All news is local How the New York dailies covered the Eric Garner news on Thursday’s front pages
The media can’t breathe. That was the reaction of many journalists to news yesterday that New York City Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo wouldn’t be indicted for killing Eric Garner — and it echoed the black Staten Island man’s last words in July.
The commentary and analysis surrounding this case is already different from that of black Missouri teenager Michael Brown, whose killer, Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, likewise evaded indictment last week. The fallout from that verdict hewed closely to the media’s ideological divide, with liberals generally questioning the move and conservatives defending it. The grand jury’s decision in the Garner case, on the other hand, has drawn criticism from both ends of the political spectrum.
The differences that remain lie in the details. Whereas liberal commentators tended to frame the news within a narrative of institutional racism, their conservative counterparts chastised the efficacy of the criminal justice system and enforcement of what they see as bad laws.
“There’s an America where people who kill for no legitimate reason are held to account, and there’s an America where homicide isn’t really a big deal as long as you play for the right team,” Sean Davis writes at The Federalist, a conservative website. “Unfortunately Eric Garner was a victim in the second America, where some homicides are apparently less equal than others.”
Davis doesn’t expand on that idea of two Americas. And he doesn’t mention race — not to mention the long history of racially biased law enforcement — in his piece. Instead, he treats Garner’s killing and the lack of prosecution as an isolated example of a brutal, yet weak, criminal justice system.
That motif contrasts starkly with liberal critiques like that of the New Republic’s Matthew Pratt Guterl, who called the no-indictment news emblematic of a “national disease.” The New York Times’ Charles M. Blow similarly argued that Garner’s death should prompt new discussions about race in America: “Reality doesn’t bend under the weight of wishes. Truth doesn’t grow dim because we squint.”
The New Yorker’s John Cassidy channels this argument more narrowly toward the NYPD, writing, “[R]educing crime and integrating the ranks doesn’t justify mistreating elements of the citizenry who don’t present a genuine public threat, particularly unarmed black men.” Race also fueled the undercurrent of editorials at mainstream newspapers like The Times, Newsday, and the New York Daily News.
Unsurprisingly, commentators on the right took more a conservative approach to the publicly available evidence in Garner’s case. At National Review, for example, Andrew C. McCarthy provides a detailed analysis of why “the grand jury may have gotten it wrong.” He caveats his conclusion, “I don’t think race had anything to do with what happened between Eric Garner and the police.” Ben Shapiro of the flaming-red Breitbart.com allows that “there is excellent cause for concern here,” adding later, “even if the police did use excessive force against Garner – which, of course, is quite possible – that still does not establish that they did so for racial reasons.”
Seriously, can you imagine what Sam Fucking Adams would have said at the news that a man had been killed over cigarette taxes.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 3, 2014
Other conservatives, such as Fox News’ libertarian-leaning legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, focused on Garner’s alleged crime, selling untaxed cigarettes. “That is the moral equivalent of jay-walking,” Napolitano writes. “He should have been sent to another street corner with a warning, rather than arrested for this harmless behavior.” RedState’s Leon Wolf, meanwhile, criticizes a lack of government accountability.
“And now, because the police earn such automatic and unjustified trust in the minds of so many, even on the rare occasion that a cop is actually videotaped, the criminal justice system cannot be trusted to provide effective oversight,” he writes. “Pathetic.”
Despite the across-the-spectrum criticism of the Staten Island grand jury verdict, it’s unsurprising to see such different interpretations of what went wrong. The killing of Garner, an unarmed black man, and the legal protection of his killer, a white police officer, fits a heinous pattern that’s all too common across the country. But it’s nearly impossible — at least based on the information readily available to the media — to actually prove that race played a role in the man’s death and ensuing response.
Of course, therein lies the fundamental problem of covering race in America today: Overt racism has been largely eradicated — Jim Crow has been dissolved; redlining has been prohibited. There is little physical evidence of the systemic racism that remains. While the disproportionate police killings of black men would seem to fill that void, Garner’s case shows some factions of the media still find ample room for interpretation.
David Uberti is a writer in New York. He was previously a media reporter for Gizmodo Media Group and a staff writer for CJR. Follow him on Twitter @DavidUberti.