What ex-police chief Garcia's exit from SJ teaches us about media bias
Veteran media scholar Mark Lisheron uses Garcia's retirement from SJ and hiring in Dallas as a platform to reveal when the "news" media is working a biased angle instead of actually reporting the facts. An Opportunity Now exclusive.
By Mark Lisheron
When Police Chief Eddie Garcia announced in August he was retiring from the San Jose Police Department, he repeatedly insisted the negative coverage of his handling of the George Floyd rioting and protests played no part in his decision.
Garcia was 50 at the time and had spent his entire adult life working his way to the top of the department. He thought of San Jose as his adopted hometown. In his four years as chief he helped restore the reputation of his department, requiring crisis training that reduced incidents of excessive force and made community outreach in high crime areas a priority.
A summer of unrest changed the perception of Garcia, who consistently defended the actions of his officers during the sometimes bloody clashes with rioters. As I pointed out in two stories I wrote for Opportunity Now, the local media, particularly the San Jose Mercury News, was instrumental in shaping that perception.
In its coverage of the riots themselves and, later, the vandalism of the home of Mayor Sam Liccardo last year, a careful review of hundreds of stories showed a pronounced bias sympathetic to the protesters and their activist spokespeople and against the mayor, the chief and the department.
With the election of Donald Trump, the problem of bias in news coverage across the country metastasized like nothing I’ve seen in 40 years in the news business. Despite the protestations of New York Times Editor Dean Baquet, his newspaper led the legacy media to the ramparts against Trump and his conservative supporters. This was nothing less than a death struggle to decide who controls the truth.
Was it really possible that President Trump said 30,573 things that were untrue, an average of 21 false statements every day of his term? The Washington Post, considered by fellow journalists to be one of the finest newspapers in the country, said they kept track of every one.
Day after day for four interminable years, watching CNN and Fox was like toggling between two different universes. As a new study of news navigation for the Pew Research Center points out, Republicans and Democrats increasingly retreated to news sources that aligned with their political views. Americans relied more heavily than ever on ever-more unreliable social media for news. And while they agreed that misinformation abounded, no one could agree on exactly what misinformation was.
“In many cases,” the study’s authors wrote, “one person’s truth is another’s fiction.”
But what’s all this got to do with new stories about San Jose? You might find this a little unsettling, but no matter what you read in a paper or on a website or see on TV the “truth” is up for grabs. And to tell you the truth it was, even when you old timers thought “Uncle Walter” Cronkite was delivering nothing but the unvarnished stuff and newspapers played everything right down the middle. As Duke Pastrami said in Howard Hawks’ wonderful movie, Ball of Fire, “that’s a lot of mahaha.”
As was apparent in the daily coverage of the protests and rioting last summer, the Mercury News, the San Jose Spotlight and San Jose Inside were quite deliberate in the way they presented the truth to their audiences. Here are some of the ways reporters and editors telegraphed their pitches:
Sources and Points of View. In story after story, local activists like Silicon Valley De-Bug and local Black Lives Matter spokespeople provided the framework for how the protests and the riots were discussed. The opinions of police department and City Hall officials appeared, but almost always in response to criticisms expressed by the activists. Ample attention was given to protesters, who were most often presented as victims of police aggression.
Omission. Conspicuously absent from much of the coverage was sympathetic accounts of business people who lost millions of dollars and livelihoods to rioters and vandals. Months later, the local press has not done a story totalling the damage of what might have been done to compensate those with losses. And when the local media failed to do it, Opportunity Now investigated the almost blanket failure of the Santa Clara County District Attorney Office to prosecute the 176 people arrested in connection with the riots/protests.
Language. For the most part, reporters covering the George Floyd aftermath did their best not to use loaded words and phrases in their stories, although San Jose Inside tried to pawn this off as the lead of a supposedly straight news story:
“One video shows the officer smirking, licking his lips and rocking back and forth, looking a little too excited to be facing off with protesters.” Adjectives and adverbs are dead giveaways the reporter is trying to lead you somewhere. Reporters, however, can take you to that very same place by putting those loaded words between quotes, something San Jose activists were all too often happy to provide.
There are myriad ways to detect bias in the news you read.
Headlines. This might be changing with the rise of boutique news websites, but in most bigger operations, the people writing the headlines are editors, not the people who wrote the stories. In a teeming market, headline writers will top a story with a grabber that has only a tenuous connection to the story. Never trust a headline on its own.
Story Placement. We’ve been trained by repetition to expect that the story at the top of the webpage or the Six O’Clock News is the most important story of the day. Have you ever wondered why a story that doesn’t seem to be big is in that slot? Or why a story you think should be in that spot is tucked in a little bitty corner or given a link to another page? Just wondering is reason enough to try to find an answer somewhere else.
Context. In the heat of reporting a story on deadline, there is sometimes no opportunity to provide some connection to the event you’re covering and the bigger picture. It seems important that Chief Garcia, who got hammered for excessive force during the rioting, was the architect of a training program that had previously delivered an actual reduction in excessive force cases. It might also have been helpful to point out to readers that Silicon Valley De-Bug and its founder Raj Jayadev have a long history of community activism and a sometimes vehement opposition to Garcia. They are hardly dispassionate observers of what was happening on the streets.
Numbers, statistics and studies. Human beings gin these things up, usually for someone who pays them to produce them. Just because they were created does not make them inviolate. It’s important to know the background of the people and institutions producing data because it will help you understand why they are producing them. And here’s where the context thing comes in. The producer of news controls which numbers, statistics and studies to use and which to ignore. Sometimes it’s more important to know what’s been left out.
Why. I’ve told young reporters, journalism students, family and friends that of all the Ws you’re taught in J-school to respect, the Why has always been my guiding star. The Why gave me the opportunity to get better at my job, to ask better questions, to look broader and deeper at my subjects. Asking Why will also make you a more critical and demanding reader. It also prodded me to ask why stories are created and presented the way they are now. The too-short answer is that the news business is, at root, a business, something to which journalists in every generation have not reconciled themselves. Many still think the New York Times publishes “All the News That’s Fit to Print” when they are actually doing the best job in the country delivering All the News Their Subscribers Demand.
When I interviewed Eddie Garcia this past summer for one of my stories he got back to me in a day, talked to me for an hour without a public information handler on the line and never once hesitated to answer a question. A rare public servant these days.
His decision to retire surprised me at first, as did his decision to un-retire and accept the job as police chief of the Dallas Police Department. The San Jose lifer was moving his family to Texas to take over a department three times the size of the San Jose force.
Judging from the local coverage, the riots, Black Lives Matter, defunding the police and a slew of activist stakeholders hang heavily over the selection of a new chief in San Jose. In Dallas, at least in the editorial boardroom at the Dallas Morning News, a chief is being welcomed for promising to do what police chiefs are supposed to do: keep people safe.
Maybe media perception has real consequences.
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