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Now, welcome to the award-winning Best of Left Podcasts with Hup today from Counter-Spin,

this week in Blackness, the Black Guy Who Tips, Laura Flaunders, the Three Anegros, the

Benjamin Dixon Show, activism from colorofchange.org and Rimbart Explains.

Protests erupted in Baltimore over the death of a black man named Freddie Gray, who suffered

a severe spinal cord injury, either upon his April 12 arrest or in the police van.

As of April 30, police still have not explained how that happened or why they arrested him.

So media had yet another opportunity to interrogate systemic racial injustices in policing practices.

To examine the other structural problems, decades of underinvestment, job loss, and housing

discrimination that fuel these outbursts of public resistance.

And yet again, many in major media opted instead for focus on property damage and pearl clutching

about thugs and looters.

While the voices and ideas of those protesting were engaged mainly by the everyday more

necessary social and independent media.

We'll let one example count for many.

The Washington Post offered readers a primer April 28th, the basic information the paper

thinks you need to know to understand what's happening.

The Who Was Freddie Gray section was drawn from the No Angel School of Journalism with

a paper stress on Gray's previous run-ins with the law, offset by friends remembrance of

him as loyal and warm.

It reads creepily as though were meant to decide from this whether Gray was this sort of

...