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Cops Sue Sean Bell Estate, Support Rally Set for Johannes Mehserle, Grant Family Demonized-The Police Strike Back

July 14, 2010 By

There’s an old saying ‘The best defense is a strong offense‘. It applied in sports. We see it in politics. We see it used by lawyers especially in rape trials where they go all out to destroy a victim’s character to protect their client-who is accused of doing the rape. In recent days we now see it with the police as they seek to re-tool a grossly tarnished image where the shooting death of an unarmed Oscar Grant has been a main spark point.

Yesterday Bay Area residents who had organized and rallied tirelessly for Justice for Oscar Grant were shocked to learn that a rally is being planned this Monday in Walnut Creek for the convicted killer of Oscar Grant Johannes Mehserle. It came a day after Mehserle’s lawyer Michael Rains bristled at the rejection of his client’s ‘apology’ letter and accused the Grants of being ‘mean spirited’ . That enraged hundreds of people who felt the Mehserle camp was insensitive and disingenuous especially since the letter was written to the public and not to the Grants.

Here’s the notice that was sent out:

RALLY IN SUPPORT OF FORMER BART COP JOHANNES MEHSERLE

by MR. MAYOR on JULY 13, 2010 ·

Hundreds of people are expected to attend a rally on Monday, July 19th at the Walnut Creek Courthouse to show their support for Johannes Mehserle, the former BART cop who was recently found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for killing an unarmed man named Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day in 2009.

The group coordinating the rally had the following to say on their Facebook page….

Anyone who supports Johannes and our Law Enforcement Officers may attend. This is a peaceful rally to show our support for Johannes and the injustices he is experiencing.

The rally is from 2pm-7pm on Monday July 19th at the Walnut Creek Courthouse on Ygnacio Valley Road.

Interesting to note when the rally was first announced here’s how it read…

“ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. ITS TIME TO STOP THROWING OUR OFFICERS UNDER THE BUS. ITS TIME TO STEP UP AND SUPPORT JOHANNES AND OUR OFFICERS AND TAKE A STAND. OSCAR GRANT WAS RESISTING ARREST. JOHANNES MEHSERLE TOLD THE TRUTH!”

Johannes Mehserle

Obviously the pressure was too much so they pulled it down and tried to switch it up to the more inoculated Rally for Mehserle and Law Enforcement Officers (LEO). This comes on the heels of cops raising money for Mehserle’s defense which no doubt allowed him to afford expert witnesses who were paid 65K and 50k for testimony that refuted the dozens of videos and explained that Mehserle was not properly trained to use his taser.

Well known anti-police brutality lawyer John Burris who is working with the Grant family told the San Jose Mercury news..he was not surprised such a rally would be held.

“There are individuals who support Mehserle and support police in general & and that’s just part of & the split in this country, those who don’t really understand the actions of the police in the African American community,” Burris said.

Many feel this rally is not only an attempt to booster the sagging image of law enforcement but also a way to show support, generate news and get Mehserle’s sentenced reduced. Thus far local news station KGO (ABC affiliate) has signed up to be in attendance.

What’s missing are good officers to speak out and say No-What Mehserle did was wrong.. We do have the report from NOBLE (National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives) to BART that shows the serious flaws in the way the police department was run and the Meyer Naves Report which shows the negligence of officers, but in spite of those findings and a conviction, there are many who feel Mehserle was done an injustice and they intend to support. That’s a huge disconnect

Why Walnut Creek? The suburb which is 25 miles west of San Francisco is home to a lot of Neilson Boxes which determine television ratings. That’s why you always see a reporter doing the whether, some feel good story or interviewing a local politician from that area. It’s good for ratings. Any smart organizer knows if you do a rally there, almost all TV media will show up, so expect this event, even it draws 10 people to get massive coverage on local Bay Area stations come Monday.  Already almost every news station is announcing this..

