There are certainly positive, constructive ways to cover the Sandra Bland case, including the excellent story the PBS NewsHour did earlier this evening. Then there are the other – really, really wrong – ways to cover this story, such as the crap the CBS Evening News demonstrated tonight. In short CBS managed to find a guy, Ron Hosko, who runs a “legal defense fund for police officers” to provide super-police-friendly analysis of the case (which is exactly what he did, as you can see in the video).
Note that Ron Hosko is the same guy who sent a “scathing” letter to President Obama, “exclusively obtained by [far-right-wing website] Townhall,” ripping then-Attorney General Eric Holder for a supposedly “ill-timed decision to launch a full investigation into the Ferguson Police Department at the height of racial tensions in that community, throwing gasoline on a fire that was already burning.” According to Hosko, “Many officers were disgusted by such a transparent political maneuver at a time when presidential and attorney general leadership could have calmed a truly chaotic situation.” Uh huh…riiiiight.
Hosko also wrote a column for USA Today entitled, “Police weren’t the problem in Ferguson,” which instead blamed “the media, the Obama administration and radical activists.” Oh, and here he is in the far-far-far-right Daily Caller talking about “race provocateurs.” Sensing a pattern with this guy? Yep, so do I, and so would anyone who did 5 minutes of Googling to find out this guy’s background. So why the hell did CBS News bring the wildly biased Hosko on the evening news tonight to analyze the Sandra Bland case, only identifying him as a “police expert?” Pathetic #FAIL by CBS, which gets worse and worse seemingly every day…Walter Cronkite tossing around violently in his grave!
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