Imagine if most media outlets told the truth like Kass? Sorry I was having a dellusional moment.
Dexter Reed as Media Alchemists Build a Martyr
By John Kass
April 17, 2024
In most news stories about the Chicago Police shooting of Dexter Reed there are certain established ingredients:
The weeping mother fainting, the suspicious white leftist lawyers wondering aloud if Dexter Reed’s death was caused by over-eager racist cops, suspicious black activists who see police as the embodiment of white rage even if they’re not white and repeated mention of the 96 shots.
Only rarely if at all was there mention of a most inconvenient fact.
He shot first.
Dexter Reed, unprovoked, shot at Chicago Police first, according to police body cam video and COPA, the historically anti-police Chicago Office of Police Accountability. Reed had a gun, he did not have a permit to carry. According to the video, he wounded one officer at the beginning of his spree. And Reed was killed. If Reed had been a better shot, a Chicago Police officer would be dead, a black officer.
“The media thing kills me,” said my friend and colleague Jeff Carlin, executive producer at WGN radio and co-host of my podcast The Chicago Way.
And the left wing media alchemists are desperately hoping to turn Reed into gold.
“(Almost) every photo we see of this kid is a photo of him graduating from high school,” said Carlin, “or he’s playing basketball in high school but why aren’t they holding up any photos of him recently? Well, it sounds like they’re trying to push a narrative.”
Indeed, the media alchemists tried to fashion him in death as a symbol. But Reed was not a civil rights icon. He had a criminal record. He was facing an illegal gun case. He’d already been shot in some sort of street battle that I imagine involved street gang signs. He was what he was: Trouble.
He pulled the trigger first. He was not a symbol of anything, except perhaps a symbol of the media’s political appetites.
Now they can shape him anyway that suits them. Like clay.
“Police fire 96 shots in 41 seconds, killing Black man during traffic stop,” read the headline in the left-wing Washington Post.
The Post didn’t mention it was Reed who shot first until the eighth paragraph. The preceding paragraphs were full of emotion from the family’s point of view.
USA Today was another left-wing newspaper that portrayed police as aggressors.
“Seat belt check: Cops fired 96 shots at motorist, killing him.”
The same style, same left wing political alchemy from CNN, CBS, and other political alchemists.
Were the Chicago Police wrongful aggressors?
No, I don’t think so. He was a felon who fired first. He shot 11 rounds. Another fact virtually ignored by media alchemists. At least one officer was hit. Police had a legal obligation to end the threat. That’s not just a comment on their emotional state, it’s the law.
But like the Post, the left-wing USA Today portrays the cops as in the wrong.
The police shooting of Dexter Reed is a tale told by a media that is determined to fan a spark into a blaze and burn Chicago—the host city of the 2024 Democrat National Convention—to a crisp.
According to the leftist local “public television” station WTTW, the lawyer for the Reed family, Andrew M. Stroth, described those final shots as a “military-style (execution).”
He claimed the plainclothes officers never announced they were police. He insisted they initiated an unconstitutional traffic stop before the shooting.
“How many more Black and Brown young men have to die before this city will change?” he said during a news conference Tuesday.
Where are the loud and angry media condemnations of this vicious incendiary and racist anti-police rhetoric? Denunciations vanished into some empty space, without echoes.
I don’t see that the police officers were racist. I spent decades in the Chicago media, not only offering opinion, but covering hard news. There were scrupulously fair editors and reporters. But as Chicago media became militantly woke and journalism died off, the fair journalists were replaced or they hid and maintained silence for fear of being dragged to one of those left wing struggle sessions.
But I think of police and their families, their kids under siege in a city where so many institutions from City Hall to the ruling Democrat Party, the ruling Chicago Teachers Union and the corrupt corporate media hate cops and seek any opportunity to publicly demonize them and reflexively hate cops.
But I did read some interesting and telling observations about Dexter Reed.
I didn’t find it in mainstream corporate media, but in The Chicago City wire, a news outlet publicly hated and loathed by the Tribune, the publicly funded television station WTTW (Wilmette Talking to Winnetka) and others.
My friends Dan Proft and Brian Timpone are involved with the Chicago City Wire and other publications. The Tribune and its political writer hates Proft and this writer encourages his unctuous media posse to hate them too.
One story ignored by Chicago’s corrupt corporate media involved thousands of federal dollars to Dexter Reed: But Proft and Timpone don’t apologize. I loathe the man, and he loathes me but I’ll never apologize to an oily combine sympathizer who has posed for decades as a newsman while protecting the Republican combine. I’m sure there are those on the left who would champion him now, to get at me, but then they’re shameless.
The story in Chicago City Wire was clear:
“Dexter Reed, felon killed after he shot at police, received $20,832 PPP loan for his ‘transportation’ business”
Did Biden and taxpayers buy him a car?
Another such story involved the lawyer Stroth having had his law license suspended reported in The Chicago Contrarian.
“A Chicago attorney who was threatened with a defamation lawsuit by police union officials in 2018 has had his law license suspended, according to records from the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC).
“Attorney Andrew Martin Stroth was suspended for 30 days after “the hearing board found that (Stroth) failed to act with reasonable diligence in representing his client, provided improper financial assistance to the client, knowingly made false statements of material fact in connection with a disciplinary matter and engaged in dishonest conduct,” according to ARDC records.
I looked it up myself, and checked it against other stories, including in the Illinois Bar Association News.
Yep, there it was, not my opinion but fact: attorney Stroth suspended.
“Mr. Stroth, who was licensed in 2001, was suspended for 30 days and ordered to take the ARDC’s professionalism seminar. He failed to pursue a client’s personal injury case, allowing the statute of limitations to expire. He also provided money to the client as a loan against an anticipated settlement and then as a purported settlement. He falsely told his client that he had communicated with an insurance claims adjuster, and he made false statements to the ARDC in the course of the disciplinary proceeding. The suspension is effective on October 14, 2021. “
You’d think the corporate media—so eager and wiggly to list each and every anonymous complaint ever filed against police officers—might think it might be newsworthy to note the following:
Reed picked up $20k in PPP loans for a “transportation” business while facing other felony charges.
And the family lawyer having been suspended for lying to clients and allegedly making false statements to State Supreme Court investigators?
Isn’t that something to be mentioned too?
Throughout this column and in the podcast, I’ve referenced the media and alchemists hoping to breathe life into Derek Reed and make of him a civil rights martyr, or the excuse to destroy the cities the political left used during their George Floyd BLM “mostly peaceful” riots.
A quick look at the internet will tell you that Medieval Alchemists—the bearded geeks and necromancers who wanted to turn lead into gold—had standard supplies in their bags.
Their supplies included glass beakers, metal frames to hold a beaker over an open flame, and a mortar and pestle with which to grind magical herbs for potions.
I figure the media would want to throw in the head of a Chicago police officer.
But there’s also something missing.
What is it?
Nothing.
Yeah, nothing.
Because that is the negative space where so many interesting and vital things are kept.
The negative space in silhouette–between the moving bodies of two ballet dancers—tells the story of the dance.
It is the space where the watchdog is expected to bark but remains silent.
It is in the negative space where you find all manner of secrets.
Like the fact that Dereck Reed shot at police first. It was that first shot that was hidden, obscured, lost by so much of the early reporting by major mainstream corporate media.
It was pushed into the negative space by so many institutions that insist that Democracy Dies in Darkness.
And now that you know that it happened, you might want to ask yourselves the one thing they don’t want you to ask:
Why?