Elliot Williams

You know, I'll even show it.

You know, many people will remember the 1984 subway vigilante shooting.

Bernard gets shot and seriously wounded four young black unarmed teenagers in the subway.

sound familiar well that's america and so this book really is a tour through one new york city was unsafe at the time but what did that empower one individual guy to do why did he feel so empowered to act out and all of the forces that made the bernie getz story um such national news why bernie gets is named in billy jill's we didn't start the fire because he becomes a bit of a cultural icon

Let me say, you know, something that's come up, that comes up in a lot of I've had it broadcast and comes up a lot in my book and may resonate with your people is this idea of media bias and corporate media and so on.

And I have an entire chapter in this book, Five Bullets, about Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the New

totally turbocharged coverage of crime in New York City to frighten people, to make them more scared, to put big headlines, wink nod, there are black folks running the streets and they're coming for you.

And it was all, and you can read it all about this chapter in Five Bullets, in this chapter in Five Bullets, it's all about how that one moment in a media takeover shifted the country's, the city's coverage of crime.

All of the New York City tabloids, which you're familiar with, the Daily News and Newsday and so on, started doing the same thing.

And if you think about 1985, where there wasn't CNN, MSNBC, Fox, I've had it, podcasts, The Scott Jennings Show, whatever else.

there was three games in town.

And if the newspapers were constantly telling you, you're scared, you're scared, you're scared, you're scared, you're scared, people would buy the newspaper, get scared, buy the newspaper again, get more scared.

And it just created this cycle of fear and resentment of other people, of black people and so on.

And that was a huge moment in the history of news.

And as I say in the book,

It's no secret that Rupert Murdoch goes on to found the Fox News channel decades later because a lot of their success has been in frightening people.

You're in a red state.

You are far more likely to see images of people looting CVS

than you are to see if you were to pan the camera, okay, looting, looting, looting, black folks stealing diapers from CVS or whatever.

If you pan the camera to the right in that city, there's probably a park that has children playing in it that used to be a place where crack lords and organized crime were.