Televised Tinnitus

The activist movement, Black Lives Matter, began in July 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. It is a movement the people had to create, because left to its own devices, the Dominant Culture and its Police State, are not concerned with body counts.

The United States does not keep an accurate count of people killed every year by the police. The U.S. government deliberately lost track of how many people were killed in Afghanistan or Iraq — but that’s a story for another time.

The British national newspaper, The Guardian, started The Counted project. From the website — “The Counted is a project by the Guardian … working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.”

Someone else has to count our obscenities for us.

The Counted projects US police killings are headed for 1,100 this year, with black Americans twice as likely to die.

The activist movement, Black Lives Matter, began in July 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. It is a movement the people had to create, because left to its own devices, the Dominant Culture and its Police State, are not concerned with body counts.

The Dominant Culture, FOX News in particular, hates Black Lives Matter, and is skewing their news and editorial content to discredit, minimize, and ultimately are trying to eliminate the movement. Watch this clip of Fox and Friends‘ weekend co-hosts: Tucker Carlson, Anna Kooiman, and Clayton Morris. I’ve watched this clip five times and then I just listened to it another five times.

This is not an extemporaneous conversation three people are having on a couch in front of television cameras. This is staged, tightly rehearsed, and everyone’s reading their lines from a teleprompter. There is very little cross talk. As soon as someone finishes their sound bite another talking head immediately jumps in with their sound bite that collectively add up to a dismissal of Stephen Colbert and disparagement of the Black Lives Matter movement.

You know they’re reading from teleprompters when Clayton Morris launched into a lengthy quote from BLM organizer Patrick Waldo about how Colbert received the bracelet. You don’t see him reading from a piece of paper … he’s reading from a teleprompter. They all are.

There are a few moments when the co-hosts stumble on a word, but these aren’t moments from an actual conversation. In a real back and forth conversation there’s cross talk and a collection of “ums” and “ers” people naturally sprinkle in their speech while they’re choosing the appropriate word to use, but the crew from Fox and Friends stumble over a word because they’re misreading what’s on their teleprompter.

The piece ends with a lame joke from Clayton Morris and then Anna Kooiman tells the viewers to stay tuned for a segment featuring a guest from the 20/20 leaders of America. She describes the group as a bi-partisan organization trying to “go against” the Black Lives Matter movement in a more “peaceful way.”

I Googled “20/20 leaders of America” and found Ashley Bell, former Georgia county commissioner, the Republican co-chairman of the 20/20 Club and ” Rand Paul supporter. Bell lost his Hall County commissioner seat shortly after switching parties … to the Republican side. I dug deeper into the The 20/20 Leaders of America, LLC (“20/20 Club”) and found connections to Conservative Black Republican organizations.

Of course FOX would find the Black Conservatism of The 20/20 leaders of America more acceptable than Black Lives Matter. Bill O’Reilly compared the Black Lives Matter movement to the gestapo.

But as Brandon Ellington Patterson writes in Mother Jones…

“The movement is calling for an end to violence, and its national voices have condemned violence against the police on numerous occasions. But the right insists it is to blame for murders of police officers. The number of peaceful protests dwarfs the number that have seen looting and property destruction, but conservative pundits insist Black Lives Matter protesters are “thugs” and that the movement’s rhetoric encourages violence. Just as they sought to discredit the movement to upset the Jim Crow social order, these right-wing voices now seek to discredit the movement to upend the current system of racist policing.”Murders of police aren’t the fault of the Black Lives Matter movement. But don’t expect to hear that on Fox News anytime soon.”

No … on FOX there will always be more staged “conversations” and useless conservative alternatives to the real work of simply counting the dead. And then demanding the killings stop.

Televised Tinnitus

September 16, 2015