Daily Beast Portrays Police More Favorably Than Breitbart

Breitbart.com and DailyBeast.com take very different angles on crime reporting. Breitbart is known as a “thin blue line” haven, and Daily Beast has “defund the police” regulars. It is therefore interesting that Daily Beast portrays police in a way that is likely to earn police more political support.

Typical Breitbart headlines are “Double Amputee Mugged Hours After Waking from 6-Week Coma” and “Grandmother Shot In Broad Daylight On New York City Street” and “Police Rescue Dog From Frozen Pond”. The message from Breitbart is there are good and bad people in the world, and that is why we need more police.

Interestingly, Breitbart’s approach mirrors leftist propaganda. Leftists would always say here is a homeless person, here is a child who didn’t eat lunch today. Here is a CEO who makes 500 times as much as his average employee. And therefore, until the world is perfect, we need more and bigger government running roughshod.

The actual results of such programs, are not to feed the hungry or incompetent, but to feed hustlers. People who administrate these programs, as well as people who know how to game the system to get access to these programs, set up offices in certain neighborhoods. They then make a business of lobbying the government, to grow their business.

And those who receive the payouts from these programs, do so in proportion to their sophistication signing up for them. They know how to help themselves, by answering questions in income and residence and family, in a way that will qualify them. The same energy and talent and self promotion used to access the programs, could be used in any industry. Even by lying police.

Meanwhile the homeless and the mentally ill can’t even find the office to sign up. And they are too anti-social to navigate the process. And their actual incompetence denies them access to these programs, the same as it prevents them accessing every other opportunity in life. And they are used as props in sensationalized crime stories, to campaign for more police.

My friend who lives in a large city, had a small house fire costing maybe $20,000 in a $200,000 home. A man came up to him at his house, and said the city has some kind of grants, where they will give him $300,000 cash to build a new house. The man offering the cash said he was friends with the mayor, or whatever public official had authority to hand out this money.

The deal was all my friend had to do is give say $20,000 of the money to the man, who would presumably then give some of that to the public official handing out the money, or at least to his cousins. Maybe a year later, that public official was arrested for corruption. He was then reelected.

Similarly, policing promises to lock up the bad people. But just as often, they actually let the bad people out of prison, in a deal to testify lies against incompetents, who are then locked up for fake crimes in a political show. Or the police are used in a political way, harassing people from the local minority party.

The police promise to get evil people, who kill for sadism, or steal for greed. They then fill the courts and prisons with incompetents and mental defectives, who get arrested three times for every crime they commit, while real sophisticated criminals evade arrest. Police promise to lock up drug kinpgins to save your family member. They then give your family member life without parole for driving someone to a $50 pill transaction.

The reason white people don’t like police, is the same reason they don’t like welfare hustlers. Because they know unless you are friends with the mayor or the sheriff, the system is just as likely to hurt them as help them, for political show. It is a game of insiders, and picking winners and losers in a politics-driven fraud. Politicians and the connected never go to jail for vehicular manslaughter. But your teenage son will get 30 years.

Ordinary people know that when demagogues go out there and rant about all the bad people in the world, they get a mandate to harass strangers. Next thing a cop will be tearing up the inside of their car on the side of the road based on nothing. They know if you run a daycare center, some ambitious prosecutor will get a toddler to invent a recovered memory that you abused him. That prosecutor will take your life for sport, to launch a campaign for attorney general.

When Breitbart rants all day about how bad it is to let people out on bond, ordinary people know they could be the ones held without bond, and lose their job and car and house. They know police are human, imperfect. They do not like the possibility that everything they have can be taken away based solely on the word and impulses of some jerk cop, who will never be investigated or face discipline.

White people are risk averse. They like buildings that are earthquake proof, with all kinds of complex structural joints and supports. They like cars with crumple zones, and hybrid engines. They do not like buildings or criminal cases built in an impulsive human way, on simpleminded corruption and demagoguery. People who become police, on the other hand, probably do it because they like to chase cars, lie to strangers, and beat people, with public approval.

This brings us to how Daily Beast reports on crime. A typical Beast headline might be something like “Persistent Detective Solves 30-Year Cold Case” or “How Science Found A Serial Killer” or “Family And Dog Found Dead In Unsolved Mystery”. Their focus is on specific crimes in an information and knowledge way, not on bad people in a tribal way. It is not “Illegal Immigrant Kills Family.”

Daily Beast also has a smaller category of stories “Police Chief Arrested For Hiding Evidence” and “Bodycam Video Of Trooper Released Two Years After Motorist Beating Death”. Unlike Breitbart, Daily Beast is capable of seeing police as criminals. Whereas Breitbart just sees the world as good and bad people, where the police are always good, and those they beat always did something bad.

Policing is imperfect and corrupt and tribal, like any government solution. The term “witch trial” has an enduring and visceral meaning to Americans. They really believe “There but for the grace of God go I.” They believe in a justice system designed to prevent it, to err on the side of innocence. Cops and politicians and rich and famous people, do not appreciate the vulnerability of ordinary nobodies to cops who lie for sport.

I finally got a cop-cult Republican to admit ordinary white people don’t like police. But she said it is the fault of recreational drugs. Some people like drugs, and therefore they have a culture of hating police. White people have hated police since the Mayflower, and the Bill of Rights. You could just as easily say it is the fault of religion. White people like to limit police action in a scientific way, not expand it to all people whom the majority claims are “bad”.

White people like police who focus on crime in a scientific way, like in the TV shows they love. White people like a world where even police are not above the law, and are caught and punished when they break their religion and fall from grace. By seeing the world as a collection of crimes rather than as a collection of bad people, voters do not fear they will be the ones whom the mob is incited against in an unscientific way.

White people do not like corrupt big government waving a clumsy fist in a corrupt and tribal way, based on political theater and demagoguery. Breitbart portrays police in a way that is terrifying to voters. Daily Beast portrays police in a way that is celebrated by voters. People are terrified of sociopathic police who say half the world is bad and then beat them up, and then hide the evidence and post dog pictures on social media, the way they are portrayed on Breitbart.