While the Grant family is processing a rally held in support of the cop who killed their son, almost on cue, Fox news Glenn Beck who all but ignored this case opened his mouth and weighed in. He accused the Department of Justice which is looking into this case of being racist.  This no doubt will get everyone ginned up and ready to rally behind Mehserle no matter how glaring the evidence.

Adding to this push back from police is the recent announcement that one of the officers involved in the Sean Bell incident in which the unarmed groom to be was shot dead in a hail of 50 bullets, is suing the Bell estate.

According to the NY Post

A cop involved in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell on his wedding day is now suing the dead man’s estate — claiming Bell drunkenly assaulted and badly injured him with a car right before the hail of police gunfire that brought the unarmed man down.

Police Officer Michael Carey’s lawsuit says Bell was boozed-up when he got behind the wheel of the car after his bachelor party on Nov. 25, 2006, and also claims the doomed groom failed to wear glasses or contact lenses despite having poor eyesight.

Carey’s allegations are contained in a Brooklyn federal counter-claim filed last week in response to a wrongful-death lawsuit being pursued by Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, against him and the other four cops involved.

In the future expect to hear and see more of these types of pushback. Expect to see lawsuits, countersuits and police support rallies.  What’s interesting to note is that while cops can sue us as individuals we can’t sue them back. We can sue the city or municipality and hold them liable, but no money from any lawsuit will come out of their pocket. You can also expect to see more outspoken punditry rush to their defense and push their key talking points. It might be a national figure like a Glenn Beck or a local on air personality who works for an outlet that has a cozy relationship with the police where they are embedded which is what we saw at the recent Grant verdict rally or where they have business interests. In other words an urban station in a big market will seek favor from the police to make sure they can continue to host night clubs and do shows in their respective jurisdictions.

DJ Kaos

In recent years we seen everyone from Steve Harvey to Clear Channel hosts DJ Kaos and DJ Sylli Asz on KATZ in St Louis get censored or fired for talking about the police after phone calls were made. In the case of Steve Harvey, he got on the air in Los Angeles and went off about the negligence of police officers who ‘mistakenly’ shot a Halloween party goer who was wearing a cowboy outfit for having a gun. According to news anchor Harrison Chastang of KPOO Radio who first reported the story, Harvey heavily criticized the police as he should’ve, but then returned to the airwaves the next day to apologize, claiming he was not a ‘police critic’.  It was reported that phone calls were made by then LA Police Chief Bernard Parks to Radio One the parent company to shut him up.

In the case of Kaos and Sylli Asz, they were accused of making light of a recent police killing. They were initially suspended, but that wasn’t enough, the police pressured Clear Channel and they were later fired. many may say that was appropriate, but contrast that with the police officers who routinely post up insensitive material on a website called the Domelights in Philadelphia where racial epithets are hurled and victims of police brutality are made fun of. It got so out of hand Black officers in the department wound up suing.. To date none of the officers who post up have been fired.

Where does this leave us?  Victims of police brutality are now faced with the added hardship of a shrewd PR war. At a recent meeting in support of Oscar Grant it was noted  that in the age of technology and informations new strategies and tactics have been developed. It was suggested that we up our game because the police, media and everyone had upped theirs. What that entails is still work in progress. The police are obviously honing in on PR and image repair.

An activist and spoken word artist named Ner City is trying dialogue.. I encourage folks to take a look at his piece

An Oscar Grant Supporter talking to a Johannes Mehserle Supporter

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Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JOYNER, HARVEY & TAVIS-THE CURRENT STATE OF BLACK MEDIA

April 26, 2009 By

dbanner1newparis

When the Tom Joyner Morning Show was pulled first from Chicago, and then from other markets early this month, Joyner counseled listeners that “…black radio will never be what it once was, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.” 

Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey, Tavis Smiley, and the Impoverishment of Black Media

Submitted by Bruce A. Dixon on Wed, 04/15/2009 – 11:46

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

joyner-harvey-smiley
When the Tom Joyner Morning Show was pulled first from Chicago, and then from other markets early this month, Joyner counseled listeners that “…black radio will never be what it once was, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.”  This message of powerlessness and permanent defeat, of resignation to someone else owning and controlling the black conversation may be all we can expect from Joyner and the rest of the black elite.  But is it the real answer? Does it even address the crucial question of how we might have and own our own black civic conversation?

 

 

Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey, Tavis Smiley, and the Impoverishment of Black Media
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
“The cancellation provoked outrage among fans because the Tom Joyner Morning Show is about as good as commercial black radio is allowed to get nowadays.”
‘The bottom line,” radio fly-jock Tom Joyner told fans in his blog, “is that black radio will never be what it once was, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.” Joyner tried to put the yanking of his show by Clear Channel into perspective for fans, who deluged his blog and email with expressions of support, and even talk of consumer boycotts. Joyner discouraged boycott chatter, and like Steve Harvey, who seems likely to replace him on many Clear Channel outlets, declared it was all “just business.”
The cancellation provoked outrage among fans because the Tom Joyner Morning Show is about as good as commercial black radio is allowed to get nowadays. Despite the show’s limited playlist of corporate-approved music and periodic descents into minstrelsy, Joyner regularly sets aside a small amount of time for commentary, issues and appeals addressed to African Americans as a community. It was never much time, and the issues, the commentary were relatively safe stuff on the whole. But to the news-starved audience of black commercial radio, Tom Joyner, like his colleague Tavis Smiley, stand out like rare gulps of fresh air.
But sustaining the life of a community takes more than an occasional breath. Community and democracy demand a steady diet of news to fuel civic engagement and public conversation in the public interest.
As BAR’s Glen Ford pointed out all of six years ago in ‘Who Killed Black Radio News,” the owners of commercial black media have for a generation enforced a no-news policy, justifying it with the unsupportable claim that all black people want is to be entertained.” The fact is that news is less profitable than 100% entertainment. PR firms and the celebrity industries provide their own “news” releases complete with commercial tie-ins, and already segmented to the age and income divided groups that marketers love. Black radio owners decided not to do news because corporate media has consciously decided not to recognize African Americans as a people or a polity with our own set of collective experience and political will. In a media regime that lives and dies by advertising alone, black commercial radio will only recognize black communities as marketing contraptions, as audience segments whose ears and eyeballs it can deliver to sponsors. The owners and managers of commercial black radio and TV are not the least concerned about our past or future, our housing or health care crises, the black imprisonment rate or the digital divide or the education of our young or the dignified security of our elderly. To them we are just a market, passive consumers to be sliced and diced according to marketing industry guidelines. A hip hop station, an oldies station, an easy listening urban station, a gospel station, all under the same ownership with no news on any of them, forever and ever, amen. If this is what Joyner meant, and we think it was, when he described the current state of black commercial radio, he was right. Except the “forever’ part. Except when he told fans ‘…there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.”
Commercial black radio and TV have not always been hostile to and incompatible with journalism. There was a brief period, back in the early and mid 1970s when journalism flourished on commercial black radio. Local teams of African American journalists competed with each other to report and package non-entertainment news directed at black communities. News gathering and reporting operations on commercial black radio played a key role in the black conversation, enabling African American communities to define themselves as more than passive masses of consumers and voters. They heyday of black broadcast journalism didn’t last long. News was never as profitable as entertainment, and as limits on how many stations one owner could have were removed, owners borrowed heavily to get more stations, and cut costs to reward themselves and repay the loans. News was the first casualty, reported Glen Ford six years ago.
There need not have been a contradiction between Black ownership and community access, including the maintenance of quality news operations. In a betrayal that, we believe, has been a major factor in the relentless decline of Black political power, many Black radio owners have adopted business plans identical to their white corporate peers.
