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Democrats and the Media Love Cops Now

After spinning anti-police narrative for years, they realize law enforcement is 'pillar of society'

Comey McCabe
Getty Images
Elizabeth Harrington
February 6, 2018

The media and Democrats are finally sticking up for law enforcement.

Of course their love is limited to top cops who misled the FISA court to get a surveillance warrant on a private citizen, inserted themselves into the 2016 election, stonewalled Congress, and showed political bias. Not exactly the rank and file, but at least it's something.

The sudden support for law enforcement is of course a reaction to President Trump, who they claim is engaging in an "all out attack on the rule of law."

The New York Times says pointing out that the FBI used political opposition research paid for by the Democratic party as the basis for a warrant to spy on a volunteer member of the opposing political campaign is an "unparalleled war on a pillar of society: law enforcement."

"The war between the president and the nation's law enforcement apparatus is unlike anything America has seen in modern times," the Times wrote recently. "[T]he president has engaged in a scorched-earth assault on the pillars of the criminal justice system in a way that no other occupant of the White House has done."

Well, it wasn't that long ago that a president attacked law enforcement, while admitting to "not seeing all the facts."

But Democrats and the media love the police now!

Take Cenk Uygur, the host of "The Young Turks."

Or Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee.

Or MSNBC contributor Kurt Eichenwald.

Let's just say Democrats and the media have "evolved" on the issue. The biggest champions of "law enforcement" now are the same people who spent years inflaming racial tensions and spinning an anti-cop narrative that there was widespread police brutality and killings of unarmed black men.

It was the New York Times that was engaging in attacks against the "pillar of society," featuring romantic portrayals of protests against cops and working to amplify the Black Lives Matter movement.

"The label appears to have lasting power, simmering like a low-grade fever on social media and roaring to life with every police killing of a black citizen and every racial protest that makes the news, informing the long-running national debate," the Times reported in August 2016.

Cable news engaged in nonstop emotional coverage of police shootings, oftentimes leaving the facts behind. CNN showed its solidarity with the anti-police political movement by striking a "hands up, don't shoot" pose, a discredited lie.

MSNBC's coverage of the 2015 Baltimore riots after the death of Freddie Gray—which led to over 200 arrests, 20 injured cops, and cost the city $20 million in damages—was glowing. It was just "pent up demand for social justice percolating" to the surface. It was the police department that "looks like outside agitators," a commentator said.

The coverage was the same in Ferguson, Mo. Millions were united with the protesters, Chris Hayes said, because they are "just burning up inside with a feeling of impotent rage, of alienation and of anguish and disappointment and injustice."

The Washington Post still refers to the police as the "Fatal Force," when documenting the number of suspects killed by law enforcement each year. But there weren't more shootings, "just more news coverage."

The Post headlines reveal a trend of anti-police bias. "For 55 officers involved in fatal shootings this year, it wasn't their first time." "Thousands dead, few prosecuted." "Black and unarmed: A year after Michael Brown's fatal shooting, unarmed black men are seven times more likely than whites to die by police gunfire." "A year of reckoning: Police fatally shoot nearly 1,000."

Mother Jones told us the "war on cops" was a "right-wing invention." But now the Republican "smear campaign against the FBI" is very real.

The problem is, the media amplifying anti-cop sentiment had real effects.

An FBI study (remember the FBI is sacrosanct now) found that police officers are "de-policing" themselves because of a new normal of anti-cop hostility. Twenty-eight percent of incidents where cops were killed in the line of duty were "motivated by hatred of police and a desire to 'kill law enforcement,' in some cases fueled by social and political movements."

Cop killers said their hatred for the police was based in part on "what they heard and read in the media about other incidents involving law enforcement shootings."

The sniper who killed five police officers and injured seven others in Dallas specifically set out to kill white cops, saying he was "upset about Black Lives Matter" and "upset about the recent police shootings."

The New York Times bemoaned that the mass shooting led to "another wrenching shift in debates over race and criminal justice that had already deeply divided the nation."

A poll last year found 81 percent of police officers say the media generally treat them unfairly, and it's harming morale.

"For police, attitudes about media bias are linked to other feelings about their jobs," the Pew Research Center explained. "Officers who feel strongly that the media treat police unfairly, for example, are more likely than their colleagues to say their work as a law enforcement officer nearly always or often makes them feel frustrated and even angry."

The media may love top cops like James Comey and Andrew McCabe, with their newfound respect for the "rule of law." Too bad it's too late.

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