I hadn’t planned on watching the local news in LA, because I know they are all shite. I also know they slashed their operating budgets, they hired unqualified teenagers with bleached hair and tanned skin, and they focus on flash over substance, but it turned out my fiancée’s house was encircled by stores and businesses being looted, a curfew had been imposed, and I needed to know actual information pertinent to what was occurring literally on the doorstep. So I tuned in. Ugh.
A note about the internet and social media and newspapers online: Nobody handled (or is handling, as this is ongoing) this crisis well. All are as guilty of the same crimes of ignorance and uninformed opinion as local TV news. One of the biggest struggles of this crisis is there is literally nobody to turn to for unbiased, factual, relevant, timely information. I’m not employing hyperbole here. There is nobody in Southern California with any sense of journalism who has either the intellect, the expertise, or the financial means to report on this story. Pointing a camera at something and saying “Hey! Look at that!” is not journalism. As much as the main focus of these protests are police failures, the failures of the press are certainly being brought front and center, as well. I’m going to single out one “reporter” (those are sarcastic air-quotes) named Brittney Hopper, but don’t assume she is the worst of the bunch. She is sadly typical of the crap I watched yesterday, and her specific form of crap is merely memorable in how truly bad she is at her job. I’m not saying she deserved to have rocks thrown at her in her newsvan last night in the CVS parking lot, but I’m not not saying that, either. Hopper was assigned to cover the protests in Long Beach. I’m not saying she was the wrong choice for the job, but if I was an assignment editor and I wanted someone who could gain the trust of the largely African American group of protestors, an eight pound blonde would not have been my first, second, or twenty-third choice. But one assumes the pickings are slim over at CBS2/KCAL9. A note for those not living in the LA area: Two rival TV stations share the same news team for budget reasons, and of course because we all know that fewer choices for news is always better (?!). So away Hopper went to Long Beach. Things started to get beyond her ability long before the looting started. Whether it was the guy on the street she chose to interview live without either she or a producer talking with him ahead of time, who said “I am a Marine Corps veteran, f*ck the police! F*ck the police! F*ck f*ck f*ck the f*cking police!” or the kid on the skateboard (guessing he was 12 or 13) who kept skating behind her with both middle fingers pointed in her direction, Hopper was out of her depth. She could not control a crowd of drunk lemmings, let alone deal with a protest filled with angry people. Then the looting started. Hopper was at The Pike, an outdoor shopping center not far from the Queen Mary. Now, I don’t mean to belittle the damage and loss of property suffered by property owners, because it is real and heartbreaking, but frankly every police chief and sheriff In Southern California has talked about little else in their largely unchallenged press conferences and interviews, so I’m going to assume that as a given and move on. Throughout the day and into the night, Hopper kept injecting herself into the story. She was experiencing this... it was all happening to her... it wasn’t about the protesters or the police or the citizens of the city, and it certainly wasn’t about George Floyd... it was about Brittney Hopper. At no point was this more evident than when she said on-air that what she was seeing was “like a war zone” or “like a third world country.” Maybe she has experience in war zones and developing nations, and kudos to her if she has, but The Pike in Long Beach has a Hooters and a Sunglasses Hut, so although there were some broken windows and other damage to property, the comparison seems at best insensitive to both the residents and the protesters. And so as the evening dragged on, and KCAL and KCBS cut from one bit of looting to another, no context, no substance, no coverage of the largely peaceful groups of protesters, Hopper ended up at a CVS pharmacy, where she was shocked, shocked she’ll tell you, to find no police presence. And as she was speculating about what might be going on inside the CVS, pointing out that there was no way she was going to venture inside because guessing about it live on-air was the more professional way to go, someone threw a rock at her windshield, an event so monumental to the life of Brittney Hopper that she posted it on her social media. If it seems as if I’m being unduly harsh towards Hopper, I probably am. As I said, everyone covering the story was as inept as she was. Over on ABC7, they got 45 seconds of footage of people running out of a store that they loved so much they showed it non stop for nearly two solid hours. And on NBC4, after having been shamed by Lebron James for not showing any of the peaceful protests, Robert Kovacik held up an iPad and showed seven seconds of a peaceful protest in Colorado. It was the protest where everyone stayed still and chanted “I can’t breathe” the entire length of time George Floyd was crushed to death by a police officer... very moving if you haven’t seen it. NBC4 couldn’t be bothered to upload the video; they just had a guy hold up his tablet for a few seconds to prove they weren’t just focused on the destruction... then they immediately returned to focusing on the destruction. I could lament that at a time when I needed to know what was going on, no news agency existed to inform me, but instead — and unlike Brittney Hopper — I choose to not make it about me. The changes that need to occur for everyone in our country need to begin with a substantive conversation. That means people skilled at asking questions and holding subjects accountable need to put people with opposing viewpoints in a room and get them talking, and the public needs to hear and react to those conversations, and from that public debate, new ideas and even new leaders can emerge. That’s how the change is going to happen. And that is exactly what we didn’t see on the news, and what we didn’t see online, either. -- Kevin M. (RPCV) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAKgmY4DJoPD7fARmnttkKXZvSP3jNeiMGymeK1Nwj5Y%3DDWjPkA%40mail.gmail.com.
