An Anniversary
Thursday was the one-year anniversary of the death of Manuel ‘Tortuguita’ Paez Terán in an event that pushed Atlanta’s “Cop City” into national news and that remains a frustrating touchstone for trust and media.
Who you believe may depend on who’s reporting it and your own preexisting ideology. Outlets you distrust can be dismissed as activist agitprop or corporate copaganda, shills for the establishment or shitposting anarchists.
The facts are only partly agreed upon and then hotly contested, with autopsies and gunshot audio sparking competing narratives.
Terán had a gun and fired first, the GBI investigation says, but there was no gun residue and Tort’s hands were raised, family autopsies and advocates say.
Activists are spreading disinformation to sow mistrust of law enforcement the RICO indictment reads. “Cops lie” a tweet insists followed by a lengthy thread of documented examples.
Like the Georgia Bureau of Investigations being both investigator and an agency on the scene that day, the various media outlets that have taken up the story are themselves players in its telling.
The Cox-dominated Atlanta legacy media vs. their upstart independent alternatives, national outlets that parachute in, partisan sights highlighting aspects that fit their party line, plus content creators, documentary filmmakers, and anti-woke niche journalists.
Their motivations, employers, or place in the economic order may matter as much as the who, what, where, and when.
Figuring out the why may be above Atlanta’s pay grade.
To want “Just the Facts” and expect that to settle things seems hopelessly naïve.
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Then
The news broke on social media by both local news outlets and activist accounts. In what would become a recurring theme, Mayor Dickens first quote tweeted an AJC headline and expressed support for law enforcement and the wounded trooper. Other elected officials also leaned on legacy local media for information and to get their own comments out.
For activists this was the default “Atlanta Way” that they worked quickly to complicate with their own posts and sympathetic outlets.
Attending the vigil in Little Five Points that evening the distrust was palpable. A concerted effort to reclaim Terán not as a violent extremist but a selfless environmentalist began.
As the investigation unfolded, media strategies emerged. Who got this leak or that scoop, why’d that police sweep occur at the same time as this press conference, who was funding the activists and their media or for that matter the Police Foundation and Atlantans for Safety.
Anyone following closely quickly became both a news consumer and media critic.
The weekend after the shooting, downtown demonstrations included destruction of police vehicles and the smashing of windows at 191 Peachtree St. The building was likely targeted as the address of the Atlanta Police Foundation, funder of “Cop City,” but symbolically the giant office tower also houses the Metro Chamber of Commerce and corporate friendly Atlanta Press Club. Foundations, business leaders, and the media, all the unelected parts of “The Atlanta Way.”
In my own media criticism, that January meant keeping tabs on the public-private partnership between Cox’s AJC and state-run Georgia Public Broadcasting. It was still unacknowledged, but active.
That “partnership” would come to its own end later that year after a state budget cut and leadership changes at GPB. The why of all that remains uncertain, but that’s the media’s own fault. They’ve consistently failed to report on themselves critically and transparently.
To my frustration, Atlanta’s independent NPR affiliate WABE quickly recreated the public-private partnership with the AJC, undermining its own newsrooms’ independence and leaving Cox without a viable non-commercial but mainstream alternative.
That leaves partisan or ideological media which, for all its flaws, proved itself a necessity in Cox City.
Most media reporting in Atlanta is just cross-promotions or public relations. “Our friends at,” “our media partners,” “Atlanta icon….”
To expect the public to support local journalism without acknowledging any flaws won’t build trust.
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Now
Thursday’s anniversary was marked by a vigil and other ceremonies, dutifully covered by both mainstream and alternative media alike.
The AJC’s front page included news of cost overruns in construction of the facility but was sparked by a city council meeting the day before. A separate article on a press conference by APD included plans for a billboard campaign to get more information on anarchists who continue to engage in “Stop Cop City” vandalism nationwide. The paper’s article included favorable statements about the unsung duties of the police, something lefty outlets greet with cynicism.
“The chief said while most residents were asleep in their beds late Tuesday, the city’s officers and firefighters braved 14-degree weather to extinguish blazes, respond to car crashes and transport homeless people to warming shelters so they didn’t freeze to death.”
“’The only reason we’re able to do that as a police and fire department is because we invest in our first responders,’
Schierbaum said. ‘Yet anarchists are at work. They struck again this week …’”
The press conference was also covered by the Atlanta Community Press Collective who added,
“Schierbaum and Georgia Insurance Commissioner John King stressed that the case would be solved by citizens, but did not go into detail as to why police are unable to solve the alleged crime themselves.”
