Mugged (22 page)
There was some hint of the justification in the first thirteen seconds with King lunging at Officer Powell. So KTLA cut that part out. I could win all arguments, too, if I could alter the evidence. Chambers boasts on the KTLA Web site that the tape “spurred a national debate on race relations and excessive use of force by police.”
Newscaster Ron Olsen also touts his Peabody Award for the edited tape that incited the LA riots.
News director Warren Cereghino was the man responsible for putting the edited tape on the air and then giving it to other networks, according to author Lou Cannon.
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KTLA’s executive producer Gerald Ruben responded to criticism of the network for distributing such an inflammatory tape by saying, “If we hadn’t aired it, someone else would have.” That’s the perennial justification of the criminal:
If I hadn’t raped her, somebody else would have
.
Years later, KTLA arranged for lingerie models to traipse through the set during the weather forecast to spice up the news. At least no one got killed with that ratings ploy.
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A year after the riots, Accuracy in Media chairman Reed Irvine complained to ABC News about its use of the edited King tape. Vice president Stephen Weiswasser responded in a letter, saying: “It is our view that the part of the tape not regularly shown does not shed light on the jury’s action, one way or the other.”
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As the kids say: Duh. Of course the altered video didn’t “shed light on the jury’s action”—the jury saw the full tape and did what any jury would do. The edited tape does, however, shed light on the
riots
, which was the point.
In the end, the elite’s more exciting version of the news became reality: The police officers who beat Rodney King were prosecuted a second time and two of the four convicted by jurors who were well aware not only of the deadly riots but of the calumnies directed at the first trial’s jurors.
Four months after the cops were duly convicted, the trial of Damian Williams and his cohorts began. Representative Waters sprang into action by demanding that the charges be dismissed. “The whole community,” she said, “is going to organize to ask the district attorney and the judge to dismiss the charges against Williams.”
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In her statesmanlike way, Waters suggested that the trial of Denny’s attackers was an opportunity to take “revenge” for the acquittals in the Rodney King case.
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John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, said he didn’t want Williams’s trial “to send out a message to all of the African American residents, and especially young African American men, that we’re going to throw the book at these three guys and the same thing is going to happen to you if you get out of line.”
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I’m sorry, but isn’t that
precisely
the message we want to send?
Reginald Denny’s assailants were acquitted of all felony charges—save Damian Williams, who was convicted on one count of mayhem. Williams and Watson were found guilty of only misdemeanor assault. The jury hung on all other charges.
In response, not one white person looted, despite being “virtually invited” to by the absence of police on Rodeo Drive. In that case, we were required to accept the jury’s verdict and not expect a reaction, much less a second, federal civil rights trial, despite the blindingly obvious fact that the defendants attacked Denny because he was white. The jurors had spoken, the case was over, the criminal justice system had run its course—let’s all accept that justice has been served and move on.
Upon his release from prison, Williams received a job from Waters.
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This lunatic was allowed to roam free, causing havoc wherever she went because, as Shelby Steele said, “the larger society feels it doesn’t have the moral authority to call her on it.”
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For years, it was required that, whenever race was mentioned, all thinking be shut down.
So much evil has been done by liberals in the name of race relations.
KTLA created a situation where if there were an acquittal of the Rodney King officers—highly likely given the facts—the city would burn.
The black stripper, Crystal Mangum, falsely accused Duke lacrosse players of gang-raping her, but was never prosecuted for her lies. Within the next few years, she was charged with child abuse, arson and attempted murder—and convicted of child abuse. (As we go to press she is on trial for murdering her boyfriend.)
Two years after Lemrick Nelson was acquitted for the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum—and the
New York Times
concluded that the verdict “leaves unresolved who killed Yankel Rosenbaum”
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—he pleaded guilty to slashing a fellow student with a razor blade.
Within less than a year of being shot by Bernie Goetz, two of the “youths,” mere panhandlers according to much of the press, had committed violent crimes—Barry Allen had mugged an acquaintance and James Ramseur had raped and sodomized a pregnant woman.
Half a dozen white people were beaten, robbed or sexually assaulted in response to hysterical media coverage of a hoax paint attack in the Bronx and a gang attack in Howard Beach.
Rewriting the facts to prove racial discrimination in lending, in 1992, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston produced a famous study allegedly proving that blacks were discriminated against in mortgage lending. The study was a sham. It was riddled with preposterous errors, suggesting, for example, that some loans required the banks to pay interest to borrowers. Once the errors were removed, no evidence of discrimination remained.
But the study fit the America-is-still-racist myth, so the Federal Reserve charged ahead and imposed suicidal mortgage lending policies on banks. Among other things, the new guidelines directed that banks stop requiring borrowers to have a credit history and mandated that banks accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as down payments.
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It would be like ordering professional baseball teams to ignore how a player hits, runs and catches, but to accept broken bones as a qualification.
The bad loans, destined to default, were spread throughout the economy in the form of mortgage-backed securities—bundling the good loans with the crap loans. When the loans collapsed, so did the economy. Our financial system had to be blown up so that millionaires at the Boston Fed and Federal Reserve could feel good about themselves for rooting out nonexistent racial discrimination.
How many lives have been ruined to fulfill liberals’ fantasy that America is still a racist country?
And now the media are impatient for another Rodney King explosion to help Obama’s reelection campaign. Then, if he is not reelected, the media will have primed the public to believe that only racism can explain it.
Isn’t ObamaCare wildly popular with the public? College graduates love living at home with their parents! The economy is great!
They plot their reporting of the news to make people believe Obama can’t lose—except for racism.
TRIAL OF THE CENTURY
Mark Fuhrman’s Felony Conviction
In 1995, Americans discovered it was considered a graver offense to use “the N-word” than to cut a woman’s head off. (Unless you happened to be a black rap artist or comedian, in which case the nonstop use of that epithet would get you an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar or NAACP Image Award.)
Only one felony conviction came out of the O. J. Simpson trial for a double murder so brutal that one victim’s neck was severed to her spinal cord: the perjury conviction of Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman, for lying about having used the N-word nine and a half years earlier. Meanwhile, despite mounds of incriminating evidence, the jury acquitted OJ of murdering Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman after only three hours of deliberation.
The end of paralyzing groupthink on race began with the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial. Unknown to the elites, the world changed at 10:07 a.m. on October 3, 1995, when an estimated 150 million people
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turned on their TVs to watch the verdict. As blacks across the country erupted in cheers at the acquittal, it was the end of white guilt in America.
Thanks to the miracle of television, nearly everyone in the country had seen the same evidence the jury saw, unfiltered by the KTLA newsroom or hapless reporters like Jim Dwyer of the
New York Times
. Ninety-five million Americans had watched the slow-speed car chase that ended with OJ’s arrest.
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For the next year, a small cable channel, Court TV, was getting ratings as if it were running the Super Bowl every night.