The Jerk Cartoon

Why TV reporter shouldn’t have been demoted for racially charged rant on cop-killer

Bailey: " Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth. Because the truth hurts you, especially if you've began to believe your own lies are the truth!" " Sean just told the truth and this is how he is rewarded!"


I’m a big proponent of journalists playing by the rules.
Reporters, in particular, need to be fair to all sides, provide the facts, and not spew personal opinions.
So why am I defending Sean Bergin, the New Jersey reporter who admits he flouted those common-sense rules?
Because he wound up losing his job, and I don’t believe the punishment fit the crime.
Since this was a racially charged matter, it quickly went viral. Fifteen years ago, it would have been a local Jersey controversy. Now it’s all over the web and on cable news.
The backstory is that Bergin was covering a cop-killing case, the brutal murder of officer Melvin Santiago, who was responding to a robbery call. He hesitated when the station asked him to interview the widow of the shooter, Lawrence Campbell. She said her husband should have killed more police officers if they were planning to kill him, sparking a furious reaction.
It was in the course of explaining this to viewers that Bergin went on a bit of a rant:
“It is worth noting that we were besieged, flooded with calls from police officers furious that we would give media coverage to the wife of a cop killer. We decided to air it because it is important to shine a light on the anti-cop mentality that has so contaminated America’s inner cities. This same, sick, perverse line of thinking is evident from Jersey City to Newark and Patterson to Trenton. It has made the police officer’s job impossible and it has got to stop. The underlying cause for all of this, of course: Young black men growing up without fathers. Unfortunately, no one in the news media has the courage to touch that subject.”
Now Bergin went too far. He was overgeneralizing without providing facts. By saying “the underlying cause for all of this” is young black men from fatherless families, he cast each one as a potential criminal.
But it also took courage to say what Sean Bergin did. He spoke with great emotion about the death of a policeman.
So how did the station react? First, News 12 suspended Bergin. Then it demoted him to a $300-a-week post in which he’d be given on light feature assignment each week. “It is News 12′s policy that reporters must be objective and not state personal opinions on-air,” a spokesman said before adding the usual claptrap about not discussing personnel issues. (Isn’t it amazing how news organizations report on everyone else’s personnel problems but their own?)
Bergin quit, as the station must have known he would. Perhaps News 12 didn’t want to take the heat for firing him; instead, executives left him with little choice but to leave.
To his credit, Bergin admits he broke the rules. He told Megyn Kelly that “I was trying to add context and balance. And, yes, and then, look there's no doubt I went off the reservation, I made a couple rogue remarks at the end. I knew what I was doing.” He thought he would get a reprimand, perhaps a temporary suspension.
Bergin says he spoke out “because this has got to stop. Somebody has to have the guts to stand up and point at this and say, hey, man, we got -- you know, we got to start talking about this. I know it's a touchy subject. I know it's a sensitive issue.”
Again, the debate over this touchy subject is better carried out by analysts and commentators, not reporters popping off. But I doubt News 12 would have dumped Bergin if he’d “editorialized” on some less controversial subject.
But as I told Bill O’Reilly, imagine if the station had suspended him for a couple of days for breaking the rules, then seized the moment by assigning him a three-part series on the roots of urban crime, fatherless families and racial animosity toward the police.
Instead, the station looks like it is fleeing controversy—and Sean Bergin is looking for a job.

Netanyahu orders Israeli military to prepare for 'significant expansion' of Gaza ground offensive

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military Friday to prepare for a "significant expansion" of its ground operation against Gaza militants.
Netanyahu said the military's primary goal would be to destroy underground tunnels used by Hamas to attack the Jewish State. The announcement came hours after Israeli ground troops and tanks struck more than 100 terror targets in Israel's first major ground offensive in Gaza in just over five years.
The offensive follows an Egyptian effort earlier this week to halt hostilities. Israel accepted the terms, but Hamas refused, demanding that Israel and Egypt first give guarantees to ease the blockade on Gaza.
“Since there is no way to deal with the tunnels only from the air, our soldiers are doing it now from the ground," Netanyahu said at the opening of an emergency cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv, the Jerusalem Post reported. “We decided to launch the action after we tried all the other ways, and with an understanding that without this operation the price we will have to pay later would be much higher."
Tanks, infantry and engineering forces were operating inside the coastal strip. In a statement, the military said it targeted rocket launchers, tunnels and more than 100 other targets. Throughout the night, the thud of tank shells echoed across Gaza, often just a few seconds apart. Several explosions from Israeli missile strikes shook high-rise buildings in central Gaza City. Pillars of smoke could be seen from the Israeli side of the border.
At Gaza's main Shifa Hospital, casualties quickly began arriving, including several members of the same family wounded by shrapnel from tank shells. Among those hurt were a toddler and a boy of elementary school age, their bodies pocked by small bloody wounds.
At least 20 Palestinians have been killed in the early stage of the ground operation, including three teenage siblings and a 3-month-old boy who died after a shell hit his family's Bedouin tent in southern Gaza, The Associated Press reported, citing Gaza health officials.
The Israeli military said a number of soldiers were wounded throughout the night, and one soldier, Staff Sgt. Eitan Barak, 20, was killed in the fighting. The circumstances behind his death were not immediately clear. Hamas' military wing said it ambushed Israeli units in the northern town of Beit Lahiya and caused casualties but Israeli media said it was likely a case of friendly fire between Israeli troops.
"The ground offensive does not scare us and we pledge to drown the occupation army in Gaza mud," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement.
Israeli officials have said the goal is to weaken Hamas militarily and have not addressed the possibility of driving the Islamic militants from power.
However, Hamas has survived Israeli offensives in the past, including a major ground operation in January 2009 from which it emerged militarily weaker, but then recovered. Hamas has since assembled thousands of rockets and built a system of underground bunkers.
Israel had been reticent about launching a ground offensive for fear of endangering its own soldiers and drawing international condemnation over Palestinian civilian deaths.
Since the July 8 start of the air campaign, more than 260 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,000 wounded, Palestinian health officials said. In Israel, one civilian died and several were wounded.
Israeli public opinion appears to strongly support the offensive after days of unrelenting rocket fire from Gaza and years of southern Israeli residents living under the threat. Gaza militants have fired more than 1,500 rockets at Israel over the past 11 days.
Israel said it launched an open-ended assault on several fronts, with the primary aim being to destroy underground tunnels into Israel built by Hamas that could be used to carry out attacks.
On Thursday, 13 heavily armed Hamas militants tried to sneak in through such a tunnel, but were stopped by an airstrike after they emerged some 820 feet inside Israel.
Israeli defense officials said soldiers faced little resistance during the first night of the ground operation, but the longer troops remain in Gaza, the greater the risk for heavy casualties on both sides.
Forces are expected to spend a day or two staking out positions and are working in the north, east and south of the Gaza Strip. Then, they are expected to move to the second phase, which is to destroy tunnels, an operation that could take up to two weeks.
Once Hamas is able to study the military's positions and movements, it may push back more forcefully, the officials said.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the military's strategy.
"The mission is progressing well," said Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, Israel's military chief. "There were a number of incidents overnight that we overcame and moved forward."
Prior to the Israeli Cabinet meeting, several ministers said they expected a prolonged offensive.
"This operation must be completed to its end and that includes a significant incursion into Gaza," said Uri Ariel, a Cabinet minister from the hardline Jewish Home party.
"We need to go in and finish the job. We need to eliminate every terrorist. They have no immunity."

