So yesterday KRON 4 News decided to do some cheap underhanded sleight of hand BS during their segment People Behaving Badly..where they focused on Oakland Side shows.. They lead into the segment with Pam Moore announcing they have ‘shocking new video’ and then reporter Stanley Roberts Kron kicks off the segment by describing Oakland as the Wild, Wild West.. From there viewers are treated to this ‘new’ ‘shocking’ footage..Only problem is the new footage is from 1-2 and maybe even 3 years ago..

KRON gives no context to videos to let you know if folks are from LA and other far away cities which many of the sideshow footage on YouTube clearly show..

Even though KRON ran a notice at the top of the screen that says courtesy of YouTube it was shown for less than 3 seconds while they put the KRON logo over the videos and make it seem like a reporter was actually out on the turf interviewing a young man shown in a year old video holding a gun that he shoots in the air..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvTEBYgGjvk

This side show footage shown on KRON is damn near a year old

KRON cuts that part out and leads viewers to believe that at any minute serious drama is about to jump off…We don’t know if the young man is from Oakland.. We don’t know if he’s still around since the video is a year old. We don’t know anything except KRON tried to make it look like they were the ones who did the on the spot interview vs his homie whose voice they cut out in the report..

We don’t even know why this young man was holding a gun or not too concerned about being seen on video. My take is when your friends are filming you, you’re not too concerned vs when a news reporter is filming you and intends to show it on the evening news..

KRON also doesn’t give you the context of him hanging with a number of his friends in his own neighborhood. Instead they show quick cutaway of a woman walking by looking at her cell phone and offer their own explanation about how jaded and shocking it is that she’s not alarmed by dude holding a gun..They imply that this woman was an ‘innocent bystander’ navigating the mean streets of Oakland in the ‘Wild, Wild West’ and she was in mortal danger. A quick look at the original footage shows that the woman is hanging with the crew and even gets in one of the cars.. She wasn’t ‘all into her cell phone’ as  reporter Stanley Roberts asserts.. She was using her cell phone to film the cars like everyone else.

In the back you can see the ‘innocent bystander woman hanging out with the crew at the sideshow

KRON misleads viewers by juxtaposing a relatively calm and uneventful scene with footage from other sideshows that were ‘turnt up’, including age-old footage where revelers throw bottles at police cars. The scene shown reminded me of the time when folks were throwing bottles at police cars in SF after the Giants won the world series. Maybe KRON should’ve shown that since they were using 2-year-old footage anyway it could’ve added to the sense of drama and mayhem..

They edit one video on top of the other so you feel like all hell is breaking out and it all went down over this past weekend. Here’s the original clip that KRON jacks to make it look like their own.. You can see the interview about 5 minutes in..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUd9aC97Wz4

With all that being said, while KRON was busy letting you know how ‘Oakland was Behaving Badly’ by showing 2-year-old side-show footage, they neglected to head on over to SF and show how our own US Senator Diane Feinstein is behaving badly by sponsoring a bill that would essentially legalize and give the President even more power to collect data and spy on us.. It’s called the FISA Improvement Bill and was subject to a worldwide protest that involved millions this past Tuesday..

Why didn’t KRON’s Stanley Roberts bring a camera to the Senator’s office and show her bad behavior and talk about her deep pocket connections to the defense industry that seems to sway all her decision-making?

Why didn’t KRON bring camera’s over to Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum and ask him why he’s leading the charge to privatize the US Postal Service and how he’s getting lucrative government contracts to sell off Post Offices all over the country??

Elders fighting the Ellis Act in SF…

Why didn’t KRON bring camera’s over to the SF’s DA’s office this past week where folks like Lisa Tiny Gray-Garcia of Poor Magazine were confronting unscrupulous corporate backed landlords and showing how their abuse of the Ellis Act in number of instances violates state law is a form of elder abuse?? They are pushing the DA to press charges.. Maybe Roberts should be covering that vs showing year old footage and passing it off as new…You can read the story Poor Magazine did on that ran in the SF Bayview here–> http://sfbayview.com/2014/the-crime-of-ellis-act-evictions/

Lastly I hope some of our esteemed council members like Lynette Gibson McElhaney,  Libby Schaaf and Desley Brooks among others push back on KRON for such a misleading report..This is not to excuse reckless behavior. There are lots of people in Oakland trying to improve things as evident by this past weekends packed out Black Male Achievement Hackathon.. what needs to be checked is reckless news reporting…5 thumbs down for KRON on that one..