Big Collusion between Big Media and Big Government

            An FBI agent contacts Twitter’s head of trust and safety and asks him to censor every mention of a major news story from the social media network on the grounds that the story is false, a result of illegal hacking, or both. Twitter complies, even going so far as to suspend the account of the newspaper that published it. Later, the story—which hacking had nothing to do with—turns out to be accurate.

            Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, creates a special direct login platform so that the Department of Homeland Security can directly flag content on the networks in order to request that it be censored. But when political hate groups use Facebook to doxx their ideological enemies—who get murdered as a result—the company is impossible to get hold of.

            The FBI routinely hands lists of users the bureau would like to see banned or shadowbanned to Twitter. The government pays Twitter to carry out these requests. “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” a Twitter employee emails in February 2021. The people who lose their accounts have no recourse or way to call the company.

            After the Los Angeles Police Department pension fund becomes the #1 shareholder of the parent company of the Los Angeles Times, the Chief of the LAPD asks the publisher of the Times to fire its political cartoonist because his cartoons criticize the police and the chief. The police chief gives the publisher evidence that shows the cartoonist lied in print—evidence that turns out to have been falsified by the police. The paper refuses to fess up to its readers.

            Elite gatekeepers dismiss these and other stories of high-level collusion between government, traditional media and big tech media as “old news.” If so, where are the old news stories? Boldface names attack Elon Musk’s hypocrisy for banning the guy who tracks the movements of his private jet while claiming to be a champion of free speech. Nice deflection, but Musk’s inconsistencies don’t erase years of systemic corruption at the expense of free expression.

Or they call it a “nothingburger.” No big deal, nothing to see here, this is merely the way business has always been done between the old boys. The New York Times ran pro-Iraq war propaganda by Judith Miller and other hacks as a favor to her buddies in the Bush White House. As Edward Snowden revealed, giant telecommunications companies and technology firms voluntarily turned over their customers’ private information to the NSA and CIA—and got paid in return. The difference in Silicon Valley’s old-boys club is added flavor: there are young people and people of color too.

The argument that an outrage isn’t outrageous because it has long been an ongoing concern rests on the crappiest piece of plywood imaginable. Dismissing said outrage by claiming that it was previously digested by some nonexistent news cycle in some nebulous past demands a level of ignorance and stupidity so staggering that it cannot even be attributed to the average American.

Fact is, news consumers don’t know about the cozy partnership between big government and big media. If and when they think about such things, readers, viewers and social-media consumers view news-gathering organizations as the natural enemies of politicians and bureaucrats — a relationship not unlike that of a cat to a mouse. In the movies, the medium that most exposes the inner workings of newspapers and broadcasting companies, reporters and their editors are invariably depicted as cynical, hard-charging outsiders dying to score Pulitzers and promotions by publishing blockbuster exposes about politicians on the take and priests on the make.

In this ideal world, fading ever further in the rearview mirror, a newspaper publisher doesn’t know, much less take a phone call or a meeting with the local police chief. The FBI can’t get through to Facebook because they are helping customers take down threatening posts. No one at Twitter knows anyone at DHS, and if they do, they aren’t allowed to talk to them.

The truth, sadly for the accountability essential to democracy, is different. Top media organizations recruit rich kids from rich families that can afford to send their brats to journalism schools to which the poor and people of color need not apply because they hardly offer any financial aid. Journalists, 84% of whom come from privileged backgrounds, view rich and powerful individuals and corporations as friends and allies to cultivate as sources rather than as enemies to investigate and expose. “Access journalism” is stenography, not journalism.

No wonder pundits at corporate media outlets are irritated at the public response to the Twitter files and are baffled that the expressions of disgust refuse to fade away. In their world, one hand has always washed the other. They have never given a passing thought to adversarial journalism, much less endeavored to practice it.

            They ask: what’s the big deal?

            We reply: if you don’t know, you must go.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

From Pot to Jaywalking, Pay Compensation to Those Hurt by Repealed Laws

            Whether it’s a soaring literary classic like Les Misérables or generic Hollywood product like The Butterfly Effect, I’m drawn to stories in which a minor event triggers a series of unforeseen dramatic events. As Springsteen wrote and Dave Edmunds sang, from small things big things one day come.

