By Ari Paul
As the Democrats headed toward their convention with momentum for the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ticket, newspapers have collectively found an August scandal. Major press outlets are amplifying Republican claims that Walz, as governor of Minnesota, let the Twin Cities burn during the 2020 George Floyd uprising. By spotlighting these charges, corporate media are assisting GOP attempts to portray themselves as the party of law and order against a tide of anarchic anti-police chaos.
To recap, Walz, who had spent a quarter century in the National Guard, was governor of the state in the summer of 2020, when white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was caught on camera murdering George Floyd, a Black man, suffocating him to death. Protests in the city erupted and turned violent, and protests popped off around the country.
When the head of the Minnesota National Guard was told by Gov. Tim Walz that the entire force would be mobilized, Maj. Gen. Jon Jensen said his first reaction was, “Whoa, wait a second here, sir” (MPR, 7/10/24).
Walz, originally hesitant to call in military assistance to restore order, eventually called in the National Guard, which Minnesota Public Radio (7/10/24) praised for having “mobilized quickly” and “adjusted on [the] fly for Floyd unrest.” MPR added that it had been the state guard’s “largest deployment since World War II, and it occurred with remarkable speed.”
The “law and order” aspect of this election is muddy. Donald Trump, who makes “tough on crime” conservatism a part of persona in his attempt to return to the White House, is the only presidential candidate in history to be convicted of a felony. Meanwhile, Harris made her career in California as the San Francisco district attorney, and then the state’s attorney general. Despite Walz’s career in the National Guard, the Republicans are drumming up the 2020 George Floyd drama to try to win back the title of the party of order.
Too much of the corporate media are helping the Republicans make this flimsy case—and allowing the debate to revolve around the question of whether Walz was quick enough to use force against Black Lives Matter protests.
‘I fully agree with the way he handled it’
Four years ago, Trump praised Tim Walz’s response to the protests after George Floyd’s murder, calling the governor “an excellent guy” (CNN, 8/8/24).
For starters, then-President Trump had actually praised Walz’s handling of the crisis in 2020 (CNN, 8/8/24). “I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said of Walz in a conference call with governors:
Tim Walz. Again, I was very happy with the last couple of days. Tim, you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.
Surely this is relevant context for any story about the Trump campaign now attacking Walz’s response to the Floyd protests. (A transcript of the call has been available online at CNN.com since June 1, 2020.)
And it should be hard for journalists to recall the police response as being any kind of hands-off approach. At FAIR (9/3/21), I covered the case of Linda Tirado, an independent journalist who lost vision in one eye after being shot by a Minneapolis cop while covering the protests; she was one of dozens of journalists that summer who sustained eye injuries because of the overzealous police response.
Two years ago, AP (11/30/22) reported, Minneapolis “reached a $600,000 settlement with 12 protesters who were injured during demonstrations after the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd.” The ACLU, AP said,
alleged that police used tear gas as well as foam and rubber bullets to intimidate them and quash the demonstrations, and also that officers often fired without warning or giving orders to leave.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune (4/4/24) noted:
At least a dozen Minneapolis police officers were sanctioned for misconduct related to the department’s riot response in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and subsequent crowd control efforts in 2020.
‘Draws fresh scrutiny’
But three major newspapers are repeating the partisan attacks on Walz’s response—that he was basically more or less acting in concert with the protesters and not interested in maintaining order.
The Washington Post (8/13/24) carried the headline “Walz’s Handling of George Floyd Protests Draws Fresh Scrutiny,” with the subhead, “Republicans say Tim Walz was slow to act as violence raged in Minneapolis. Activists say he showed restraint and compassion.” It summarized that “Trump and his allies are seizing on criticism from other Democrats that Walz was too slow to act to portray him as weak,” making him out to be “another lenient liberal politician, in their telling, who gave a pass to protesters and allowed destruction in their cities.”
The Boston Globe (8/13/24) re-ran the Post piece.
The point of this New York Times article (8/14/24) is that after Walz was asked in a nighttime call to send in the National Guard, he slept on it and decided to do so in the morning.
A day later, a New York Times story (8/14/24) ran with the headline “Walz Faces New Scrutiny Over 2020 Riots: Was He Too Slow to Send Troops?” Its subhead: “Gov. Tim Walz’s response to the unrest has attracted new scrutiny, and diverging opinions, since he joined Kamala Harris’s ticket.”
