The media is not fostering the good faith and honesty necessary to make things better.

Alerted to this from Ann Althouse commenting on a NYT hagiography. From "Appreciate the article but the sanitizing and glossing over of the serious crimes including assaulting a pregnant woman with a gun does a disservice to reporting reality."

"He need not be perfect for all of us to mourn and demand change but by manipulating the life story we lose the ability to educate many who don’t see the problem as they focus on the spin versus the real story - his murder."

The second-highest-rated comment at "George Floyd, From ‘I Want to Touch the World’ to ‘I Can’t Breathe’/Mr. Floyd had big plans for life nearly 30 years ago. His death in police custody is powering a movement against police brutality and racial injustice" (NYT).

Also highly rated: "I am confused. I believe the autopsy report said he was high on fentanyl and methamphetamine. This seems relevant to the full picture yet is not mentioned in the meticulously researched article."

I've read the NYT for more than 50 years, and I don't believe I have another option for reading a real newspaper here in America. I've always been looking out for the propaganda.

If those were the top comments at the time she read the article, they have been superseded by the minions of social justic totalitarianism emoting like all get out.

She further notes

And it's bad not only as bad journalism, but it's bad on the subject of police brutality. It doesn't matter that the man who died had big dreams of the future or professional-level athletic ability. The police shouldn't be executing anybody.

That's the irony. Just about everyone agrees no citizens should be killed by police and no police should be killed by citizens. Both things happen. Less than they did ten and twenty years ago, but still too often. What do we need to do in order to stop both things happening? That is the problem to be solved.

The fact is that there will be life threatening situations both to police and civilians as long as individual civilians are committing violent crime and as long as politicians are pursuing policies potentially injurious to police. That reality brings in to play ugly trade-offs for which there is no right answer, only tragic ones.

But additionally of note, beyond the bad journalism and bad empiricism, this is a persistent publishing habit with little apparent benefit. It probably makes someone feel good about providing balance but it affects the judicial system and roils the public.

The hagiographic rendition of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin followed the same pattern. Nobody deserves to die and nobody is a saint. We don't need to speak ill of the dead but it is equally wrong to air-brush away unpleasant realities. In a eulogy you do the best you can. In a newspaper, ideally, you report the whole story.

With both Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, there was gross journalistic malpractice, early reporting showing pictures years younger than they were, emphasizing their dreams, finding people to say nice things. And then the full picture emerged. These guys lived hard lives. Made some bad decisions. Never had the chances we would hope they could have had. Sometimes too many second chances to learn some important lessons and sometimes too hard a punishment for too minor a crime.

The same seems to be emerging with George Floyd. Just another flawed human subject to original sin and too many bad decisions but still with dreams and aspirations and hopes for better times.

Nobody deserves to die and yet the media seems to try, in special cases, for political reasons, to make a special effort to demonstrate that some people especially don't deserve to die. And that is wrong. NOBODY deserves to die. Whether in aggregate, you ended up making more good decisions than bad or more bad decisions than good, that is irrelevant. Nobody should have died and we all agree on that.

The media, for clicks, is trying to tell a story to make people cry and in doing so makes it harder for justice to be served and harder to fix real problems.

Instead of selling emotion for clicks and politics, how do we bring the number of police killed in the line of duty from ninety down to zero? And how do we bring the number of unarmed civilian deaths at the hands of the police from 40 down to zero? And how do we bring the number of deaths of armed civilians who attack the police from 1,000 down to zero?

Those are good goals that I imagine everyone could support.

Pretending that some civilians deserve to die and some don't and that some police deserve to die and some don't is evil.

We are all flawed. Let the system work and reform it as needed. But let's dispense with the media premise that whether we are saint or sinner justifies death or not. Nobody deserves to die.

And whatever we do to prevent those deaths, there will still be tragic failures. All we can do is try through good faith and honest understanding. Neither of which the media is fostering.