McKinney Pool Brawl

The video of the McKinney, TX, event is rich with interesting detail. I especially like how the white kid doing the filming and his friend return the officer's flashlight, thereby currying favor to continue filming without being molested. The kid with camera kept his head in a chaotic situation and purchased the right to run his own agenda. He was being ignored by the cops not just because he's white. And I like how Officer Casebolt's orders to leave contradict the orders of the other officers to sit down, which just compounded the confusion.

The black kids were polite and obedient too, just baffled as to why they were being ordered about, until Officer Casebolt yelled in their faces. And as the girl in the bikini goes down she calls for her mother. A child confronted by warrior zeal.

I'm intrigued about the portrayal of the event in the right-wing talk-radio medium. I was listening Wednesday morning to Dennis Prager (from LA) on 650 AM KSTE from Sacramento. His guest (Mark Davis, 660 AM in Dallas/Ft. Worth) was giving a more-or-less dispassionate blow-by-blow of the events in the video. As Davis recounted it, the teenaged girl is told to sit on the grass by the cop, and was manhandled when she disobeyed. But you can easily look at the video and see how she is ordered several times to leave, and because of the slow response of her and her friends, and probably also because of backtalking (out of hearing range), is then manhandled and thrown about. Davis talks on his radio blog about how many times he's explained this incident to others, so it's strange he'd get it so, so wrong, unless he was deliberately misstating facts. So, casual radio listeners are being misled here. Interestingly, that portion of Prager's broadcast was quickly hidden behind a paywall - the free summation doesn't mention the misstated facts - and complete verification would cost $$$ I'm not willing to pay.

And why is it important to misstate facts? Many people didn't see the video and they are thus malleable in their opinions. And memories are being made now, so if the simplified memory summary is corrupted now the event can be used later on for other purposes.

Commentators have long noticed how the right wing comes to different conclusions about events than the rest of society. Part of that is simply because they are being told different things than the rest of society. Wrong things.