Smoking gun? Intercepted calls point finger at Russian separatists in jet downing

Intercepted phone calls purportedly between Russian military intelligence officers and members of a pro-Russian separatist group that appear to capture the moment the rebels realized the plane they shot down was a civilian passenger plane could be the smoking gun that helps prove Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was downed Ukraine by the insurgents.
The tapes were released by SBU, Ukraine's security agency, and transcript was published in the Kiev Post. It appears to capture the chaotic moments after the plane was shot down — and the realization that it was a passenger plane rather than a Ukrainian transport plane, which had been targeted in recent days by the Russia-backed separatists.
"We have just shot down a plane," says a man the SBU identified as Igor Bezler, a Russian military intelligence officer and leading commander of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. 
That call came just 20 minutes after the crash and was placed to a person identified by Ukraine’s SBU as a colonel in the main intelligence department of the general headquarters of the armed forces of the Russian Federation Vasili Geranin, according to Ukraine security officials.
But in a second tape released by the agency, two men identified as "The Greek" and "Major" discuss the debris field and the fact the the plane was a civilian aircraft.

"We have just shot down a plane."- Igor Bezler, Russian military intelligence officer and leading commander of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic

“It’s 100 percent a passenger [civilian] aircraft,” Major is recorded as saying, as he admitted to seeing no weapons on site. “Absolutely nothing. Civilian items, medicinal stuff, towels, toilet paper.”
The Boeing 777 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down by what U.S. intelligence sources confirm was a surface-to-air missile near the village of Chornukhine, Luhansk Oblast, some 30 miles inside the the border with Russia.
The second conversation, if verified as authentic, could dispel Russian separatist claims that it was the Ukrainian military that shot the plane down. According to the transpcript:
Major: "These are Chernukhin folks who shot down the plane. From the Chernukhin check point. Those cossacks who are based in Chernukhino."
Grek: "Yes, Major."
Major: "The plane fell apart in the air. In the area of Petropavlovskaya mine. The first '200' [code word for dead person]. We have found the first '200.' A Civilian."
Greek: "Well, what do you have there?"
Major: "In short, it was 100 percent a passenger [civilian] aircraft."
Greek: "Are many people there?"
Major: "Holy [expletive]! The debris fell right into the yards [of homes]."
In a third intercepted conversation released by the SBU — which the agency says took place about 40 minutes after insurgents seemed to realize they had shot down a civilian plane — Cossack commander Nikolay Kozitsin tells an unidentified separatist that the fact the Malaysia Airlines plane was flying over the combat zone likely meant it was carrying spies.
"That means they were carrying spies," Kozitsin allegedly says. "They shouldn’t be [expletive] flying. There is a war going on."
On Friday, emergency workers combed the sunflower fields and villages of eastern Ukraine, searching the wreckage of the jetliner. The attack on Thursday afternoon killed 298 people from nearly a dozen nations, including vacationers, students and a large contingent of scientists heading to an AIDS conference.

U.S. intelligence authorities said a surface-to-air missile brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, but could not say who fired it. The Ukraine government in Kiev, the separatist pro-Russia rebels they are fighting in the east and the Russia government that Ukraine accuses of supporting the rebels all deny shooting the passenger plane down. Moscow also denies backing the rebels.

By midday, at least 181 bodies had been located, emergency workers said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed Ukraine for the downing, saying it was responsible for the unrest in its Russian-speaking eastern regions — but did not accuse Ukraine of shooting the plane down and did not address the key question of whether Russia gave the rebels such a powerful missile.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk described the downing as an "international crime" whose perpetrators would have to be punished in an international tribunal.