the movie theaters from Colorado, but felt the need
to show that and pictures of the hundreds killed in Kenya just goes
to show how much the media and the society as a whole values us.
It's simply inexcusable the way they just show the blatant
disrespect they have for us, and by large I feel ashamed that I've
supported CNN for so long after watching the past couple of years.
Honestly I don't trust any kind of news outlet when it comes to
educating me on the current events going on around the world. If I
HAD to choose one, MSNBC is the one I would go to in terms of at
least attempting to be bias, Fox News being the biggest joke of them
all. But regardless of that, CNN has seriously diminished any kind
of hope of being a reputable news station by reporting the way that
they do.
Beyond it
all, it was just so heartbreaking looking into the eyes of my
coworkers who were just smiling five minutes earlier and having fun,
then seeing their eyes fill with frustration, anger, confusion,
despair and even a slight loss of hope. These are the things that we
live with every single day with no escape from, there's no hiding
from being Black in this country and it's more and more evident
these days that they want us to suffer for wanting to be equal. CNN
and other major news outlets are just tools in that war against us,
just look at the fear and anger that it causes from a single
broadcast. Watching this made me realize that not even TV can serve
as an escape for us, and that more than ever that now is a time for
change.
CNN is the
one of the biggest reasons for us to act together and take a stand
from propaganda destroying us, because there's no excuse for images
of dead bodies and videos of a man, a husband, a father, being
murdered in the middle of the street like a wild animal not behaving
anymore to those who stole him from his natural environment. It's
even a bigger shame that we have to act out against and educate
rather than them knowing that it's wrong.
But that's just another reminder of what it means
to be black in the United States of America.
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