Instead of reporting the facts, mainstream media has become obsessed with supporting narratives—and they’re not telling the whole story about the anti-police movement in America.
But Rob Rosen, a media insider and author of the book, “Crimes of Omission: Distorted Justice: The Media’s War on Truth,” joined Liz Collin on her podcast and shared his perspective on the media coverage of some of the high-profile cases that changed the course of American history.
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Rosen has decades of experience in the media business as an award-winning producer and director. He produced shows on Fox Nation and HBO, among others, and has worked at a CBS station in Los Angeles, both on and off the air.
“I had been directing a show that I had created called ‘Reasonable Doubt’ where we were taking a look at possible wrongful murder convictions. So at that point I was really steeped in the justice system, seeing it from all sides, from the families of convicts, from the prison system, from dealing with a ton of homicide detectives and cops,” Rosen explained.
“So I was getting a pretty well-rounded sense of what was going on and I was seeing this anti-police movement and the way that it was being covered very much from one side, pretty much only from the point of view of civil rights groups, social justice groups, and the attorneys who were representing families who were trying to get money from cities,” he said.
Rosen points to the Trayvon Martin case from 2012 as the start of a major shift in news media. “Something happened where this very radicalized social justice movement was really starting to blossom in a lot of ways. It wasn’t just in the anti-police movement. Something happened though in the coverage with Trayvon Martin where suddenly I think that there was a strange marriage,” he explained.
“You had a lot of younger people who were infiltrating newsrooms—who had been radicalized a little bit in college—and they wanted to see journalism, not as a mirror to hold up to society, not as a truth machine, but as a vehicle to make social change, which, as we know, that is not journalism,” Rosen said.
He also explained to Collin how “it really blew up in Ferguson in 2014 where it was irresistible to Jeff Zucker and to CNN to have live coverage of watching a working-class city burn itself to the ground. You have passion, you have violence. For them it was ratings and eyeballs … It’s just reactive storytelling. Put a bunch of live trucks out there, flood the zone and you’ve got hours of primetime programming.”
Rosen talked about how this kind of news reporting came with consequences. “We were in such a fever in the 2010s, any kind of fact that could cast doubt on the pure innocence of whoever had been the ‘victim’ of these cases of alleged police brutality, or anything that could have just kind of created a gray area, was omitted,” he said.
“I think one of the cases that was really the most egregious was Michael Brown in Ferguson,” Rosen explained.
For Rosen, this was a case of “someone who is really having a psychotic break … On the way to that grocery store where we’ve all seen the surveillance footage of him trying to steal those cigarette rolling papers, he’s walking with a friend and he suddenly darts out in the middle of a busy intersection and cars are swerving out of the way. And his friend’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry. God’s got my back. Nothing can go wrong.'”
In reflecting on the case, Rosen pointed out how “officer Darren Wilson basically had his life destroyed, had to go into hiding, but all someone has to do, and I think they’d be surprised, is read the final report from the attorney general, the progressive attorney general, Eric Holder, who basically says that Darren Wilson’s account is backed up by both the witness accounts and the physical evidence. But if you are watching CNN during that time, you would never know that.”
Rosen said, “We hit a breaking point in the summer of 2020” with the George Floyd riots, which followed a similar kind of reporting with the shooting death of Philando Castile in 2016.
“And I don’t blame the people for being angry. For eight years, they’d been fed a steady diet of stories, which made it seem as though people of color were being hunted in the streets of America and it exploded,” he said.
Rosen spoke about several other key aspects of these cases with Collin and shared insights on how newsrooms across the country reacted and reported on them.
Rosen spoke with dozens of people in the most influential newsrooms across America in compiling his book, “Crimes of Omission: Distorted Justice: The Media’s War on Truth,” which will be published in June, but can be pre-ordered on Amazon.
Liz Collin
Liz Collin is a multi-Emmy-Award-winning investigative reporter, news anchor, and producer who cares about Minnesota. She is the producer of The Fall of Minneapolis and Minnesota v We the People documentary films, and author of the Amazon best-selling book, They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and The Death of George Floyd. Her work has prompted important state laws. Yet perhaps most of all, Liz has been giving a voice to the truth—and helping others tell their stories—for more than 20 years.
Dr. JC Chaix
Dr. JC Chaix is an editor, educator, and an expert in media studies. He wrote and directed the Alpha News documentary "The Fall of Minneapolis" and "Minnesota v We the People."
