SWAT team-style raids, verbal and physical antagonism, and threats against citizen and journalists alike have long been embedded in the history of law enforcement in the United States, through both Republican and Democratic administrations. But after decades of attitudes largely sitting between grudging acceptance and hero-worship, the last ten years has seen a surge of negative attention toward policing in America, provoked by acts of extreme aggression carried out with far less subtlety than before and that has, by spreading first on social media, forced mainstream media outlets to cover it extensively.
Critics of this media coverage, like civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis, say that since its conception in the United States, media’s role has been less to offer objective news and more to shape an obedient society that blames their problems on its most vulnerable, emphasizing a belief that state punishment is the solution. And even with the pressure to cover egregious behavior like the harsh treatment of immigrants by ICE, he argues, media outlets have continued to feed into the superstructure that enables misguided pro-police attitudes and normalizes such behavior.
