Moments of bravery and cowardice in the news coverage of Alex Pretti’s killing

Truth-telling is hard when your bosses are bootlickers

It’s been incredibly sad to see my beloved news industry struggle so publicly with whether and how to tell the truth about the wanton, brutal killing of Alex Pretti -- someone who did absolutely nothing wrong –- at the hands of the masked federal agents terrorizing his city.

The “narrative,” as the political reporters call it, is simple. A good man, an ICU nurse at the VA, exercising his constitutional rights and helping up a fellow observer who had been pushed to the ground, was pepper-sprayed, tackled, beaten and shot 10 times by a bunch of vicious thugs.

All you have to do is watch the videos to know that’s true. There is no good-faith debate about the facts.

Then top officials of the U.S. government immediately spread damnable and easily disproven lies about him and what happened – and blocked any kind of independent investigation.

Why, you might ask, would they lie so quickly, so outrageously, and so transparently?

Because it works.

The lies themselves should have been a major story: “Trump Administration lies about brutal Border Patrol killing seen on video.” (See, as a model, David Kurtz at TPM.) But none of the major news organizations went that way.

Instead, Trump’s propaganda organs, led by Fox News, jumped to attention and started spreading disinformation. And mainstream-media outlets also tempered their truth-telling with those administration lies.

If you were watching the news coverage in real time, like I was, you could see the lies working. Some news organizations simply resorted to stenography. Some contrasted the administration account with the videos, but left it at that.

It was particularly fascinating to watch the New York Times, where you could see bursts of bold, direct, honest coverage of what reporters had seen with their own eyes. And then you could sense a countervailing tide, presumably directed by more senior leaders, of coverage mired in both-sidesism and weasel words, carefully measured so as to not “take sides” even when one side was the truth and the other was lies.

(I see signs of an incipient civil war, frankly, between braver reporters and editors – possibly including the weekend crew – and soul-killing senior editors like Joe Kahn, Carolyn Ryan, and Patrick Healy. But that’s just speculation at this point.)

To its credit, the Times quickly recognized the significance of the story, leading the site with a bare-bones story and a headline -- in the active voice -- less than two hours after the shooting took place.

And then the Times did something very smart, that was ultimately emulated by many other news organizations. It got its crack video investigations team to perform and write up an analysis, which showed both that Pretti was holding a phone, not a gun, and that his legally carried handgun was removed from his person before the shots were fired.

And the Times leaned heavily on that analysis in its coverage, rather than parroting the lies and splitting the difference between the two accounts, like many other outlets did, including the Washington Post.

In fact, by late afternoon, the Times headline, though qualified, was pretty bold: “Videos Appear to Contradict Federal Accounts of Fatal Shooting.”

In the evening, the lead story was admirably straightforward: “Man Killed by Federal Agents Was Holding a Phone, Not a Gun.”

And Sunday morning, I cheered. Just as I’d hoped, some editor actually removed the “appear to” qualifier from the essential headline, to read: “Videos Contradict Federal Accounts of Fatal Shooting.”

But my celebration was short lived. Soon, that headline was replaced with the weaker “State and Federal Officials Clash Over Shooting Inquiry”.

Then the Times published this horror, co-authored by one of its White House correspondents: “How the Trump Administration Rushed to Judgment in Minneapolis Shooting.”

There was no “rush to judgment”. It was a rush to propaganda. And rather than forcefully calling out the administration’s outrageous disinformation campaign, the authors shamefully cast it as “a race to control the narrative.”

It appears the senior editors are back in full charge again. The banner headline in this morning’s Times print edition is: “Minnesota and Federal Officials Clash Again Over the Facts in a Fatal Shooting.”

There are also repeated signs in the Times of editors attaching mealy-mouthed headlines to what are actually pretty tough articles – as if the reporters and their assignment editors were at odds with the editors writing the headlines.

The article by Charles Homans headlined “Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis” was in fact a profound indictment of what Trump has wrought there. The lead:

Donald Trump’s most profound break with American democracy, evident in his words and actions alike, is his view that the state’s relationship with its citizens is defined not by ideals or rules but rather by expressions of power, at the personal direction of the president. That has been clear enough for years, but I had not truly seen what it looked like in person until I arrived in Minneapolis, my hometown, to witness what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge.

And this morning, there was a laughably naïve headline – “A Crisis of Confidence for ICE and Border Patrol as Clashes Escalate” over a strong and interesting article that was actually about the “growing sense of fear, frustration and disillusionment among some current and former immigration officials.”

Overall, the Wall Street Journal has been surprisingly bold; the Washington Post has been surprisingly meek.

To its credit, ABC World News Tonight was intensely skeptical of the government accounts on Sunday, ending with the conclusions that “it’s not clear who, if anyone, will be held accountable.”

NBC Nightly News gave plenty of airtime to administration liars, but did a creditable dissection of the videos, which they noted “did not appear to show him brandishing a weapon, as DHS has stated.”

By contrast, the Bari Weiss-led CBS Evening News on Sunday unsurprisingly split the difference, simply referring to “starkly different accounts” about what happened.

I argued after the shooting of Renee Good that nothing makes people lose trust in news organizations as much as when they’ve seen something with their own eyes — and then see news coverage that doesn’t comport with what they themselves experienced.

And I think that will be even more true with the Pretti killing. Furthermore, the Trump administration lies will not age well. Indeed, we see signs that even Trump and other Republicans are now hedging – and that even Fox News seems to be backing away.

History will vindicate the reporters and editors out there who want to tell the truth -- and hopefully the senior editors getting in their way will wither away.