As cable news continues to run hours worth of live video of fires and riots in Baltimore, Md., some in the media showed a remarkable amount of compassion for the looters and arsonists turning the city upside down.
Baltimore is currently in a state of deep unrest following the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of a suspicious spinal injury last week while in police custody.
Covering the rioting Monday on Fox News, anchor Shepard Smith reasoned that members of the community feel “helpless.”
“Are there big problems in that community with lawlessness?” he said. “There are. The people who were there will tell you that’s about poverty and lack of opportunity and being put down by the man. That’s what they have said all along.”
Later in the day, Smith waxed poetic while describing a small group of peaceful protesters seen on camera singing a hymn. He described the scene as “probably much like it was back in 1968 when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and these same streets and this same historic community erupted and burned and neighbors turned on neighbors and a community was lost.” Rising to the material, Smith went on, “And that community is lost on this day and tonight these people come back to reclaim this territory, saying, ‘I will treat everybody right until I die.'”
On MSNBC, in the 8 p.m. ET hour, contributor Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown professor, also invoked King while discussing the developments in Baltimore.
“It is quite easy to dismiss what is going on now as a bunch of hooligans and looters,” Dyson said. “The great Martin Luther King Jr., whose noble crusade of nonviolence is often contrasted sharply to what we see today, said, ‘Riots are the language of the unheard.'”
Petula Dvorak, a Washington Post columnist, wrote Monday about having traveled to Baltimore to cover the rioting, explaining that she was pushed down at one point and had her phone stolen, only to be helped back up to her feet by two other locals. “The kids — they all looked like teens to me — were angry,” she explained. “Who wouldn’t be growing up in such poverty?”
Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun has documented the chaos in the city, which included a burglarized CVS and the burning of a local grocery store, a community center and an apartment building, as well as a fight that broke out between looters and neighbors who were trying to protect a Rite Aid.
The Sun’s editorial board wrote Monday that “looting convenience stores, smashing police car windows and throwing rocks at officers accomplishes nothing but to confirm the ugly stereotypes that underlie the very injustices the demonstrators are trying to protest.”
The New York Daily News reported that at least five journalists were attacked while covering the unrest.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has instituted a week-long 10 p.m. curfew that begins Tuesday.
Baltimore’s current state of turmoil comes after a series of recent clashes between law enforcement and communities across the country, often involving what appear to be excessive use of force by police against unarmed minorities.
