"Suspected Police Bullet": Copspeak Dominates Media Reports On LAPD Killing of Girl
And NBC's Chuck Todd puts his foot in his mouth
Fourteen-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta was trying on a quinceanera dress at a Los Angeles Burlington Coat Factory when she was killed by police December 23—but you might not know that depending on what media outlet you turned to for the story.
“Teen killed in a Los Angeles store after a police officer's shot penetrates wall of dressing room, officials say” read CNN’s print headline. The network’s HLN channel blamed a “suspected police bullet.”
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Copspeak
The police’s target, Daniel Elena Lopez, and the child were “struck by gunfire,” CNN reported. They were both killed at the scene. Lopez was carrying a bike lock.
ABC News said that Orellana-Peralta was “apparently killed by stray police bullet” while CBS LA reporter Kristine Lazar flattened the killing into the familiar “struck by police gunfire.” Lazar defended herself from criticism on Twitter by saying that she felt it was clear that “bullet came from police.”
The use of copspeak in framing how media covers police shootings and violence is an issue that’s been well-covered in recent years by media critics. Local and national newsrooms traditionally tend to take as gospel what they hear from police departments.
“The close relationship between reporters and police is often marked by diffusion of language from the police PR team to the front page,” Adam Johnson wrote for FAIR in 2016.
That’s changing for the better—the LA Times referred to Orellana-Peralta in a headline as “14-year-old girl killed by LAPD,” the Daily Beast declared that “Cops Kill 14-Year-Old Girl,” for example—but media bias on issues of race and institutional authority remain a work in progress.
The ‘white’ is silent
A perfect example of the prejudice still to be overcome was seen Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press during an interview of writer Nikole Hannah-Jones. During the conversation, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd said that while “parents” might feel uncomfortable having their children learn about the history of the US, “parents of color” might feel differently.
Hannah-Jones replied with a cutting takedown of Todd’s presumption of who gets to be the default before launching into a more general reply.
“You should just think a little bit about your framing,” Hannah-Jones said.
Todd’s comments are bad enough for the “white” part of the parents being implied, but his role at NBC News as the network’s political director means that those ingrained biases don’t stop at Meet the Press.
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"Suspected police bullet" makes me expect an impassioned speech from the bullet's lawyer proclaiming its innocence and that it will fight all the way.