Such is certainly the case with Radio One. “The company’s voraciousness mirrored the consolidation throughout the radio industry after rules limiting the number of stations one company could own nationally were lifted in 1996,” wrote the Washington Post, in a February 5, 2003 showcase article. Radio One boasts a 60-person research department that “randomly calls thousands of people and conducts 20-minute surveys of those who tune in to its radio stations.” Do the people want news? The subject isn’t broached by either Post reporter Krissah Williams or her main interlocutor, Radio One Chief Operating Officer Mary Catherine Sneed. Instead, the conversation is all about the sales value of entertainment programming. “If you’re not [at parties, clubs and grass-roots events], you’ll never be a big personality in the community,” Sneed said. “Those are the things that separate stations from one another.”
News isn’t even on the radar screen. Indeed, so insidiously have disc jockey patter and the talk show format been substituted for news that large segments of the Black public may no longer know the difference.
“Reclaiming commercial black radio would mean rediscovering the Freedom Movement’s traditions of disrespect for illegitimate authority.”
It may be that way now, but it doesn’t have to be. Contrary to Joyner’s wisdom, there’s plenty that African American communities can do to influence the behavior of commercial black radio. But seeing the way forward, much less actually organizing it, requires thinking well outside the boxes that the black misleadership class, of which Joyner and Tavis are a part, are used to drawing for themselves and for us. Today’s black notables are too respectful of illegitimate authority, too preoccupied with their own careers, too deferential to corporate power to acknowledge the true dimensions of the crisis, or help us solve it.
Reclaiming commercial black radio would mean rediscovering the Freedom Movement’s traditions of disrespect for illegitimate authority. It would mean confronting the white and black absentee owners of corporate black radio and TV, like Clear Channel and Radio One at their own public events, like live remotes, and demanding news for the people. It would mean mobilizing people from black journalism schools and black communities to demand the reanimation of black journalism. It would mean insisting on the establishment of local news gathering operations at black radio and TV stations as a condition of the continued good will of audiences toward their owners and advertisers. That is a tall order, well outside the vision of a Tom Joyner or even of a Tavis Smiley, who sometimes pretends to be a journalist.
Leadership is seeing a way where the wise and informed tell you there is no way, and organizing people to take that way. Neither of these guys is in the leadership business. Joyner and Smiley are in the business of marketing, assembling ears and eyeballs for delivery to sponsors. In Tavis’s case, those sponsors include Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, two of the nation’s biggest and most notoriously low-wage employers, along with payday loan and housing bubble profiteers Wells Fargo and Bank of America. This seriously limits the problems one can mention on the air, let alone the solutions.
Media are the circulatory systems of modern societies. Mass media can empower us. They can enable us to carry on our conversation about what we expect from society and from each other. Or mass media can distort our public conversations and our private lives, instilling anti-cooperative and antisocial values in young and old alike. Look at BET.
African American communities are not the only ones that suffer from the slow death of journalism. Civic engagement in the larger American polity is withering too, and for the same reason. Newspapers are folding not because they are unprofitable, but because even after cutting actual journalism to the bone, they don’t bring in the fifteen and twenty percent returns that the bubble economy has accustomed investors to. A well-run newspaper can consistently bring in a seven to nine percent annual return on investment, which in pre-bubble days was considered just fine. The very few newspaper corporations that remained family owned, or that went nonprofit are doing journalism as well as ever.
Forty-some years ago, Dr. Martin Luther wondered aloud that all his life’s work might have been the integration of African Americans into a burning house. King answered his own question by declaring that if that was the case, we would have to be the firefighters, not just for ourselves, but for the whole American polity. If the demand for news, news for the people, is ever to be raised inside corporate boardrooms and in the street at live remotes, it will happen first in African American communities. Or maybe not at all. There is no legal road to this. It can only be done by confronting owners of commercial black media and making the price of a no-news regime too costly for them.
We can be firefighters, struggling for a democratic, responsible media, trying to reanimate old and configure new models of journalism for our own and the larger American community. We can disregard Joyner’s advice, and struggle to free the black conversation from corporate gatekeepers who would monetize, militarize and privatize it. Or we can burn with the rest. And watch Black Evil Television.

