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Linn Washington who is an expert on Mumia's case and feature's in 'In Prison My Wholfe Life' has has just released a new article about Fox News's obsession with Mumia.
Glen Beck's Mumia Obsession
Fox Finds a New Black BoogeymanBy LINN WASHINGTON, Jr.
R elax Rev Jeremiah Wright.
The Fox News cable channel crew has discovered a new all-purpose black
boogey-man to rile latent racial animosity in America: Mumia Abu-Jamal,
the internationally acclaimed death row journalist.
Abu-Jamal is now a regular reference in the weapons of mass deception
arsenal employed by Fox and its friends to demonize their enemies de
jour.
A few weeks ago, the campaign mounted by two Fox ideological allies
that successfully sacked Fox liberal commentator Dr. Marc Lamont Hill
highlighted Hill’s backing of a fair trial for Abu-Jamal as an
objectionable offense.
Far-right agitators David Horowitz and Cliff Kincaid saw sinful scandal
in FOX simply employing Columbia University Professor Hill for what the
scholar was: a liberal hired by Fox to question postures conservatives
proclaim sacrosanct.
Kincaid, in an October 19th posting on his Accuracy in Media site,
scored Hill for calling Abu-Jamal a “freedom fighter and political
prisoner.”
Earlier this summer Fox’s onslaught against now former White House
‘Green Jobs Czar’ Van Jones frequently cited Jones’ support for
Abu-Jamal who is on Pennsylvania’s death row due to a controversy mired
conviction for killing a Philadelphia policeman.
For weeks, Fox’s popular Glenn Beck bashed Jones for supporting efforts
to free “a communist cop killer” – irrespective of the fact that
Abu-Jamal is not a communist and card carrying communists never
reference Abu-Jamal as a member of their movement.
Frequent emphasis by advocates of Abu-Jamal’s execution, including Fox
hosts, that courts have repeatedly held-up Abu-Jamal’s conviction
ignore an improbability embedded in that accurate statement about this
case.
The same Philadelphia and Pennsylvania courts that have found major
flaws in 86 Philadelphia death penalty convictions between Abu-Jamal’s
December 1981 arrest and October 2009 declare that not a single error
exists in America’s most publicly contentious murder case.
Pa courts, for example, find no foul in prosecutors improperly
excluding blacks from Abu-Jamal’s trial jury, manipulating evidence and
making secret deals with alleged eyewitnesses – all fundamental fair
trial violations producing favorable actions by those courts for
defendants in numerous cases.
Another example is Pa State and federal courts voiding 22 death
penalties because of failures by defense lawyers to present any
mitigating evidence for their clients during death penalty phase
hearings following guilty verdicts.
However, those same courts found no fault in the failure of Abu-Jamal’s
trial counsel to present any mitigating evidence during the penalty
phase hearing.
A problem more troubling than the penchant of Fox and friends to fudge
facts is the fact that too much of the mainstream media uncritically
embraces rhetoric oozing from the far right, rarely subjecting that
rhetoric to full and fair reporting that is supposed to be the
cornerstone of journalism.
This lack of full and fair reportage polluted coverage of the onslaught
against Van Jones and has long corrupted coverage of the controversial
Abu-Jamal conviction.
A September 6, 2009 New York Times article
on the resignation of Van Jones from his White House post listed Jones’
public support of Abu-Jamal as one of Jones’ alleged liabilities.
However, that Times article
lacked any reference to the fact that Jones, as an Ivy League trained
lawyer involved with social justice issues, could legitimately have
concerns about the disturbing evidence of fair trial rights violations
enmeshed in Abu-Jamal’s conviction.
“Human rights organizations have pointed to egregious procedural
mistakes in Abu-Jamal’s original trial, which were obviously rooted in
a background of prevalent racism,” stated a resolution approved on
October 28th by the City Council of Munich, Germany. Elected leaders in
over twenty-five cities from San Francisco to Copenhagen have approved
resolutions demanding a new trial for Abu-Jamal.
The seminal February 2000 Amnesty International report on the Abu-Jamal
case concluded that “numerous aspects of this case clearly failed to
meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal
proceedings.”
Yet, the New York Times and
other major American newspapers deemed Amnesty International’s
Abu-Jamal report not worthy of coverage despite major papers carrying
nearly thirty articles referencing other AI actions during a ten-day
time period surrounding release of that Abu-Jamal report.
Philadelphia’s largest newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, ran a 53-word News Brief on page 2 of its B-section on that thirty-five page AI report.
Although the AI report was the first from a major organization to
thoroughly document egregious shenanigans by the Pa Supreme Court in
the Abu-Jamal case, – the Inquirer did
not consider that report significant enough for full article coverage
despite having published 67 articles mentioning Abu-Jamal in 1999 alone
The mainstream news media’s mile-wide-but-inch-thick coverage of
Abu-Jamal aids the ability of Fox, its friends and others to exploit
public misunderstandings about this case.
Fair trial proceedings are a fundamental tenant of American democracy.
Yet, the judge presiding during Abu-Jamal’s trial displayed unfair bias
by proclaiming before jury selection that he was going to help
prosecutors “fry the nigger.”
While such an overtly racist remark generally constitutes a judicial
error requiring reversal of a conviction, a Philadelphia judge ruled no
error existed because the jury not the judge convicted Abu-Jamal.
That ruling contradicts the reality that judges control what evidence a jury hears.
That Amnesty International report noted that “the jury was left unaware
of much of the crucial information regarding” the policeman’s death due
in part to “the overt hostility of the trial judge.”
Surprisingly, a mainstream media usually quick to prick racially
inflammatory remarks exhibits little interest in numerous instances of
racism infecting the Abu-Jamal case.
Evidence of outrageous errors underlying Abu-Jamal’s conviction literally hides in plain sight.
One glaring example is photos of the December 1981 crime scene taken by
police investigators that do not show a critical element of the
prosecution’s case against Abu-Jamal.
The eyewitness testimony of cab driver Robert Chobert was a central
pillar of the prosecution’s case against Abu-Jamal but police crime
scene photos do not show Chobert’s cab behind the slain officer’s
patrol car where prosecutors claimed it was parked when Abu-Jamal
killed Officer Daniel Faulkner.
Four police photos capturing different angles of the crime scene
contained in the trailer for a forthcoming film about Abu-Jamal’s case
do not show Chobert’s cab.
There are only two possible scenarios for the missing cab in those
crime scene photos: either police tampered with the crime scene by
removing the cab or the cab was never there. Either scenario is a major
legal violation warranting a new trial.
Curiously, inconsistencies in crime scene evidence and irregularities
in court rulings rarely elicit attention in mainstream media coverage
of the Abu-Jamal case that takes a guilty-as-charged tact.
Yet these inconsistencies and irregularities are what fuel the vast international movement supporting a new trial for Abu-Jamal.
On Thursday, November 12th, Abu-Jamal supporters have scheduled a rally
at the US Justice Department headquarters in Washington, DC urging
Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a civil rights investigation
into violations rampant in this contentious case.
One major civil rights violation often overlooked by Abu-Jamal
supporters and ignored by his opponents occurred during a critical 1995
appeal hearing.
Pa’s then Governor Tom Ridge sabotaged that proceeding by improperly
issuing a death warrant based on confidential information Ridge’s aides
obtained from state prison personnel who were illegally intercepting
mail sent to Abu-Jamal by his defense lawyers.
Ridge’s warrant enabled biased trial Judge Albert Sabo to rush that
appeal hearing where Sabo denied defense lawyers standard opportunities
to adequately gather and present evidence.
While a federal appeals court faulted prison personnel for illegally
opening Abu-Jamal’s legal mail neither federal nor state courts have
found any fault in the damage to fair trial proceedings done by Ridge’s
malicious action.
One problem with mainstream media coverage of the Abu-Jamal case and
other instances of racial related injustices from the criminal justice
system to other sectors of society like education or employment is that
coverage presents racial inequities as isolated instead of endemic.
Failure to present inequities in context deprives the public of proper
understanding. The 1968 Kerner Commission Report on race relations in
America faulted the news media for this failure.
As noted in the Kerner Report, “If what the white American reads in the
newspapers or sees on television conditions his expectation of what is
ordinary and normal in the larger society, he will neither understand
nor accept the black American.”
Linn Washington Jr. is
an Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University in
Philadelphia, Pa. He writes regularly on the Abu-Jamal case, inequities
in the justice system and racism in the news media.
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