Prison Radio
Mumia Abu-Jamal

In all my years, I’ve never seen such biased, negative and nasty news coverage as I have of the Philadelphia-based MOVE Organization.

There may be one exception: the coverage of the so-called Central Park 5, the young men charged (and later cleared) in the rape and beating of a young New Yorker.

Possibly.

But both are test cases in media demonization; they just occurred in different cities.

Remember the recent brouhaha over a rock ‘n’ roll racist who called the president a “subhuman”?

Editorials readily used such terms to depict MOVE, but they rarely do so these days.

They are more sophisticated.

Yet, demonization remains. This tactic today is used as a pretext and precursor for war.

Remember Saddam Hussein, called ‘insane’? Or Muammar Khadafy likened to Daffy Duck?

This is but the corporate press, marching with their ink pens to wars of words.

A recent article in the Philadelphia magazine, entitled “Lost Boy” was full of innuendo and suggestion that MOVE folks beat and attacked their children. The article, detailing the life and untimely demise of the man once known as Birdie Africa, was, at bottom, a smear piece on MOVE.

Why? Why now?

Because MOVE people are up for parole now, for their minimums have all been served. All of the survivors of the police attack on MOVE of August 8, 1978, have spent over 30 years in prison.

Now, it’s time to slime them according to the press.

They do it in a more sophisticated way today; but they do it.

They even gratuitously publish bits of letters from MOVE people, which gives the illusion of balance.

But the slant remains. (MOVE bad; police good)

How anyone could write about the massacre of May 13th, 1985, and not announce that city cops (armed by state and federal forces) killed 11 men, women and babies, with murderous intent, blares the slant of the entire piece.

Cops are quoted saying stuff that suggests they’d never kill kids – as they are killing kids.

Former police chief, Gregor Sambor, told members of the MOVE Commission that children – MOVE children- were considered combatants. Think of that.

Those children –uh, I mean ‘combatants’, were bombed and burned to death by the city of their birth, after the announcement (by Sambor): “Attention MOVE! This is America!”

Yet, the slant is a child was forced to eat fruit in season, instead of candy; and fresh vegetables, instead of Twinkies.

Slant wins again, right?