Media ignore the shooting of police officers when “it’s not part of the narrative,” Pres. Obama charged in what the White House billed as a “Drop-By of 21st Century Policing Event” last Friday.
Media pick and choose which shootings they’re going to cover and publicize, depending on their political agenda, Obama said:
“And part of the reason I wanted to stop by here is, invariably, what happens is the media’s attention shifts. There’s a tragedy and a spate of police officers down, or a shooting involving police, and it captures the media’s attention. And then, suddenly, two months from now, there’s a different story -- except in one of your departments somebody is still getting shot, it just doesn’t warrant attention anymore, apparently, because it’s not part of the narrative.”
Obama condemned the use of political goals to divide Americans, rather than unite them:
“And what I promised both those who were angry about Minnesota and Baton Rouge, but I also promised the widows and families and children of folks in Dallas and Baton Rouge, was that this is something we need to care about all the time. This is something we are going to sustain. This is not a one-off. We’re going to just keep on at this.
“And progress is not always going to be as quick as we’d like. And there are going to be misunderstandings sometimes, and there are going to be temptations for politics to fan the flames of division instead of trying to bring people together.”
But, as Newsbusters noted last week, conservatives like New Gingrich lay the blame for using politics to divide Americans on the matter squarely on the shoulders of Pres. Obama. In an interview with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Gingrich blasted Obama for constantly blaming police – and being wrong:
SCARBOROUGH: You had a statement talking about how a normal white American could never understand what it's like being black in America. You see what's happening in Baton Rouge. You see what's happening across the country. How do we move forward, especially on the issue of race?
GINGRICH: Well, the risk of once again being divisive. As long as you have Barack Obama doing what he did over the last few years. You've had 7 1/2 years of a black president. 7 1/2 years of a black attorney general. Gallup report race relations are worse than any time in the last 17 years. Why? Because how often has he hit the police. He hit the police in Cambridge and he was wrong. He hit the police in Ferguson, he was wrong. He hit the police about Florida, he was wrong. At what point does the president have some obligation to say – you know there are two parts of this.