David Rovics
I have heard multiple journalists expressing their shock at seeing heavily-armed and armored riot police using tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets, and other “nonlethal” weapons against peaceful protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. While it’s a good thing that so many of these journalists evidently feel that the police practices they’re observing (and falling victim to) are abhorrent, the fact that they’re shocked by them belies the general bias of the corporate media. Where have these people been all their lives? Apparently not where I’ve been. They haven’t been reporting on the bigger protests of the past years and decades, that’s for sure. If they had been, they would realize that these kinds of police tactics are not the exception in the USA (and elsewhere) — they’re the norm.
Blog: The Road to Ferguson: A Musically Annotated, Partial History of the US Police State