That day’s Axios Atlanta newsletter was intriguing. Its “1. Big Thing” was a marking of the anniversary with a recap and link to an anarchist’s list of events. Linking is not an endorsement and the nature and limits of free speech and protest, has been an aspect of the story throughout, no more so than after an activist’s death.
The intrigue, to me at least, is that Axios’ Atlanta reporters include one veteran of the city’s last, formidable Cox alternative the alt-weekly Creative Loafing, now just online and with little news coverage, and a writer who left the AJC to join Axios before it got bought out by Cox.
For journalists in Atlanta, Cox is hard to escape.
Davos Men
The flagship Axios morning email that day marked its own 7th year anniversary and coincided with the World Economic Forum in Davos where the prestige, born-digital media company had a whole house for its events and interviews.
Cox Enterprises was also there as a Davos partner.
That morning email from co-founder Mike Allen included a story about a “News biz” reckoning in 2024 with layoffs and cuts at major dailies.
“Why it matters: If billionaire owners can’t make the L.A. Times or The Washington Post profitable, then the news industry has to ask itself: What can?
The New York Times had a similar article that same day: Billionaires Wanted to Save the News Industry. They’re Losing a Fortune. — The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Unspoken in both is that the billionaire Cox Dynasty purchased Axios for half a billion dollars and is reportedly investing 100 million dollars into the AJC under publisher Andrew Morse in an ambitious effort to grow digital subscriptions enough to make the paper profitable again.
What do the layoffs in L.A. and Washington portend for Atlanta?
The Friday announcement that the entire staff at Sports Illustrated was being laid off caused even more fears of a crisis in journalism and subsequent decline in democracy.
Axios’ own media newsletter last week had an item about alternative media gaining investors, but not of the alt-weekly kind, rather of the conservative or contrarian “radical centrist” style of Bari Weiss’ site “Free Press.”
“The big picture: More money is flowing to media outlets and platforms that provide an alternative to mainstream news sources.”
What went unspoken here was that the Free Press profiled dissident Cox heir Fergie Chambers last Dec.
Chambers is certainly controversial and tests the limits of Free Speech, in many ways.
His Instagram account was suspended, and screenshots of his statements shared with law enforcement.
Then there’s the speech of others, like reporters writing on billionaires as owners, the dangers of people with money and extreme views, or the future of media and democracy in Atlanta.
Other articles in the AJC last Thursday included one about homeless outreach during freezing temperatures in Macon, part of the paper’s effort to field more correspondents in other GA city’s where the legacy paper is shrinking, and thus make the AJC the state/regional source.
But that was the LA Times model to profitability.
Another feature was a piece on director Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, part of the paper’s increased focus on Black Culture.
Wilkerson has an Atlanta connection having taught at Emory. In fact, she was the James M. Cox Professor of Journalism.
As for our elected leaders, Mayor Dickens was in Washington Thursday where, according to the AJC, he was “attending a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors…. Dickens chairs the conference’s Public-Private Partnership Task Force that focuses on building relationships between government and the private sector.”
The mayor is unpopular with “Stop Cop City” activists, but the AJC article hyped his Washington connections:
“Dickens is slated to play a leadership role during President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential bid. In May, Biden announced that Dickens was chosen among 50 high-profile Democrats as part of the Biden-Harris 2024 reelection-campaign advisory board. U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock is the only other elected official from Georgia included in the group.”
Gov. Kemp was in Davos for the second year in a row and, according to the AJC “has a unique pitch for the business chiefs and political power brokers he aims to woo this week…
“’It’s really about the Georgia way. We let the market work, then go after innovative companies,’ he said in an interview Tuesday from the annual gathering of billionaire financiers, corporate executives and global heads of state.”
Unspoken here was whether he had meetings with Cox Executives while there.
The surprise Thursday was a WABE story after it obtained the personnel records of the officers involved in the shooting a year ago.
It added some important context even a full year later and is something activists could use to bolster their own Point of View or act as a counterpoint to the prosecution’s release of portions of Terán’s diary.
The WABE story was also a kind of reassertion of their own newsroom’s independence after partnering with the AJC. But an ad for the AJC’s Politically Georgia wound up in my page and reminded me about it all over again.
What’s the Future of Media in Cox City
If Andre Morse’s plan fails what happens to the AJC?
And without the AJC promoting movies or books with Atlanta connections, without the Cox foundation endowing professorships, what will Atlanta’s journalism and the culture at large lose?
But are the AJC and Emory willing to genuinely critique the status quo if they’re so dependent on it continuing?
Can only billionaires save journalism? What about if they have communist kids?
In Atlanta, do we have to accept “Cop City” to keep the James M. Cox professorship? And puff pieces on Cox friendly politicians to get stories on poverty issues or investigations into prison abuses?
How free is the press in Atlanta and what happens next?