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Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News, Political articles Tagged With: , , , , ,

Choosing Hip over Hype-WBLS Beats Hot 97 Again

June 23, 2006 By

dbanner1newparis

Choosing Hip over Hype
Listeners emerge from radio daze,
tuning out Hot 97 to pump up WBLSBy Errol Louis

orginal article-June 23, 2006

http://www.nydailynews.com/06-23-2006/news/col/story/ 429055p-361762c.html
 

Here’s some news that will be music to the ears of the many New Yorkers who have grown sick of the vulgarity, violence and stale, payola-driven programming that has poisoned much of urban radio and black culture in general.According to the latest Arbitron figures, tens of thousands of listeners appear to be tuning out Hot 97 – which used to be ranked the No.1 hip hop/R&B station in New York – in favor of WBLS, which beat out Hot 97 in each of the last two ratings periods.

WBLS has been on a tear for the past year, thanks to its decision to hire two powerhouse broadcasters: Steve Harvey, who hosts a morning drive time talk-and-music show, and Wendy Williams, who holds down a block from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Harvey and Williams are seasoned radio personalities who bring wit, intelligence and a positive message to a mostly black audience that is hungry for quality.

You don’t hear the b-word or N-word tossed around on WBLS; Harvey and Williams are too classy to insult their audience that way. And listeners have responded in droves.

According to Arbitron, WBLS had 3.1f the city’s teen and adult radio listeners last winter, but has increased its audience size over each of the last four ratings periods, building its share up to 3.9àDuring the same time, Hot 97 slipped steadily from 4.5f listeners to 3.7à

In plain English, WBLS now draws about 30,664 more listeners than Hot 97 during any given period between 6 a.m. and midnight. That can translate into millions of advertising dollars moving from the losing station to the winner.

The numbers are a victory for community groups that called for a boycott of Hot 97 following its repeated broadcast of a sickening song parody that mocked victims of the 2004 tsunami that devastated Asia. More negative press dogged the station thanks to three shootings in front of its office over the last few years by the entourages of rappers invited by – and sometimes incited by – station deejays.

The decline of “Shot 97” provides powerful evidence that positive, quality programming ultimately wins more listeners – and advertising dollars – than shallow shock radio.

Power 105.1, the third urban-format station, has been dropping in the rankings as well, losing to WBLS earlier this year and barely eking out a win most recently with 4f listeners. The station’s rankings may continue to fall, thanks to the recent, career-ending tirade of Power 105.1’s ex-morning host, Troi (Star) Torain, who got a pink slip and a criminal indictment after threatening, on-air, to sexually assault the 4-year-old child of a rival deejay at (where else?) Hot 97.

“The hip-hop stations are losing audience share all over the country. How much can you hear about Jay-Z?” says Paul Porter, a media critic who runs a Web site, IndustryEars.com. “Steve Harvey’s topical; he’ll point out things you won’t get on other shows. He’s going to be the biggest voice in black radio.”

Credit for the changing mood also goes to groups like the Boston-based Seymour Institute, a black think tank, that have been quietly waging an effort, church by church, to mobilize the black middle-class against the hedonistic and violent lyrics and imagery that have sprouted in hip-hop culture like weeds.

“There is a cultural marketing machine that pushes toxic entertainment upon black adults, adolescents and children each day,” says the Seymour group in a recent manifesto. “There is no need for the black community to be complicit in its own degradation.”

The same message is being echoed by local grass-roots groups, from www.abolishthenword.com to an organization from a Bronx church called the Council of Bad Language Disdainers.

Cultural politics aside, Harvey and Williams are succeeding because they do radio the way it should be: smooth and smart. Tune into 107.5 FM and listen for yourself.

 

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