Young reporters at WKCR showed what real journalism is all about while their cable news counterparts were uncritically passing along propaganda.
If you spent Tuesday night listening to WKCR-FM, Columbia University’s student-run radio station, you would have heard journalists describing, in precise, riveting detail, the terrifying invasion of their campus by the New York Police Department at the request of their school’s administration. If you woke up the next morning and tuned in to mainstream news coverage of the exact same events, you might have felt that you had landed in an entirely different world.
The on-the-ground reporting from the WKCR journalists about the NYPD’s militaristic destruction of Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment—and the forcible removal of protesters who had occupied one of the school buildings—could not be further from what mainstream news channels presented to their audiences. Instead of following WKCR’s careful, rigorous lead, the corporate media repeatedly laundered NYPD and other government propaganda—and in the days that followed, news outlets continued this pattern in their reporting on other protests around the country. These outlets claim to be some of the most trustworthy names in news. They have millions of dollars to spend on reporting. But this week, they were all put to shame by journalists who haven’t even left college.
The mismanagement of the story started right away, as journalists like CNN’s Anderson Cooper began uncritically echoing the assertion by police officials that the protesters had been influenced and infiltrated by nefarious external forces. CNN and local New York reporters also passed along the NYPD’s baseless smear that “the wife of a terrorist” was on campus.
By Wednesday, CNN’s Dana Bash was still suggesting that there were “outside agitators” driving the protests. She had gotten that suggestion directly from New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams, who said in a Wednesday morning press conference, “There is a movement to radicalize young people…. this is a global problem that young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children.” (Bash played that comment with no follow-up.)
That same morning, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to justify the arrests and fan the flames of the “outside agitators” narrative. Holding up a long chain, he said, “This is not what students bring to school. This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities. These are heavy, industrial chains that were locked with bike locks.” Left unmentioned was the fact that the chain Sheppard was brandishing so dramatically is sold to students by Columbia itself. Morning Joe then tweeted the clip out with no context.