Hey Minnesota Reformer editor, gestapo following illegal executive orders isn’t “law enforcement.”
Fair enough, but people are protesting stuff being done by government agents who commonly refer to themselves as “law enforcement officers” and the alphabet soup of all the agencies involved (FBI, ICE, DHS, etc) wouldn’t fit in a headline easily
To be clear, I’m only criticizing the Minnesota Reformer for running that headline in the first place, not you for copying it. You did nothing wrong; you were just following rule 4 as required.
I just feel that how issues are framed is important, and refuse to accept the headline’s implication of legitimacy.
For sure, I tend to be a bit sympathetic to journalists because they have a pretty thankless job and writing quickly about complex events filled with dishonest people pushing bullshit talking points is just always going to be a really hard thing to do really well consistently
But on the other hand what you’re saying is a totally fair criticism, and I’m glad to see it because you’re totally right about the importance of framing and how many bullshit things people in power do gets laundered by being written about in passive voice or as some kind of natural and inevitable outcome instead of as a conscious decision made by real people, and getting push back on it gives journalists at least some basis to change how they do things and say “I’m just responding to what my readers are telling me,” when people accuse them of being biased.
Problem is the headline isn’t referring to the agencies or the officers.
They are referring to the illegal actions they are performing as “law enforcement actions”
Yeah, I really don’t think it’s anything nefarious from this outlet because they’re actually pretty great with a lot of their headlines, but the general practice throughout journalism and punditry and politics of calling police agencies “law enforcement” and just flatly referring to stuff they do as “law enforcement actions” without interrogating the fact that their “law enforcement actions” are actually breaking the law is a problem