            A real-life example transpired three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when I was falsely accused of jaywalking — a misdemeanor at the time — by an LAPD officer who roughed me up and handcuffed me to boot. For 14 years, nothing happened as the result of that arrest on October 3, 2001. In the summer of 2015, without warning, getting busted for jaywalking blew up my life.

            Tiny problems can wreak havoc. Like the O-ring. Hell, I got expelled from college over a wart.

The jaywalking thing cost me my job as the staff cartoonist at the Los Angeles Times, damaged my reputation to the point where I was nearly blacklisted from journalism and cost me friends and colleagues. It made me doubt the ability or willingness of journalism, the love of my life, to do the right thing. It convinced me beyond a reasonable doubt that the justice system is hopelessly corrupt. I drank too much. Who knows—the weight I gained may eventually kill me.

I am grateful for every day that passes when I don’t think about jaywalking or the LA Frigging Times. Unfortunately there was no way to distract myself this week. California governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law decriminalizing jaywalking. As of the first of the coming year the Freedom to Walk Act means you’ll be allowed to cross a street in the Golden State—safely! look both ways before crossing, like mom taught you—without fear of being fined, handcuffed, beaten, arrested or even killed by a lunatic cop unless “a reasonably careful person would realize there is an immediate danger of collision with a moving vehicle or other device moving exclusively by human power.” (The legislation is silent on devices powered by other animals or plants.)

            Jaywalking tickets are big business in California. In Los Angeles alone, the LAPD raised $6.2 million in revenues by fining 31,712 accused jaywalkers between 2010 and 2020. Blacks were targeted more than three times their presence in the population.

            Several well-meaning readers contacted me to inform me of California’s new law, which I support wholeheartedly except for an all-too-common omission: it’s not retroactive. Those who have suffered fines, imprisonment and other punishments under a law that is subsequently repealed ought to be made whole. If slaves were emancipated by the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865, escaped slaves and those who helped them who were punished for their “crimes” should receive apologies and restitution by 1866. Merely erasing a conviction from your criminal record, as some states that have legalized marijuana have done, isn’t enough.

Anyone who is charged and convicted for a crime that is no longer a crime ought to be refunded their fines and attorneys’ fees, plus compound interest charged at the highest credit card rate. Anyone who spent time in jail or prison for an offense that is no longer viewed as an offense under the law should be generously compensated by the state or city responsible for their conviction.

Even if California were to come to its senses and pay millions of dollars in penance to everyone who suffered under bigoted jaywalking laws that were originally conceived by automobile companies as a way to discourage walking and sell more cars, there still wouldn’t be any way to undo all the weird side effects of what we now recognize as an obsolete form of oppression.

For poor Californians, the $196 jaywalking fine was devastating. Under our vicious capitalist system, there can be no doubt that some people failed to make rent and even lost their homes after being targeted by police enforcing this idiotic statute.

As a solvent, able-bodied, white, cis male, Ivy League graduate, paying the citation was no big deal. But even for me, it was a train wreck.

Upset about being falsely accused — I wasn’t jaywalking, the cop made it up — and mistreated, I filed an internal affairs complaint against the officer back in 2001. Citizens are ignored in such cases 96% of the time, and I was no exception. By 2015 I had been working for the LA Times for six years. But I didn’t know two things. First, a thin-skinned police chief was furious every time I drew a cartoon criticizing the police. Second, in 2014, the LAPD union bought an interest in the parent company of the LA Times and formed an obscene corrupt alliance with the paper’s publisher, multibillionaire Austin Beutner.

In 2015 Beutner and Chief Charlie Beck held a secret meeting where, clearly needing more important things to do to fill their time—they should try golf, the evil rich love it—they conspired to ruin me. Beck dredged up my old IA complaint file, which contained an audio recording the cop had made of my jaywalking arrest: basically six minutes of wind and street noise. At Beutner’s direction the Times wrote a piece that argued the cop was kind and polite, and that my description of the encounter in a Times blog piece was false, so I must be fired for crimes against journalism.

Fox News, Breitbart and the rest of the right-wing mediasphere had a field day dragging the corpse of my reputation across the Internet.

Ultimately, I was vindicated. The doctoring of the tape, the Beck-Beutner conspiracy, the fact that I’d told the truth about what happened in 2001 while the LAPD Times had lied all came out in the media and through the course of a lengthy court battle. There’s no telling how much work I’m not getting as a result of the Times’ defamation campaign, though I am working.

