©Jack Cashill
WND.com - August 27, 2014

Okay, I know, the phrase “media integrity” may strike the reader as an oxymoron like, say, “postal service.” But the Post Office, for all its faults, defies the oxymoron by delivering my mail 99 percent of the time.

As was evident in Ferguson, Missouri, the major media—CNN most disgracefully—made no effort at all to undo its oxymoronic reputation. Indeed, the word “moronic” does no injustice to the coverage.

The shooting of Dillon Taylor (left) in South Salt Lake, Utah, two days after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, gives the media the opportunity to correct the errors they have been making for the last fifty years.

And those errors go well beyond the media’s insistence on covering only the shooting of black men by white officers. They go to the subversive assumptions of that coverage.

As many conservatives already know, an officer of color, presumably black, shot and killed the unarmed 20 year-old Taylor, the nation’s second recognized “white Hispanic.” The cop may or may not have acted hastily.

If the media do choose to cover this case, the first thing they need to recognize is that the police confront difficult young men a thousand times a day.

As this spot-on Chris Rock video suggests, the young men in the great majority of those cases do something to aggravate that confrontation. Inevitably, some of these confrontations go wrong.

The reason police dramas are so much more popular than dramas about firefighters is that the policeman’s job is so much more emotionally and psychologically difficult.

Often alone, the cop faces a situation for which no textbook has prepared him, like, say, an enraged 300-pound black teen charging right at him.

In Ferguson, it will likely be proved that Officer Darren Wilson did what he had to do and showed himself a damn good shot in the process. Unfortunately, the media have already wrecked havoc in his life and that of the nation writ large.

They did so by beginning with three destructive assumptions. The first was that in the shooting of an unarmed man the cop is always wrong. The second was that if the cop were wrong, he committed a crime.

And the third assumption, and the most corrupt of the three, is that any time a white cop shoots a black man, he did so because the man was black.

In Ferguson, for instance, CNN’s black, gay announcer Don Lemon spent breathless hours on gratuitous details that had no other goal than to indict Officer Wilson, like whether he knew Ferguson robbed the cigars.

My liberal Facebook friends posted these teeny revelations triumphantly as if they confirmed their—and CNN’s—contention that racist cops were gratuitously gunning down innocent black youths as they always have.

Obama’s mentor at Harvard, Charles Ogletree, was among the many pundits who pulled the most absurd card in the race deck, comparing Michael Brown to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman.

The esteemed law professor said this on national TV—well, MSNBC—with minimal pushback from the host. “He did not break any law at all in terms of the police officer,” said Ogletree of Brown, as though punching Wilson in the eye didn’t count.

The Ogletrees of the world—and their enablers in the media—have been peddling this toxin for the last fifty years. And the message has proved sufficiently powerful in the black community that the election of Barack Obama has done nothing to dent it.

Indeed, Obama’s presidency has only made it worse. Through the eyes of Charles Ogletree and his ilk, to criticize Obama in any which way is to “dog whistle” to those Klanners, crackers and racist cops just waiting the word to pull those white sheets out of the dryer.

The media could use the Utah case to show that not all police confrontations involve white officers and black men. They could also show that if a mistake were made, it ought not be criminalized or filtered through a racial lens.

After all, if a white fire captain misjudges a fire, and a black child is burned to death—and this happens--no one thinks to charge the fireman with a hate crime.

If a white doctor misdiagnoses a black child, and the child dies—and this happens too-- no one thinks to charge the doctor with a hate crime.

Why then hold white cops to a legal and media standard no other professionals are held to, not even black cops.

As the son, nephew and cousin of cops, I take this personally. And if I’m Darren Wilson’s attorney, I am rereading the Fourteenth Amendment.

Who is Jack Cashill?

Webmaster's Note:  Jack Cashill's Book-TV presentation of "Deconstructing Obama" can be viewed at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/298382-1