In yet another example of how objectivity in mainstream news is a myth, Albuquerque Journal reporter Dan Boyd recently spun the police union endorsement of Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Ronchetti as a net negative, highlighting the union’s opposition to a “Civil Rights” bill from 2021.
There are countless ways to report on the news that a gubernatorial candidate earned a high-profile endorsement. The most obvious is that crime is on the rise, and the incumbent Democrat governor’s policies have done nothing to combat increasing violence and yet another record-setting year for homicides in the Duke City.
Police officers are blue collar workers with an increasingly dangerous job who devote their lives to the safety of their community. They are perpetually understaffed and overworked. They are first on scene at the most heinous acts of violence a society could imagine.
But that’s not how reporter Dan Boyd saw it.
He chose to highlight the endorsement by pointing out that the union in question opposed the “2021 NM Civil Rights Act” and was a pittance in comparison to the incumbent governor’s “15 other labor union endorsements.”
Opposing “Civil Rights” is about as damning as it gets, and that was the point. But as anyone with a media literacy IQ of 90 could assume, there’s more to the story than Boyd’s “anti-Civil Rights” synopsis would have you believe.
New Mexico’s “Civil Rights Act” of 2021 was a largely symbolic bill that allowed lawmakers to boast that they were “ensuring equality and justice for all New Mexicans,” when in reality its sole aim of ending qualified immunity for police didn’t even do that.
To date, no individual police officers have been sued for “civil rights violations” as a result of the bill. The law allowed New Mexico Democrats to garner media attention on the backs of George Floyd’s death. Today, just as before the bill passed, citizens can sue police for civil rights violations.
Boyd knows that. He covered the bill extensively during its debate and passage. Surely he read it.
Like the bill itself, the point of Boyd’s tweet was to provide cover for Democrats.
Nice job, Dan. Sacrificing any remaining credibility as an objective source of news to score partisan political points is exactly why people have lost faith in “mainstream” news.
The only antidote to fake news is media literacy.
Categories: 2022 Governor's Race
The Conservative New Mexican 
I tweeted a reply https://twitter.com/HoHardee/status/1575391865670492161 over contributions in general. Qualified Immunity ought to protect police.
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