You can partially thank the media for this. They like to sway opinion on issues for profit. Look at all the cartoons and TV shows and movies from the 80's and 90's demonizing Arabs to make way for the endless middle east wars.
The endless stream of crime dramas that make it clear the police never do wrong and if you make it to a trial you are certainly guilty. We have a prison industry in this country that is predatory to everyone but especially the poorer uneducated classes, and crime dramas are their commercials.
>> The endless stream of crime dramas that make it clear the police never do wrong and if you make it to a trial you are certainly guilty.
I've been watching "The Good Wife" seasons 1 and 2 recently. The show deals with people in private law firms, government prosecuting agencies, law enforcement, and random folks caught up in the legal process. The seasons are set in Chicago during the post-2008-crash time frame, so there's a lot of financial pressure all around.
The show depicts well the financial and political game, the skewed incentives, and deal-making, the disregard for truth, racial and economic biases, how law enforcement often actually "does wrong". I'm sure the show's not very realistic, but it's fun, it paints almost no one in good light, and exposes the double-dealing and back-stabbing up and down the stack.
Yeah, I'm not buying the whole "crime dramas portray cops as infallible" argument. Every cop show I've ever watched shows the police regularly bending the rules or otherwise being shitty at their jobs. If there wasn't controversy in the plot it wouldn't be entertaining. Saying crime dramas cause failures in our legal system is like saying violent video games cause mass shootings.
That is called manufacturing consent. How often do police get in trouble for bending or outright breaking the rules... that behavior is normalized in media, which normalizes it in reality.
In this case at least, we can thank the media for the acquittal -- if you count the magazine among the media.
It's a little less dramatic than it might have been, since his artwork as the catalyst had nothing particularly to do with the case. But certainly the magazine's participation here was constructive to the right outcome.
The local news station, on the other hand, was perhaps a bit less helpful.
The endless stream of crime dramas that make it clear the police never do wrong and if you make it to a trial you are certainly guilty. We have a prison industry in this country that is predatory to everyone but especially the poorer uneducated classes, and crime dramas are their commercials.