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Floyd Bodycam Leak Highlights Press Collusion With Government

As the last wisps of smoke still curl up from the ashes of the widespread destruction left behind by the “mostly peaceful” social justice warriors who burned, smashed, and looted in the name of promoting tolerance and harmony, new details emerge regarding the catalytic death of George Floyd. It now turns out that the authorities in Minnesota have been holding back bodycam footage of the minutes leading up to Floyd’s death, which appear to corroborate the hypothesis that Floyd may have died of a drug overdose, not police brutality.

The British Daily Mail on Monday scooped American news media with the leaked police body cam footage. To be clear, the footage does not exonerate the police officers although it provides considerable context not previously available. Floyd refused several police orders including not making his hands visible during the initial traffic stop to resisting entering a patrol car.

In the video, Floyd complains about difficulty breathing before the infamous knee-on-the-neck pose. His shortness of breath may have been a symptom of an advancing drug overdose that ultimately may have contributed to his death. The autopsy indicated a quantity of 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in Floyd’s blood. One study of 143 postmortem analyses of fentanyl overdoses found a median level of 9.8ng/mL in the blood of people believed to have died from overdosing on the drug.

Setting that aside, the way in which the new information came to light is further indication that American news media cannot be trusted to cover and report facts. Why would a whistleblower need to find a foreign news outlet to publicize the highly newsworthy videos of the minutes before Floyd’s death?

The answer, of course, is that American news media work together to advance a shared political agenda. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is a project the New York Times wrote openly about in 2017. In the view of the writers and editors, history calls upon the American news media to oppose this president.

In early 2017, the media entered into a fragile agreement not to publish the infamous Steele dossier. Buzzfeed broke the agreement which ended the anti-Trump whisper campaign as the Steele fairytale could be subjected to the disinfecting sunlight of public scrutiny.

In the aftermath, CNN criticized Buzzfeed for not sticking with the program. Buzzfeed pushed back on the criticism, stating the publication was “not going to participate in an attempt to divide the media against each other.” The New York Times wrote an editorial complaining that the disunity of the press created an opening for the president, “And so, Mr. Trump won again, by succeeding in doing just that. It was all part of a show in which he used news organizations as props in their own lampooning while he played them off each other with labels of good and bad and selectively answered their policy questions. A united front would have given the reporters stronger footing.”

And since then, readers outside of the mainstream media have noticed a palpable “united front” within the media. Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of the The Intercept, tweeted this montage of supposedly independent news agencies using the same phrases like, “bombshell,” “tipping point,” “the walls closing in,” and “beginning of the end.”  Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh routinely compile such videos to mock the journalistic “united front” against President Trump.

But their unity is evident not only in the get-Trump effort. Plenty of other evidence exists.

In November 2019, ABC and CBS worked together to hunt down a reporter suspected of exposing media suppression of the Jeffrey Epstein story. And one should not overlook the fact that the entire theory of “Russian interference” in the 2016 election involved hacked and leaked emails containing embarrassing revelations that the media had coordinated with the Clinton campaign.

More alarming is the fact that the Department of Justice has joined in an effort to suppress foreign sources of information that might contradict the media narrative.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the now-abandoned prosecution of the Russian social media case was just an effort to block foreign news and opinion from reaching American voters. The Russians, the government warned, were introducing “divisive” political speech into the public discourse. “The case against Concord,” I noted at the time, “rests on the idea that if a foreigner publishes ‘divisive’ political speech critical of an American presidential candidate (but only if it’s not Trump), that person must first seek permission from the [Justice Department] and the [Federal Elections Commission], disclose his true identity, and reveal his source of funding.”

Thus, under the Justice Department’s theory of prosecution in the Concord case, it may now bring a criminal case against the Daily Mail for undermining American media unity by introducing “divisive” information to Americans. Indeed, authorities in Minnesota have already launched an investigation to find and punish the leaker.

This “united front” project so successfully orchestrated by American media has dire implications for our freedom. Beyond the obvious editorial bias that infects virtually all of journalism, the industry has suppressed the competitive impulse of reporters to scoop each other when the otherwise newsworthy story might harm the political objectives of the colluding outlets.

This should be seen for what it is: a conspiracy to restrain trade within the news industry. It’s anti-competitive, anti-democratic, and dangerous to our republic.

If the Department of Justice were not itself colluding to maintain the “united front” of the press, we would expect an antitrust investigation to be opened. Until that stops, Americans suffer with a politicized and united media that the Chinese Communist Party can only envy.

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About Adam Mill

Adam Mill is a pen name. He is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and works in Kansas City, Missouri as an attorney specializing in labor and employment and public administration law. He graduated from the University of Kansas and has been admitted to practice in Kansas and Missouri. Mill has contributed to The Federalist, American Greatness, and The Daily Caller.

Photo: Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images

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