Would federal and state authorities have pursued the six racist Rankin County lawmen who have now pled guilty to torturing two Black men, even if the news media had not paid much attention to the story?
Maybe so.
After all, the horrific shot to the mouth that one of the two men received made it difficult for the so-called “Goon Squad” — five sheriff’s deputies and one municipal police officer — to come up with a believable story to explain away what happened.
Still, the digging by media outlets increased the pressure on prosecutors to act. A good example was the work by The Associated Press. A month after the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had launched a civil rights probe into the incident, an Associated Press investigation found that some of the suspected white officers had what appeared to be a pattern of abusing Black men, sometimes fatally.
The coverage was reminiscent of the good work the same news organization performed a couple of years ago in Louisiana. There, a cover-up of alleged police brutality might have been successful if not for the persistence of the AP to obtain officers’ body-camera footage, which vividly showed the fatal violence unleashed on Ronald Greene following a high-speed chase and refuted the narrative provided by state troopers.
In recent times, politicians have found it useful to demonize the news media, calling it the “enemy of the people” for its supposedly slanted coverage of conservatives. To some degree, that strategy has worked, creating a public distrust toward those whose reporting does not support the ideology of those on the right.
But the news media is more often than not the “friend of the people.” It provides a means to publicize alleged wrongdoing, which often prompts official action. In some cases, it conducts investigations independent of the government, the results of which can be helpful to authorities who are sincere about investigating and expose those who are not.
The six Rankin County officers were bad eggs. Their criminal conduct is not typical of the majority of honorable men and women who work in law enforcement. But when there is a bad egg, be thankful that there are reporters and editors who are willing to take on the story.
