Why Media Failure Is A Major Story Of Our Time
The following is a transcript of my radar on Thursday’s edition of “Rising” on Hill TV.
People used to make the mistake of treating media criticism like front-page news when it probably belonged on A2. Most of the time, a story’s substance still warranted more attention than the media’s treatment of it. But if newspapers still mattered today, media criticism would belong front and center just about every single morning. The daily failures of the legacy media are so severe and so damaging, they now deserve just as much attention as the very news our news media is failing to cover.
Nearly a year ago, then-US President Donald Trump notoriously conducted a photoshoot with a Bible in front of St. John s Church in Washington, DC, while authorities.
There have been at least 19 deaths in Bureau of Indian Affairs detention centers in the last five years. Many of the victims had been arrested for petty crimes and were awaiting trial when they died.
(Sharon Chischilly for NPR)
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
When police took Carlos Yazzie to jail on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico after his arrest on a bench warrant in January 2017, he needed immediate medical attention. His foot was swollen and his blood alcohol content was nearly six times the legal limit.
But law enforcement decided that he was fine, jail records show. They put Yazzie in a cramped isolation cell at the Shiprock District Department of Corrections facility instead of taking him to a hospital and then left him unmonitored for six hours without periodic staff checks as required, according to an investigative report. When a guard handing out inmate jumpsuits the next morning stopped at Yazzie s cell, the 44-year-old day laborer was dead. It would later be determined in an autopsy that he died from acute alcohol poisoning, which is easily treatable by medical professionals, experts said.