Liberal actor Morgan Freeman is so tired of the riot stories he’s telling Marlow Stern of the Daily Beast “F— the media.” This came at the end of a rant in which he suggested coverage of the Baltimore riots is less one-sided than Ferguson...and he’s suggesting Ferguson wasn’t sympathetic at all to the black activists.
“Now, they’re getting more of the whole picture. Ferguson? No. Baltimore seems to be coming up with a different scenario in the background,” says Freeman. “People are saying, ‘You were not all there when we were just talking and trying to make a point, but if we set something on fire, all of a sudden you’re all here. Why is that? What’s the difference?’ And some young reporters are listening. That sort of observation is very useful.”
“The other thing is that technology lets us see behind the scenes a little bit better,” he continues. “Police have a standard reaction to shooting somebody. I fear for my life and I fear for my safety. Now, at least you can see, ‘Hey, his hands were up in the air! What part of your safety were you afraid of? The guy was running away, what part of your safety was in danger?’ There was one situation I saw where a cop told a guy to get out of the car, said, ‘Show me your driver’s license,’ and the guy reached back into the car and the cop shot him!”
“Anyway, off the media,” he says, waving his hands in the air and chuckling. “F-ck the media.”
Notice how Freeman carefully ignores the reality of the shooting in Ferguson, what the actual evidence showed about whose hands were NOT up in the air. On other other hand, "the guy was running away" captures the Walter Scott shooting.
Freeman is promoting a “sweet little” romantic comedy called Five Flights Up, in which Stern reports “a young Muslim man whose truck has been stopped by the NYPD on a bridge. A televised standoff ensues, with media figures and the public wildly speculating about the cause of the stop. Most, as is their wont, immediately jump to the ‘he has a bomb’conclusion.”
“Isn’t that always happening?” says Freeman of the media’s penchant for unsubstantiated, biased conjecture during live news events. “Look at MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. Go between those three. There’s a take, there’s a take, and there’s a take. It’s just commentary. CNN wants to be pure news, but the others are just commentary. They’re just commenting on things.”
It's fair to blame cable news for speculating during live news events...but it's also fair to pin some blame on a fickle audience, since breaking live news events can drive up ratings numbers....and what are they supposed to say? CNN acts like turning to a different story line will scare off all its viewers, so they stick on a story like Baltimore and don't let up.
Stern and Freeman don't seem to notice that Hollywood won't base a film on an actual young-Muslim-puts-bomb-in-a-van story like Faisal Shahzad, and wouldn't dream of making a movie about the Fort Hood shootings.