CSotD: Campaigns and Complaints
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David Cohen comments on Louisiana’s “police buffer law,” which went into effect this month and prohibits reporters or others at the scene of an incident being within 25 feet of an officer who has ordered them back.
This seems like a solution in search of a problem, unless the problem you’re attempting to solve is something like the George Floyd murder, which might not have led to a conviction if a bystander hadn’t turned her camera on it, from less that 25 feet away.
I’m reasonably sure the law is aimed at those bystanders, because most reporters have reasonably good relations with police. “Reasonably” is relative: Having had a son who was a first-responder, I got to hear what the cops and firefighters thought of my colleagues, and several of them were laughed at behind their backs.
I remember one reporter who asked the head of the border patrol something particularly stupid at a press conference, to which he responded, “If you keep asking questions like that, we’re going to stop inviting you to our parties.”
She wasn’t around long. She became a network correspondent where she could be fed intelligent questions by her producer.
Another TV reporter who didn’t last long was at a murder-scene briefing where she asked “How did the killer get through all this yellow tape?”
I did all right. I was issued a press card at one paper but never had an occasion to use it. I didn’t even have one at the other two papers where I was employed or at any of the newspapers for which I freelanced.
Police buffer laws aren’t really meant for the press. They’re aimed at the nosy public, and, as the Pro Publica report notes, one legislator who opposes them wanted to change the name of her state’s law into “The I Don’t Want the World to See the Police Kill an Unarmed Innocent Man Like George Floyd Again, So I Want To Protect Bad Cops and Violate Free Speech Act.”
Her amendment was defeated.
Juxtaposition of the Day
These guys can’t both be right. Either the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Recession is over or it’s not, and it depends on who you ask and what they decide to tell you.
As Bramhall says, Trump will happily blame Biden and Harris for a fall, even if there isn’t one, while Margulies points out how the public is disturbed by a failing economy, which assumes there is one.
And as the saying goes, “If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.”
Which is to say that it depends on who you ask, what they decide to tell you and whether you know how it all works in the first place. I used to get angry looks at a department head meeting because if someone said July was down X%, I would ask “Is that month-to-month or year-to-year?” because it makes a very large difference.
As I guess they discovered when the paper went out of business, though I’ll bet they blamed the Internet.
Similarly, when someone says that this is the market’s biggest drop in two years, it’s perfectly all right to ask “By dollars or by percentage?” but they’ll just get mad at you for questioning their wisdom.
Though not as mad as they’ll get if you respond, “Two years? So what? Are you investing or playing the ponies?”
Best to just tent your fingers and say, “Mmm.”
Changing the subject is always a wise move, and Jack Ohman (Tribune) turns the (alleged) depression into a rally. Not a stockmarket rally, but a political rally, as polls show Harris/Walz starting to do better than Trump/Vance, though it’s not clear how much of the trend is H/W doing the right thing and T/D tripping over their own impediments.
And that, too, depends on who you ask and etcetera.
Matt Golding has an idea of what’s going on up at our end of the globe, and he packs a lot of accoutrements into that simple little cartoon.
Ella Baron works on a much larger canvas and in far greater detail than Golding, and everything here is hilarious, including the rich laughter that infuriates MAGAts but seems to tickle everyone else.
Ann Telnaes picks up on a Harris rallying cry and expands it into a history lesson. While Baron makes Vance’s Neanderthal attitude towards women look childish and foolish, Telnaes is, as so often, at her best when she is furious, though the women she depicts are calm and resolved.
She’s not issuing a challenge. She’s stating a fact.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
It’s the same the whole world over, because, while John F. Baker III calls himself “The Common Wombat,” he’s in Baltimore, while Katauskas lives where there are real wombats, and yet they both dwell among permanent snowflakes in search of things to be angry over.
Though the British are finding senseless anger less amusing as seen in our
Juxtaposition of the Day #3
Three different explanations for the violent anti-immigrant riots that are shaking Britain, thanks to misinformation about a knife assault on little girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. The three fatalities and six wounded was initially blamed on a Muslim migrant.
Later information showed that he was native to Britain, the son of Rwandan immigrants, which has its own irony since anti-migrant forces in England hope to deport migrants to Rwanda for resettlement.
Jennings blames the riots on the press, while Riddell places the blame on far-right political leader Nigel Farage, and it’s not hard to link their constant anti-migrant stances to the assaults on migrant shelters since the stabbings.
But Brown’s accusation may be closer to the target, since much of the toxic misinformation was on the Internet and Elon Musk has been at center of things, celebrating and sharing hateful posts and reportedly stifling those of progressive activists.
And then, Nick Anderson (Tribune) points out, alternately insulting his fleeing advertisers and threatening them with lawsuits for not wanting to be associated with a toxic website.
It could be worse. You could be charged with bailing out a foundering Twitter while your boss drills holes in the boat.
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