Column: What the media got wrong about 'Cop City' protests in Atlanta increasingly clear
In March, The Herald-Times reported on the arrest of Bloomington’s Maggie Gates at the “Cop City” protests in Atlanta, which oppose the clearcutting of the Weelaunee Forest to build a $90 million police training facility. The military-grade facility, proposed after the 2020 BLM protests, is so-named because it includes a mock city to practice anti-protest urban warfare. The article repeated an inaccurate police narrative that Gates, and other demonstrators charged with domestic terrorism, were arrested while destroying construction equipment. A follow-up article revised that demonstrators were arrested at an outdoor concert about a mile from the construction site, on the flimsy grounds that they had mud on their shoes.
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The Herald-Times’ discrepancy did not stem from a simple error, but from a pattern that afflicts both local and national news desks. After the George Floyd protests, news platforms purportedly reconsidered how they report on the police, challenging a history of relying exclusively on biased police accounts to tell stories about crime. While journalism about blatant police brutality has perhaps evolved, this new skepticism has not extended to other functions of policing; journalists are still likely to accept depictions of protesters as dangerous radicals, and take at face value stated motivations for expensive investments in policing.Last month, for example, The New York Times covered the “Cop City” protests on its podcast The Daily. The segment attempted an evenhanded reporting style as it framed the story, but went on to relay details that align closely with police narratives.When describing the police killing of a protester named Tortuguita, the Times noted that accounts differed, but provided only the police narrative — now proven false by the state’s own standards — that Tortuguita shot first, and police opened fire in response. They omitted the results of an independent autopsy, which found Tortuguita sitting cross-legged with their hands up when shot 14 times, and body camera footage which suggests that the sole gunshot wound sustained by an officer resulted from friendly fire. Recently, after a conspicuous three-month delay, the official autopsy was released, revealing 57 gunshot wounds and no gunshot powder on Tortuguita’s hands.The Daily describes the fight “[coming] to a head” when activists burned “police and construction vehicles” in early March. Narrating this event as the point of escalation also closely echoes the police narrative, ignoring several watershed moments that preceded it: a dozen protesters were arrested on domestic terrorism charges in December and January; officers killed a protester in their tent; crews began clearing the forest. Why is the destruction of machines considered less tolerable, more eventful, than the destruction of an ecosystem or the death of a person?The climax of the podcast is a lengthy narrative account, ominously soundtracked, of these protesters destroying equipment in the forest. It then describes protesters sneaking into the festival before being arrested, leaving ambiguous whether the group of arrestees (which included Gates) was the same as those at the construction site.These unfounded charges, which carry sentences up to 35 years, are a grave civil rights violation, enabled by a dramatic expansion of the scope of domestic terrorism charges. The state of Georgia has an especially flexible definition, an example of what the ACLU called “a highly problematic trend of the government — both state and federal — using domestic terrorism powers to punish dissent.”If domestic terrorism charges become standard responses to protests, what kind of recourse do citizens have to challenge the government’s failures to correct police abuses or the destruction of our natural environment — both quite literally life-or-death issues? The Daily did not comment on their broader significance of these charges, nor on the fact that there is no evidence to link the arrestees to the property destruction action. Furthermore, it portrayed a diffuse group of activists as a powerful, organized force — camouflage-clad warriors ripping through fences “like a hot knife through butter,” turning machines to smoke — a key rhetorical strategy used by law enforcement to brand even peaceful protesters as members of a conspiracy or terrorist organization.Relying on police narratives to provide the factual basis for stories about police-citizen disputes is insufficient at best, propagandistic at worst. It narrows the narrative frame, concealing important questions: Why is a $90 million investment intended to fight crime better spent building a mock city than investing in real communities? Why are some protesters condemned by police and denied bond for their “out-of-towner” status, while the Atlanta Police Foundation accepts funding for the training center from private entities unconnected to Atlanta, like the Koch brothers? How do these dramatic policy choices unfold with so little scrutiny from media and politicians?Now is a crucial time for newsrooms to rethink their approach to reporting on the police. Not only are protesters’ hearings unfolding in Georgia, but the role of police is evolving: reactionary policies like Indiana Senate bill 187 — which requires state police to “prioritize the investigation and prosecution” of people who damage public monuments, and “[enhance] penalties to the crime of rioting” — make the mandate for officers to protect property over human life increasingly blatant. In addition, precincts nationwide continue to push for costly expansions of police infrastructure, including a proposed new jail in Bloomington. News desks must look beyond the police reports or miss the real issues at stake.
Eva Rosenfeld is a writer and journalist in Bloomington.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Column: Official accounts aren't the complete story in 'Cop City'
