The worst of it was not even Monday night, when things came unglued. Tuesday was much worse, I think. In the hours leading up to Baltimore's imposed 10 p.m. curfew, as cops held a line against protesters at a particular intersection, the way the television media lurked around waiting for the curfew to arrive, and also, it seemed, for something to happen, was borderline disgraceful.
The problem was not that they were covering the story. Obviously the story needs to be covered. In fact, that's an understatement. What happened to Freddie Gray - exactly what happened - needs to be divulged, and the obvious anger over his death and more importantly the circumstances in which his short life played out, need to be recognized. That's not to say I condone what happened in Baltimore. I don't. And I think the viral video of the mother slapping her riotous 16-year-old son upside the head should not be considered amusing, but instead an inspiration - reassurance in an uneasy time that common sense and restraint are still out there.
Her name is Toya Graham, and she deserves a Parent of the Year award...no joke. A national round of applause, please...!!
But there is a root cause to the trouble in Baltimore that lies deeper than Freddie Gray. Unrest like this doesn't happen on its own. It's almost never a single flash point, but rather the result of something that's been building, and allowed to sit around, for a while. It's kind of like old cans of paint and soiled rags sharing space on the basement floor next to the furnace. Just because another day goes by without a fire doesn't mean combustion is not a distinct possibility at some point in the future if something is not done to change the situation.
So Tuesday night, it made perfect sense that America would be watching, and that it should be watching. There is a subtext of race relations - and police relations - at play here that reaches the lives of all Americans, clear out to the furthest rural regions, to that lonely intersection out on the edge of some tiny little town, that sees a car pass maybe once every half hour. It's critical that the people out there understand what's going on in Baltimore, and what went on in Ferguson last year, and Cincinnati in 2001 and Los Angeles in '92, and Watts in '65...and Baltimore in '68. And perhaps start wondering why it keeps happening, periodically, in the same way, for largely the same reason, 50 years on.
By that reckoning, TV media needed to be in Baltimore, telling the story. They did NOT, however, need to be in the middle of it, as though they were part of it. As though every newscaster present was suddenly a Baltimore resident or native, with a personal stake in what was going down. They did not need to be so embedded that protesters were disrupting their broadcasts, cops were asking them to get out of the way, and city officials (Baltimore council people, etc...ACTUAL Baltimore residents...) were telling them, on camera, that their presence was agitating the crowd as much as the cops were.
They didn't need to be directly on the street, coughing from what they thought was tear gas (but turned out to be smoke bombs), moving with the crowd, trying to interview people who were in no mind set - no mood - to be interviewed. Fox News was the absolute worst. Geraldo Rivera was jammed right in there, right in the middle of the crowd (with Sean Hannity back in the studio, sickeningly UNABLE to keep from turning the whole thing into a liberal/conservative debate, because that's all he knows how to do...:-/...), shouldering his way through the torqued up masses, confronting people, directing his camera man to go here or there. And wherever the cameraman turned, his bright, glaring camera light swept across another agitated face in the tense Baltimore night. It was exploitative and utterly pointless, did not contribute anything to the dialogue.
Those are the moments when there's no doubt that what television news does in this day and age rarely contributes to any dialogue about anything, but instead mostly gets in the way...
Gets in the way, and often gets it wrong, in its never-ending quest to help sell as many cars, cases of beer and bags of tortilla chips as possible, which lamentably has become its primary charge in the last twenty years.
