CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter and the Washington Post are facing intense backlash for attempting to compare the arrest of a CNN crew while covering the Minneapolis riots to the tragic death of George Floyd.
On Friday, CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his team were taken into custody around 5:10 a.m. local time as they were reporting live outside a liquor store that had been set ablaze in the demonstrations. An hour and a half later, the network reported their release.
“A CNN reporter & his production team were arrested this morning in Minneapolis for doing their jobs, despite identifying themselves -- a clear violation of their First Amendment rights,” the network said in a statement earlier. “The authorities in Minnesota, including the Governor, must release the 3 CNN employees immediately.”
Police reportedly claimed Jimenez and the crew were taken into custody because they were told to move and didn’t listen. CNN said Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz “deeply apologizes” for the incident and had been working to have the three employees freed.
However, The Washington Post raised eyebrows later in the day with a piece headlined, "When a CNN camera hit the ground, America saw the world through George Floyd’s eyes."
"The confrontation had started a few minutes earlier, but it was at 5:13 when one member of the team who was being taken into custody asked if he could put the camera down. Suddenly the all-seeing eye was on the ground, recording legs, shoes and concrete," the Post's art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott wrote. "Now the world was askew, utility wires cut across the frame at a sharp and unnerving angle, and every eye on the planet could see the scene unfold from the same position that George Floyd, the African American man pinned under the knee of a white Minnesota police officer on Monday, witnessed in the last moments of his 46-year life."
Kennicott acknowledged that "volumes could be written about how CNN has turned news into theater, how the narcissism of celebrity degrades its coverage and how it has substituted the argument of self-aggrandizing ideologues for genuine discourse" before adding that Jimenez and his crew "were doing their jobs, and nothing caught on camera in those six or seven shocking minutes suggested that he was acting in any way counter to journalistic norms, public safety or police requests."
He then linked the treatment of Jimenez and his crew to the hostility CNN has faced from President Trump -- despite the arrest took place in a Democratic-controlled city and state.
"He was, as one of his crew said off-camera, just doing his job. That he, a journalist of color, was arrested by cops whose pale arms suggest that many of them are white, and that CNN, which has been a consistent object of President Trump’s puerile and corrosive abuse, was the target raises deeply disturbing quest... (Read more)
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Submitted 1398 days ago
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