I wrote about the horrific attempted assassination of two L.A. cops in Compton on Sunday. It’s big news in the states, as it should be.
I was curious to see how Danish media had covered it…. and apparently they’re almost all straight outta Compton.
Here’s a search I performed on DR a little after 17:00 on Tuesday afternoon.
And here’s a search a few minutes later on Information:
And a search on Berlingske a little after that:
Jyllands Posten an hour later:
In case your browser isn’t sharing those screencaps with you, they’re search results for “Compton” on the respective news sites… and they’re all coming up with irrelevancies. (I tried other search terms and still found nothing.)
To their credit, TV2 wrote about the crime on Sunday.
Given this general lack of coverage, I have to assume most Danes remain unaware of this story.
That’s interesting, because the Danish editors whose desks cover American issues couldn’t possibly be unaware of this story. Nobody looking at American media since Sunday could have missed this story. Nobody. It’s just not credible.
That means that the relevant editors at DR, Information, Berlingske, and Jyllands Posten, among others, must have made a conscious decision not to carry the story.
Consider: America has been wracked for months by violent riots (amid some mostly peaceful demonstrations) based on the empirically and demonstrably false idea that American law enforcement is systemically racist and its officers are carrying out a holocaust against innocent black Americans. The rhetoric has been incendiary: ACAB (“All Cops are Bastards”) has become more than a catchphrase: it’s become a meme. “Defund the police” has become a mantra. “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” has become a popular chant at protests and demonstrations. And so one Saturday night in Compton a gunman walks up to a parked police cruiser and repeatedly shoots two officers in the head.
And the Danish editors responsible for American coverage figure that’s not something you need to be aware of.
I’m old enough to remember when a completely unhinged lunatic opened fire at a political event being held by a Congresswoman from Arizona and the American media immediately and relentlessly blamed… Sarah Palin. Because she had used cross-hair icons in a campaign ad to target particular congressional seats in Arizona.
That was enough for the establishment to blame Palin for the shooting. As if she were the first politician to use military metaphors in a political context.
The shooter, Jared Loughner, was simply out of his mind. His malice toward Giffords was revealed to have had no connection at all to Palin or her campaign ads. (A Palin libel lawsuit against the New York Times on this very subject was just cleared for a jury trial a couple of weeks ago.)
Remarkably, the establishment media don’t seem to be holding anyone responsible for the shooting of these cops. That’s not to say that the violent and hateful rhetoric pouring out of the zeitgeist from a thousand sources is what drove the shooter to take aim at those cops: possibly it was not, as I noted when writing about the incident on Sunday. He or she may, like Loughner, simply have been acting on the advice of the voices in his or her head.
But I want to repeat another observation I made on Sunday: had these officers died, then the number of law enforcement officers murdered by ambush (for any reason) so far this year would exceed the number of unarmed black men killed by law enforcement (for any reason) in all of 2019.
That’s a simple statistical fact.
If a country of 320 million souls is going to tear itself to pieces over a “holocaust” that produced nine deaths in 2019, and we’re going to cover that in depth here in Denmark, do the eight dead ambushed police officers of 2020, and these two survivors, not merit some consideration?
It’s impossible to understand the current American moment without the totality of the picture. (It may be impossible to understand anyway; god knows I’m struggling.) Search for “George Floyd” on DR and you’ll be rewarded with an embarrassment of riches. Or search for Jacob Blake. Same thing. Search for any mention of the shooting in Compton and you get nothing at all, even two days after the fact.
Meanwhile, of course, the story continues to spread in America as additional details emerge–details like the heroism of the female officer, who managed to radio for help and apply a life-saving tourniquet to her partner after having been shot through the face.
That’s a hell of a story in its own right, is it not?
But probably I’m over-reacting. Probably DR has already commissioned a professor of American Musicology to put together a feature article on the songs you simply must hear to understand the necessity of shooting cops.