Tag Archives: Ferguson

The news media are a major presence in the Baltimore riots. Are they providing an accurate picture of what's going on?

Three social facts that guarantee it won’t be long before the nation’s attention focuses on another divided community or insensitive Tweet that yet again reveals the permanence of racism.

The San Francisco Giants have won their third World Series in five years, continuing their trend of winning every even-numbered year. The Giants’ principal owner, Charles B. Johnson is known for his support of the conservative PAC American Crossroads but overall the team and its fans have been leaders in progressive causes.

The use of body cams by police in Rialto, California led to a 60 percent drop in use of police force with complaints against police officers falling by almost 90 percent. The only obstacle preventing every police department from making cameras standard is cost — $300 to $400 per unit and oversight of video recordings.

The US police are probably among the most heavily armed in the world but that has not stopped urban disorder from happening. Long term solutions will not be found by turning police forces into the paramilitary outfits we are currently seeing on the streets of St Louis.

A hashtag campaign confronts the racial biases in the images we see and challenges the opinions we embrace of young, black Americans. This is social media at its best, offering a real-time counter-narrative to the media’s typically negative and stereotypical imagery of young black people as something to be feared.