NBC Nightly News (6/10/22)

This week on CounterSpin: In what is being reported as an “abrupt” or “surprise” development, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, whose shtick relies heavily on legislative roadblocking, has agreed to sign on to a package that includes some $369 billion for “climate and energy proposals.”

The New York Times reports that the deal represents “the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress”—a statement that cries out for context.

The package is hundreds of pages long, and folks are only just going through it as we record on July 28, but already some are suggesting we not allow an evident, welcome break in Beltway inertia to lead to uncritical cheering for policy that may not, in fact, do what is necessary to check climate disruption, in part because it provides insufficient checks on fossil fuel production.

But journalistic context doesn’t just mean comparing policy responses to real world needs; it means recognizing and reporting how the impacts of the climate crisis—like heat waves—differ depending on who we are and where we live. There’s a way to tell the story that connects to policy and planning, but that centers human beings. We talked about that during last year’s heat wave with Portland State University professor Vivek Shandas.

Transcript: ‘That’s Lethal, Communities Completely Exposed to This Kind of Heat’

Also on the show: Although it’s taken a media back seat to other scourges, the US reality of Black people being killed by law enforcement, their families’ and communities’ grief and outrage meeting no meaningful response, grinds on: Robert Langley in South Carolina, Roderick Brooks in Texas, Jayland Walker in Ohio.

Anthony Guglielmi

Major news media show little interest in lifting up non-punitive community responses, or in demanding action from lawmakers. So comfortable are they with state-sanctioned racist murder, the corporate press corps haven’t troubled to highlight the connections between outrages—and the system failure they betray.

Exhibit A: Beltway media have twisted their pearls about the US Secret Service having deleted text messages relevant to the January 6 investigation. No one seems to be buying the claim from Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi that the messages were  “erased as part of a device-replacement program” that just happened to take place after the inspector general’s office had requested them.

Laquan McDonald

Now, many people, but none in the corporate press, would think it relevant to point out that Guglielmi came to the Secret Service after his stint with the Chicago Police Department, during which he presided over that department’s lying about the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald. There, Guglielmi claimed that missing audio from five different police dashcam videos—audio that upended police’s story that McDonald had been lunging toward officer Jason Van Dyke, when in fact he’d been walking away—had disappeared due to “software issues or operator error.”

As noted by Media Matters’ Matt Gertz, Chicago reporters following up on the story discovered that CPD dashcam videos habitually lacked audio—Guglielmi himself acknowledged that “more than 80% of the cameras have non-functioning audio ‘due to operator error or, in some cases, intentional destruction,’” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

A dry-eyed observer might conclude that Guglielmi was hired, was elevated to the Secret Service not despite but because of his vigorous efforts to mislead the public and lawmakers about reprehensible law enforcement behavior. But I think it’s not quite right to think this means the elite press corps aren’t sufficiently interested in Guglielmi; the point is that they aren’t sufficiently interested in Laquan McDonald.

CounterSpin talked about the case with an important figure in it, writer and activist Jamie Kalven. We hear some of that conversation this week.

Transcript: ‘How Many Other Laquan MacDonalds Are There?’