Riots, lies, and videotape

National Review, May 25, 1992 by John O'Sullivan

From the first news of the acquittal of the four police officers, there was a universal sense of something momentous happening. One picked it up most strongly from the television newscasters who reported the verdict as a straight miscarriage of justice.

Given the evidence of the videotape, that was understandable. But it was also contrary to the orthodox liberal stress on due process, defendants' rights, and the virtues of a system that acquits ten guilty men in order to avoid condemning one innocent.

What would the media reaction have been if the policemen had been acquitted not by a jury, but because the exclusionary rule had prevented the videotape being produced in evidence? A speculation, of course, but not an idle one. Many a guilty defendant has been acquitted to liberal applause on exactly such grounds.

But policemen, of course, are not the usual suspects. That is something on which both the jurymen and media liberals apparently agree.

The jurymen were, I suspect, reluctant to condemn to perhaps eight years in prison those on whom their security rests daily. They might well have found them guilty of an offense that carried no more than 18 months in jail. But they sensed that the political establishment wanted to impose exemplary sentences as a demonstration of its own impartiality. And they did not want that.

Media liberals were anxious to secure convictions as a satisfying climax to their psychodrama of police brutality. As Lorrin Anderson points out to me, "The year-long showing of America's Favorite Home Video was surrounded on television by a barely disguised, lip-smacking Schadenfreude: the cops caught--at last! That's the way it is, folks, here in Amerika."

Ever resourceful, however, they quickly switched themes from police brutality to suburban racism. The jury, which had contained an Asian and an Hispanic, suddenly became "an all-white jury." It was hinted, none too delicately, that L.A. blacks would have been far more scrupulous jurymen-- though I have yet to hear that impartiality requires the inclusion of Koreans in any juries that try rioters.

The broader political import of such reporting was that Ronald Reagan and George Bush were to blame for all this because of their policies of "racial division" illustrated by Willie Horton, who in the mind of Media Liberaldom has now become a symbol of White Racism. (For purposes of comparison, try imagining Ted Bundy as a symbol of feminist hysteria.)

A related theme dominated early reporting of the riots. They too were seen as the legitimate response of Urban and Black America to Reaganism and Bushism--"Rage," "Frustration," "Years of Neglect," and so on. It was the unanimity of the mainstream press and network news that was truly arresting. The same themes, the same policy programs, the same words came tumbling out of the mouths of supposedly independent reporters.

Watching network TV in particular was rather like living in a one-party state whose vast propaganda apparatus was ultimately dependent upon the talents of one overworked clerk. Dissenters were allowed a say on discussion programs. But news reports were ideologically uniform.

Reporters have internalized the liberal analysis of "the urban crisis" so completely that they report it rather than what is in front of them. "Rage," they intone, as cheerful looters rush past the camera laughing at their good fortune. "Protestors," they explain, as criminal gangs beat up passersby.

As with the Rodney King jury, their eyesight is disabled by their imagination. They both witness people carrying out violent attacks--but what they see are defenders of the people.

A propos of which, two points: the jury has the better case for its belief-- and it will influence public debate only once.