The experience changed me, mostly for the worse.

Nothing could make me, or the other people hurt by California’s repealed jaywalking law, whole again. But the state should try.

Every state should try, every time it repeals a bad law.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

DMZ America Podcast #59 | July 29, 2022: Ted Calls in from Moscow; Paul Pringle and Other Self-Serving Figures at the LA Times

In this week’s DMZ America Podcast, cartoonist Ted Rall calls in on a shaky line from Russia. Listen to this first-hand account of how US sanctions are (not) affecting Moscow and how things look and feel in the Russian capital. LA Times investigative reporter Paul Pringle, in the news over his controversial book (“Bad City”) calling out corruption at the Times and in LA in general, and attacking his own newspaper over a USC scandal, played a key role—perhaps largely forgotten—in the LA Times’ infamous decision to fire and smear Ted as a favor to the LAPD. Scott and Ted recall how things went down in 2015 and analyze how few people at the LA Times have much to be proud of.

 

 

Internal Affairs Is a Joke

Listening just now to NPR talking about internal affairs departments that “self investigate” the police, I naturally think about my now-notorious encounter with an LAPD motorcycle officer on October 3, 2001.

First and foremost, the cop watched me cross the street legally, with the signal, within the crosswalk, safely, without traffic. He arrested me for jaywalking. He knew it was false. He wrote me a bullshit ticket because he could. I assume he needed the numbers.

He roughed me up and handcuffed me for no reason. This was after I’d already voluntarily presented my ID. Obviously I wasn’t going to run away.

He was snotty and rude throughout the encounter, which culminated with him uncuffing me and throwing my driver’s license into the gutter after pretending to hand it back to me. I was scrupulously polite and cooperative the entire time.

I filed a complaint with the internal affairs department of the LAPD. They never contacted me. I called and left a message but they never got back to me. Finally they sent a letter saying that they had investigated and found my claim groundless. Of course, they never investigated. How could they? They never talked to me.

IA is a joke. That same year, the internal affairs division of the Los Angeles police department found that zero out of 1356 bias complaints were legitimate. At the same time, fewer than 2% of police officers are responsible for over 50% of complaints filed by citizens. That’s one hell of an interesting coincidence.

Numbers are similar elsewhere. In New York, internal affairs investigated 2495 reports of police bias over four years. IA agreed with citizens 0% of the time, cops 100% of the time.

A person well-connected with LAPD asked around the department about my cop. “A real asshole,” he reported back. “He has a terrible reputation.” That’s not surprising. The officer worked for the infamous West Traffic Division, where quotas were so rampant that police who refused to issue false tickets were retaliated against and discriminated against. The city ultimately had to pay out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits filed by good cops who were treated like shit by the LAPD because they followed the law.

(This was the cop the LA Times pretended to choose to believe over me when I related the above account in a blog for the LA Times. They fired me and labeled me. I sued. The LA Times has fought ferociously to avoid letting me have my day in court over this. Right now things look pretty bleak. Even though the LA Times knows for a fact that I told the truth, and have admitted as much in court, they continue to try to bankrupt me. So far it’s going  well. For them.)

To put it mildly, I have no respect and only contempt for the police. And I have even less respect and even more contempt for what pretends to pass as a system of justice. The whole system needs to be destroyed.

Full Text of National Writers Union Amicus Letter

The NWU has joined six other free-speech organizations in supporting my lawsuit against the LA Times with an Amicus Letter to the California Supreme Court. It is so great to see people stepping forward and standing up against billionaire Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong, whose LA Times is bullying me on behalf of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Here is the text of their letter:

Text of CRNI Amicus Letter

The Cartoonists Rights Network International compares what the LA Times did to me to repression in Turkey, Malaysia and Equatorial Guinea.
 
Here is the complete letter CRNI was kind enough to send to the California Supreme Court in opposition to the LA Times’ motion that I pay billionaire Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong (owner of the Times) hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Ted Rall vs. LA Times: Here’s Rall’s Appellate Brief Challenging the Times’ Nasty, Abusive “anti-SLAPP” Motions

Yesterday my attorneys filed, and California’s Court of Appeals accepted, our Appellate Brief in my defamation and wrongful termination lawsuit against the Los Angeles Times et al.