The piece starts out summarizing the case that Walz was slow to respond. In the ninth paragraph, the Times offered a baby-splitting verdict on Walz’s response:
But a reconstruction of the days after Mr. Floyd’s murder reveals that Mr. Walz did not immediately anticipate how widespread and violent the riots would become and did not mobilize the Guard when first asked to do so. Interviews, documents and public statements also show that, as the violence increased, Mr. Walz moved to take command of the response, flooding Minneapolis with state personnel who helped restore order.
This wasn’t the first such story in the Times. Earlier in August, the New York Times (8/6/24) ran the headline “Walz Has Faced Criticism for His Response to George Floyd Protests,” with the subhead “Some believe that Gov. Tim Walz should have deployed the Minnesota National Guard sooner when riots broke out following the police murder of George Floyd.” The third paragraph said:
Looting, arson and violence followed, quickly overwhelming the local authorities, and some faulted Mr. Walz for not doing more and not moving faster to bring the situation under control with Minnesota National Guard troops and other state officials.
‘Make America burn again’
The real problem Heather Mac Donald (Wall Street Journal, 8/13/24) has with Walz is that he believes there’s such a thing as “systemic racism.”
On the same day the Post story ran, the Wall Street Journal (8/13/24) ran an op-ed by pro-police pundit Heather Mac Donald, who said it wasn’t just Walz’s allegedly slow response that was bad for Minnesota, but his entire worldview that sympathized with Black victims of police violence:
In 2022, Mr. Walz declared May 25 “George Floyd Remembrance Day” and has done so each year since. The 2022 and 2023 proclamations invoked “systemic racism” or its equivalent five times. They urged the public to “honor” Floyd “and every person whose life has been cut short due to systems of racism,” and to “deconstruct and undo generations of systemic racism.”
She continued, “Mr. Walz’s belief in ‘systemic racism’ dovetails with Kamala Harris’s worldview. Both portray the police as the major threat to Black Americans.”
Elsewhere in the Murdoch press, Fox News (8/14/24), citing a “former federal prosecutor in Minneapolis who prosecuted George Floyd rioters,” said “Walz’s record as governor on that issue, and several others, including fraud, makes him ‘unfit’ for a promotion to vice president of the United States.” The man quoted here is Joe Teirab, who also just won a GOP House of Representatives primary with Trump’s backing (WCCO, 8/14/24).
A CBS piece (8/13/24) straightforwardly related that “Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, claims Walz ‘actively encouraged’ rioters” in the lead of its story. Fox News (8/7/24), as a sort of GOP public relations arm, was more forceful when it ran the headline “Vance Praised for ‘Absolute FIRE’ Takedown of Harris/Walz ‘Tag Team’ Riot Enablers: ‘Make America Burn Again’” Fox‘s subhead:
“Tim Waltz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020. And then, the few who got caught, Kamala Harris helped them out of jail,” JD Vance said.
‘Record is mixed’
Criminologist David Squier Jones pointed out to MPR (8/13/24) that “Americans tend to have an inflated sense of crime occurring in their communities that don’t gel with crime statistics.”
Given that Trump himself had praised Walz’s leadership during the protests, and that the law enforcement response to the protests cannot be framed as too lax, one would think newspaper coverage would apply more skepticism to the Republican claims. Newspaper coverage of these Republican attacks has followed the “Republicans allege this, while Democrats deny it” model, simply rehashing partisan talking points without illuminating the issue.
David Squier Jones, a criminologist at the Center for Homicide Research, offered a much more measured version of the events of 2020 and their aftermath to MPR (8/13/24). While Walz sympathized with the anger toward the police murder of Floyd, he said, contrary to Vance, “I did not see anything, read anything, or hear anything that he encouraged active rioting.”
Jones also noted that Walz’s “record is mixed in terms of encouraging police reforms.” “He has also supported police in terms of increasing funding for police departments throughout the state,” he said. “He’s looking for better policing, not defunding policing, not removing policing, and he is certainly not anti-police.”
Such analysis doesn’t make for great attack-ad copy, but it will probably do more to help citizens cast an informed vote in November than parroting GOP press releases.
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