Thursday, October 20, 2011

At Occupy Oakland an ABC reporter is told--“We shoot white bitches like you around here.”

“We shoot white bitches like you around here.” According to our source, the Oakland Police Department was apparently called to the scene. Inquiries to the police, and to Hollyfield, which began at roughly 8 a.m. Pacific time yesterday, are still unanswered today. Other local morning news reports from three of the major Bay Area stations suggested that the Occupy Oakland tent city had descended into rat-infested squalor with complaints of vandalism, public urination, sexual harassment, and sex in public. The night before, local CBS affiliate KNTV had reported that one Occupy Oakland activist had set his dog on a reporter in a vicious attack that would have maimed his arm had the reporter not been wearing a suit jacket. Yet even as these local stations reported how Occupy Oakland has collapsed into chaos, they failed to report that police were allegedly called to protect a reporter whose life was threatened in a racist and misogynistic way. KGO is not playing up the alleged incident on its website, and its reporting on the Occupy Oakland chaos is leaving out these explosive details–that, if verified, would make Occupy Oakland the major national story it ought to be. Here is Ms. Hollyfield’s report from this morning, in which she mentions threats to KGO’s cameras, but not the alleged threat to her life. Hollyfield later confirmed, on Twitter, the threat to “break our camera,” but did not mention the alleged threat to her life. In another report from the Occupy Oakland tent city early this morning, KTVU’s Claudine Wong was verbally abused and intimidated on live television, in a tense scene witnessed by viewers throughout the Bay Area. That report was filed from roughly the same place, and at roughly the same time, as Ms. Hollyfield’s. According to our source, the other local stations are aware of the threat made against Ms. Hollyfield, but nothing has been reported about the incident as of yet. A participant in the protest–who urged his Twitter followers to “punch a banker in the face” and called for the military to join the demonstrators–confirmed that the media had been banned from the Occupy Oakland site, but denied that the protest camp was unsafe. Later, during the midday broadcasts, only KNTV, the local NBC affiliate, reported the unrest at the Occupy Oakland demonstration. However, other local media outlets have begun to report the emerging violence of Occupy Oakland. The San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday: Some Oakland residents say the demonstration has gone too far already. “It’s like Burning Man at City Hall,” Marleen Sacks, 46, said Tuesday. “Any time you’ve got a group of people who openly defy the law without consequences, I think that’s a problem.” She added, “This happens to be a cause that a lot of city officials are sympathetic toward. If they weren’t sympathetic, it would be shut down right away.” The Chronicle also reported that Occupy Oakland had decided to block media access to the public park where the tent camp is located, denying journalists their First Amendment rights—in creepy consensus fashion. And, as Big Government notes this morning, the Oakland Tribune has described Occupy Oakland as the home of “[h]omeless people, ex-convicts, at least one registered sex offender, students, unemployed hotel workers, anarchists and reform-minded activists.” And those are the good people, supposedly. The rest of the Occupy Oakland tent camp has degenerated into a Lord of the Flies re-enactment, infested with “bullies, the mentally ill, drunks, thugs and anarchists.” Violent crime–including assaults against women–is accompanied at Occupy Oakland by drug dealing, child endangerment, and frequent fights among tent camp residents and passersby. That is the true face of the Occupy movement that President Barack Obama has embraced and Bay Area denizen Nancy Pelosi has “blessed”–a society, in the words of one police officer, “far more oppressive than our own.”

No comments: