patrick.net

My favorite thing ever is when the NYT does a profile on a lib that did something bad and needs an image boost. They always have two pictures: the first has the subject in their house wearing a sweater and looking out a closed window. This creates the impression that they are hiding from a mob and just want to be left alone, and the NYT will run this pic regardless of whether the subject started the fight in the first place. The second picture has the subject walking in a park or a garden looking pensive, as if to suggest that they will bravely push through their fear and ultimately triumph over the bad guys.

I won’t spend much time on this developing ICE shooting story, except to say that the real story is the coverage of the story. Here’s this morning’s New York Times home page, with wall-to-wall coverage of the Minneapolis ICE-related tragedy. ...

Notice what’s missing:

no discussion of why the stop occurred,
no analysis of agent threat perception, and
no comparisons with hundreds of similar police shootings, including at least two other recent fatalities involving ICE firing into SUVs. ...

Yesterday, the New York Post ran a story headlined, “Renee Nicole Good was Minneapolis ‘ICE Watch’ ‘warrior’ who trained to resist feds before shooting.” She and her lesbian wife recently moved back to Minneapolis from Canada, where they’d briefly relocated in protest of Trump’s 2024 re-election. According to the Post, Good —a mother of three— was a card-carrying, trained ICE-resistance activist.

Good’s wife, Rebecca, was busy confronting ICE agents (outside the SUV) at the time of the shooting. The Post reported she was filmed sobbing, “it’s my fault,” after the shots rang out and she realized Renee had been struck. “I made her come down here, it’s my fault,” she can be heard saying in a video filmed by a local resident.

According to the Post’s story, both women were members of “ICE Watch,” a group that tracks the movements of ICE agents and coordinates ways to interfere with them. For instance, ICE Watch recently shared an Instagram post that encouraged members to bring items to help barricade the streets around where the shooting took place, including suggesting bringing dried-up Christmas trees to burn.

So, they’re not super smart. But still.

The story also noted that, according to DHS statistics, ICE agents have faced an unprecedented spike in car attacks, surging by +3,200% over the last year. The agent who shot Ms. Good was himself recently injured in a different car attack last June, in Minneapolis, under similar circumstances. According to a New York Times report, the agent was dragged 100 yards after trying to disable the driver with a stun gun, and required medical treatment.

Notwithstanding the growing evidence that Ms. Good and her wife deliberately intended to get in harm’s way, this media psy-op will probably work to shift the national focus from fraud to ICE enforcement, at least in the short term. Attention, after all, is limited. It’s a zero-sum market. It’s neither good nor bad; it is just how the psy-wars go.

Lesbo who FAFO'd in Minneapolis:

Assuming you are masochistic enough to consume corporate media’s articles, when reading this type of piece, always first ask: “do all the quoted sources agree with each other, and varying expert opinions are conspicuously absent?” If so, you can safely ignore all the quotes and focus just on the factual reporting of what actually happened.

Believe it or not, this kind of reporting is what is most responsible for killing legacy media and driving people to social media for news. On social media, folks actually find the diversity of voices and opinions that is lacking in contemporary corporate media. Even allowing for all the noise of misinformation, outright lies, silliness, and unintelligent commentary, Twitter’s “town square” beats whatever the Times is serving up.

At least the bias is obvious on Twitter/X, which is all anybody asked for anyway.

It would be trivially easy for big news publishers like the Times to give readers right-click access to quoted experts’ biographies, previous comments, publication history, and political donation records. But they don’t. Think about that. And think about the claim that publications like the Times allegedly exist to “inform” us.