December 11, 2002

In this issue

DENNIS BERNSTEIN, who hosts Flashpoints on KPFA-FM, has a great metaphor for what the United States is about to do in Iraq. He and I were on a panel discussing the looming invasion and the news media's coverage at the Bookfair against Warfare Dec. 8, and he was explaining how insane it was to insert tens of thousands of U.S. troops into a region where just about everyone dislikes the United States, where a large part of the population is armed, and when there's no justifiable rationale for the invasion, much less an exit strategy.

"It's like going into a beekeeper's yard with a baseball bat and whacking about 13 hives, just to see what will happen," he said.

We spent a lot of time talking about the way the major media have been almost systematically ignoring dissent.

It's pretty remarkable, even by the not-terribly-high standards of the national media: there isn't even the basic balance, the throwaway quote or two from a critic of the administration's policies. It's as if dissent is invisible.

On a very different level, we're seeing a local example of one-sided news coverage: as A.C. Thompson reports, the San Francisco Chronicle has already run at least 15 stories about the police brawl outside a Union Street bar, and the local TV news has followed suit. Every one of those stories was legitimate news, and the incident was, and is, entirely worth covering and pursuing. There's nothing wrong with how the Chron and the TV stations are handling this.

But this is hardly the only example of police misconduct – or even of police beatings and brutality – that's going on in San Francisco and hardly the only example of the San Francisco Police Department or individual cops trying to cover up problems. As Thompson notes, black kids in the Bayview and Hunters Point get beat up all the time – and those stories never seem to survive more than one day's news coverage.

What do you suppose would happen if every one of those stories got the same page-one treatment as the alleged assaults on two white men in the Marina?

And by the way, what is the mayor doing justifying the Union Street incident as "mutual combat"? Aren't the cops – even off-duty cops – supposed to break up fights?