The movement for black lives is alive and well across America and on social media, but you probably wouldn't know that from watching CNN.
Reported incidents of anti-black hate crimes and police-involved deaths are actually higher this year than they were two years ago, when coverage of cops killing people of color was so ubiquitous it was impossible to ignore. One would think this would be front-page news.
But Donald Trump is our president now and the mainstream media apparently no longer has the bandwidth to cover alleged discriminatory treatment and brutality inflicted on African-Americans by police. Cable-news pundits are too busy trying to kill off the campaign-season, ratings-friendly Frankenstein monster they created over the previous two years.
This reality makes the mission of activists like Kimberly Ortiz that much more difficult.
"They're diverting our attention to Trump so we don't have to talk about these issues," the 32-year-old Bronx mother of two said on Monday night. She was standing at the corner of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in Harlem, before she and about 30 other protesters marched through the New York City neighborhood's streets, shouting verbal indictments and obscenities at the two dozen NYPD strategic response officers who shadowed them in police cruisers.
Their flashing lights illuminated the angry black, brown and white faces of Ortiz and her comrades. Smartphone-wielding pedestrians recorded and documented the scene. Members of the press were notably absent.
"The people who have influence are being distracted by the grabbing of the pussies, the Russian spy" investigations, Ortiz added. "I think it's intentional."
A founding member of the pro-Black Lives Matter group NYC Shut It Down, Ortiz spent the evening doing the same thing she and her fellow activists have done every Monday for more than two years now: calling attention to the violent killing of black men, women and children by police or other overtly racist acts.
This week’s subject was Ramarley Graham, an unarmed black teenager who was fatally shot five years ago by an NYPD officer inside the 18-year-old's Bronx home. The killing was witnessed by Graham's 6-year-old brother as well as his grandmother, whom the officer, Richard Haste, also threatened to shoot as she watched her grandson dying on the bathroom floor.
On Sunday after years of stalled criminal and civil rights investigations that resulting in no disciplinary action, let alone jail time, Haste quit his job in lieu of being fired.
An internal affairs probe found the officer guilty of misconduct, saying he had “exercised poor tactical judgment leading up to the discharge of his firearm” and “acted with intent to cause serious physical injury,” which led to Graham’s death.
The story was covered by The New York Times and other local media outlets but drew little or no coverage from national cable news networks like CNN, MSNBC or Fox News — part of a growing trend of flagging mainstream media attention.
"Mass media outlets are very selective on the news they report. We already know that," Ortiz's friend and fellow activist Shannon Jones of Bronxites for NYPD Accountability said on Monday. "This country is not attuned to showing black plight. It's not going to happen over an extended period of time."
Two years ago a slew of disturbing videos of police killing unarmed black men, women and children were plastered all over the 24-hour cable news cycle, making national headlines almost weekly.
In a one-month span late in 2014, police fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Akai Gurley in Brooklyn's East New York neighborhood, while grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City’s Staten Island, respectively, declined to indict the officers who admitted to killing Mike Brown and Eric Garner, who both had been unarmed.
A few months later in April 2015, another onslaught of daily media coverage covered the day-to-day developments in the Eric Harris, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray; this was followed shortly thereafter by white supremacist Dylann Roof’s church massacre in North Charleston, South Carolina, and the mysterious July death of Sandra Bland, the black woman who died in police custody in Texas after a questionable traffic-stop arrest.
But since Trump's election in November, many similarly troubling videos have gone viral on Facebook and Twitter, while the mainstream media has turned a relative blind eye.
Last week self-proclaimed white supremacist James Jackson rode a bus from Baltimore to New York, where just a few blocks from Times Square he fatally stabbed through the chest a randomly selected black man named Timothy Caughman with an 18-inch blade.
Jackson, who now faces terrorism charges, said he chose to do this in New York because it’s the “media capital of the world,” and he wanted to send a message. That message was apparently lost on reporters and editors at the New York Post and the New York Daily News, who for some reason maligned Caughman, rather than his killer, as a career criminal. This has drawn criticism from at least one writer among the Daily News’ ranks as well as members of the pro-Black Lives Matter community.
Media coverage of the racist New York terrorist attack was muted nationally amid the unending litany of stories focusing on Trump — congressional hearings concerning his ridiculous tweets, his party’s latest failed attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare and FBI probes of the Trump campaign's possible ties to Russia.
“Not only was [Caughman] murdered on the streets, but he was murdered again by the media,” organizer Jason Walker of the advocacy group Vocal New York told a crowd last week of more than 100 people gathered at the steps of the Union Square park in Manhattan, before a march organized in the wake of Caughman’s apparent murder.
Other pro-Black Lives Matter activists like Carmen Perez of Justice League NYC, Linda Sarsour of the Arab American Association of New York and Nelini Stamp of Resist Here and the Working Families Party marched with Walker to the corner of Broadway and 38th Street, where supporters created a memorial using bouquets of flowers and flyers bearing Caughman’s likeness.
One protester held up a sign that read "BLACK LIVES STILL MATTER," echoing the idea that America’s national focus has shifted away from the movement.
“[Caughman’s] death is reminding us to not be distracted,” Sarsour told the crowd at one point during the protest. “We don’t see the same type of outrage that we did back in 2014. . . . I want you not to be distracted by the clowns and white supremacists in the White House.”
But Ortiz said this lack of media attention is hardly new for Black Lives Matter supporters and it won't stop her from fighting for what's right.
"As long as our black and brown brothers and sisters are still dying and there is no accountability, I will march until I can't march no longer," she said with a laugh. "And even then, I'll haunt y'all motherfuckers!"
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