I sued in 2015. The Times filed three anti-SLAPP motions against me, halting the case because they’re scared of facing a jury and want to intimidate me. In 2017 a lower-court judge ruled for the Times, ordering me to pay them $350,000 in the Times’ attorneys fees. This document is our appeal of the 2017 decision.

If successful, the $350,000 judgement will be vacated and I can build my case to take to a jury.

If not, the $350,000 stands, plus more fees for the Times defense of this appeal. And my case dies. And Californians who work for media companies will have no recourse in the courts if their employer discriminates against them, even if they do so for racist or sexist or homophobic reasons.

Please read our brief below; it’s an interesting read. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and reactions. Thank you for your incredible support!

 

Ted Rall vs. Los Angeles Times: anti-SLAPP Appellate Brief by Ted Rall

Today We Are Challenging the LA Times’ anti-SLAPP Motion in California’s Court of Appeals

California anti-SLAPP rulings are automatically appealable “de novo” ( which means the higher court looks at it with “fresh eyes”) to the Court of Appeals. Therefore, today my attorneys Jeff Lewis and Roger Lowenstein are filing our appellate brief in Ted Rall vs Los Angeles Times et al. We are asking the justices to overturn the lower court ruling issued last summer, which found that the Times has an absolute privilege under the First Amendment to publish anything it wants about anyone, even it’s false and libelous. The lower court acknowledged in its ruling that the enhanced audio showed that I wrote the truth in my May 2015 blog post about jaywalking.

Even though California’s anti-SLAPP law makes it extremely difficult to sue for defamation, we do not believe the law was intended to, nor does it say, what the Times is arguing. So we are fighting on.

This path is not without risk. The lower court awarded the Times about $350,000 in legal fees, and ordered me to pay them. If the Court of Appeals agrees with the Times, my case will be dismissed and I will have hundreds of thousands in additional fees.

Nevertheless, it is important that victims of injustice stand up for themselves, and not just for their own sake but for the betterment of society. If the LA Superior Court ruling stands, it would create a precedent that would effectively legalize libel. This could ruin countless lives and careers. In addition, the Times must be held accountable for its corrupt collusion with the LAPD. Media organizations should not create financial partnerships or close associations with law-enforcement agencies they are supposed to cover objectively. Given that the Times publisher was friends with the chief of police whom I mocked in my cartoons, is it any wonder that the LA Times does a lame job reporting on police malfeasance and violence against people of color?

After the court accepts it, I will post and disseminate a copy of our Appellate Brief online. If you wonder why the press is in trouble these days, it’s worth a read.

You can support my legal battle against the LA Times here.

Ted Rall v. LA Times et al. – Lawsuit Update

Remember this the next time someone tells you it’s too easy to file a lawsuit in American courts. We need tort reform, but not to make it harder. It needs to become easier to seek justice!

As I wrote earlier, a judge in LA Superior Court ruled against me in the first round of anti-SLAPP motions filed against me by the LA Times. The Times is deploying anti-SLAPP — a law promoted as a way to protect whistleblowers and critics against wealthy corporations — against me because I am suing them for defamation and wrongful termination. (This was after they falsely claimed I had lied about being roughed up by an LAPD police officer in the course of a jaywalking arrest, and continued to lie after I used their own evidence to prove it. The Times and its publisher had a close financial and political relationship with the LAPD, which I had repeatedly criticized in my cartoons.)

On November 20 the ethics-impaired LA Times — terrified that my case might someday be heard before a jury of my peers — continued its scorched-earth litigation tactics and asked a judge to issue a judgement against me for about $350,000 of the Times’ legal fees. The fees included Times lawyer Kelli Sager’s $705/hour fee, which she described as “discounted.” It also included fees for preparing the anti-SLAPP motions themselves, which violated court rules by running 27+ pages instead of the allowed 15, and a previous judge threw out of court.

The Times also requested that I be forced to post an “appeals bond” equal to 1.5 times the value of the award, thus amounting to about $525,000. That bond would have to be posted in cash; in other words, I would need to send a bonding company 100% ($525,000) to post the bond in order to continue my case.

Remember: the Times is the defendant! They wronged me, not the other way around.

The judge ruled in the Times’ favor.

Corporate media takes care of its own, so I do not expect much solidarity from my fellow inked-stained wretches.

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