Roland Martin, Rick Sanchez and CNN Blow Off The Real Story. Again

[Joanne98]

by BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon

Having black reporters in the newsroom ought to make a difference in how stories are covered. But often it doesn't. The August 26 arrest of a black Brunswick GA preacher allegedly counter-protesting at a right wing demonstration against universal health care briefly made national news, mostly because there was a few seconds video of the arrest. The lesson, CNN's Roland Martin sternly warned us, was to obey the cops. You wouldn't know it from CNN or Fox, but the arrested preacher was a man with a forty year record of fruitful advocacy, and not a “counter-protestor” at all. But news and journalism nowadays are two very different things.



Roland Martin, Rick Sanchez and CNN Blow Off The Real Story. Again.

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

“A real journalist, rather riffing lazily on the “angry black guy gets what he deserves from local cops” theme might have asked who the arrested guy was”

At the age of 70, Rev. Zach Lyde has been in the storm a long while. A lifetime activist from a family of the same, a second generation Baptist preacher and member of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, Rev. Lyde is the living intersection of multiple streams of African American culture and struggle.

When Rev. Lyde stopped on the sidewalk outside the Brunswick GA post office August 26 to engage right wing teabaggers demonstrating against the advent of what they called “socialized medicine” in a spirited discussion, he was manhandled by police and arrested for protesting without a permit. Since there was video footage of the incident, the arrest made the news hole on CNN, where Rick Sanchez and Roland Martin used it to frame the kind of self-serving, lazy authoritarian spiel that fills the time on network and cable news shows nowadays.


To be fair, Rick Sanchez at least noted that Rev. Lyde was trying to engage the teabaggers in a discussion, maybe even an important one. But the CNN video showed only a brief exchange with cops that ended with Rev. Lyle face down on the sidewalk being cuffed. And Roland Martin was having none of it. In Martin's universe, passers by apparently don't talk to demonstrators, and if they do perhaps they should accept the consequences. The cops had done the right thing, CNN's Roland Martin continued, in allowing an exchange between white demonstrators and a passing black pedestrian to escalate into a situation in which police drew tasers on a 70 year old man, kicked and assaulted him and hauled him off to jail for protesting without a permit. Good citizens don't question the police. Good citizens obey the police.

A real journalist, rather riffing lazily on the “angry black guy gets what he deserves from local cops” theme might have asked who the arrested guy was, or what the heck he had to say. A real journalist might have picked up the phone and talked to somebody in Brunswick besides the police. In Roland Martin's case he could have two or three lowly interns or gofers make those calls for him.

At Black Agenda Report, we don't have interns or gofers, but we are real journalists. We did what a responsible black journalist ought to do. We picked up the phone and made some calls to find out who Rev. Lyde was, and what he says happened.

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