Murder and Media: The Rodney King - Case Study Example

The incident was branded as another instance of wanton violence on the part of LAPD, and more than that there was clearly a racial element to it. But this is so absurd. Maybe the police beating was justifiable. Maybe there was nothing of racial bias or hatred involved the situation and the police would have done exactly the same thing even if Rodney King were a white man. Nobody bothered to cast any doubt on the media version of the event, nor bothered to look at it from an impartial frame of mind, that is, until the Washington Post journalist Lou Cannon came up a remarkable account of the whole incident in his "Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD," though only the better part of a decade after the incident.

In the book, Lou Cannon lucids present his case that the four Los Angeles Police Department officers prosecuted in 1992 for beating Rodney King were merely scapegoats for the deadly riots that took place in the Los Angeles city soon after the police officers received their not-guilty verdicts. Lou Cannon reveals how the crucial first few seconds of the tape was most deliberately edited out from the version shown on all the television networks. But why Because it was favorable to the police officers' case, showing a drug-influenced and totally disoriented Rodney King trying to lunge at a police officer in order to grab his gun.

The conclusion is simple: the inflammatory US media reporting intentionally and significantly warped the public perception for its own gains and thus paved the way for one of the worst riots in our modern times. Let some facts be told. First, King was on parole for a robbery conviction and was trying to escape all through the high-speed 8-mile chase, stubbornly refusing to pull over. As the defense in the trial of the police officers argued, King was heavily under a drug such as PCP. King was behaving extremely erratically, although all this had not been videotaped in the first place.

The officers only start beating King after their attempts to incapacitate King by firing a non-lethal weapon at him fail. The tape only captured that part of the story when King became passive and the officers took the charge. However, the officers were only following their training and standard police practices, striking King in a way that is unlikely to cause serious injury. No serious injury was caused either. So what was all the fuss about How could such a completely banal and innocuous incident have not only badly tarnished LAPD but triggered massive rioting that threw a big city into chaos for three days That is the power of the media, it can be used for good or bad.

It is unfortunate that sometimes media barons fail to see beyond their narrow short-term self-interest.