"F*ck The Media," Courtesy Of Morgan Freeman

             
                     

The iconic Morgan Freeman has with three little words done us all a huge service.

Morgan Freeman had strong words for the media on Baltimore coverage, and called networks out for zooming in on places like Baltimore only when they see fire.

“F–k the media,” he told the Daily Beast in an interview published Thursday, and complained about the big three cable networks’ bias.

http://www.thewrap.com/...

Some folks may not know that Freeman provides the voice-over for the TSA warnings at Alabama's Birmingham-Shuttlesworth airport. There's nothing quite like listening to Morgan Freeman gently but firmly remind you not to leave unattended bags lying around and never offer to carry something for a stranger onto a plane: "Thank you and have a nice flight."

But in an interview with The Daily Beast, Freeman laid into the media's riot-chasing coverage of not only the events in Baltimore last week, but of Ferguson, Missouri as well:

Freeman says the Baltimore coverage, while fairly biased in its focus on the rioting, has been an improvement over the very one-sided coverage of the Ferguson protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s death. “Now, they’re getting more of the whole picture. Ferguson? No. Baltimore seems to be coming up with a different scenario in the background,” says Freeman. “People are saying, ‘You were not all there when we were just talking and trying to make a point, but if we set something on fire, all of a sudden you’re all here. Why is that? What’s the difference?’ And some young reporters are listening. That sort of observation is very useful.”

Of course this point was not lost on readers of this site, but it may well have been lost on the rest of the country who woke up last week to yet another media frenzy over disadvantaged African-Americans facing off with police in the street.  For better or for worse Hollywood celebrities command the attention, if not always the respect, of a large segment of the American public. When you switch on your tablet in the mornings it is usually not political news that greets you on the Google or the Yahoo or the Facebook, but some type of celebrity shenanigans or utterance. We should be delighted when the two overlap on an issue as timely as the sensationalistic, wrongheaded and biased coverage of the problems of racial and economic disparity in this country. Because the media--the cable TV networks chasing fires and gunshots without once examining the cause of the desperation and poverty, the newspapers acting as stenographers for the police and politicians-- have no one to blame but themselves for the public's growing disgust. When people like Morgan Freeman articulate that disgust, it helps change the conversation in a useful way.

Freeman also commented on the usefulness of living in a world with smartphones and instant video recording capabilities;

“The other thing is that technology lets us see behind the scenes a little bit better,” he continues. “Police have a standard reaction to shooting somebody. I fear for my life and I fear for my safety. Now, at least you can see, ‘Hey, his hands were up in the air! What part of your safety were you afraid of? The guy was running away, what part of your safety was in danger?’ There was one situation I saw where a cop told a guy to get out of the car, said, ‘Show me your driver’s license,’ and the guy reached back into the car and the cop shot him!”

“Anyway, off the media,” he says, waving his hands in the air and chuckling. “F-ck the media.”

And while Freeman may have simply been signaling his desire to seque into a different topic,  his remarks to the Beast dovetail closely with an interview he gave to Newsweek yesterday, in which the 77 year old actor pulls no punches while discussing his new film, 5 Flights Up, which focuses on wild media speculation that ensues after a Muslim man is stopped in his truck on a New York City bridge. While Freeman says some of the media's behavior portrayed in the film is reminiscent of that displayed in Baltimore, there are differences as well:

The movie has a subplot in which New York is thrown into chaos over a suspected terrorist attack, which Freeman said does not share similarities to recent real-life events.

“That unrest [in Baltimore] has nothing to do with terrorism at all, except the terrorism we suffer from the police,” the 77-year-old star said. “And the fact that now that’s out in the open.” Freeman referred to the case of Amadou Diallo, the Guinea immigrant who in 1999 was killed by four New York City plainclothes officers who mistook his wallet for a gun. “Forty-one times he was shot. That was the beginning of our understanding of how dangerous police are.”

Freeman, nominated for an Academy Award in everyone in the Universe's favorite film, The Shawshank Redemption, and winning the Oscar in every Republican's favorite director, Clint Eastwood's, Million Dollar Baby, is also a prominent supporter of President Obama. There is no more recognizable voice in America, certainly none better suited than his to articulate a new American Sensibility in the simple words of: "F*ck the media."

At least until they start doing a better job.