Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

How Many Ways Can You Avoid Reporting That Cops Killed a Baby?
Janine Jackson 
24 Jun 2026
🖨️ Print Article
Kohen Wiley

A one-year-old baby was shot dead by police, but corporate media shield the police and their barbaric actions with a passive voice.

Originally published in FAIR.

“One-Year-Old Boy Killed After Officer Fires at Vehicle in Mississippi,” said the New York Times headline (6/16/26). So, a “one-year-old boy”—what most people would call a baby—was “killed after” a police officer fired at a vehicle, but there’s no verb you could use to connect those two things?

The Times subhed continued that pacifying work:

It is not entirely clear what led up to the shooting, but the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said that police officers were responding to a shoplifting call.

“Ohh, shoplifting…!” we’re evidently supposed to say, before turning the page; that might make the baby murder make sense. I don’t need to say that baby was Black.

There will be more coverage of this heartbreaking, infuriating news about cops in Senatobia, Mississippi, called to the five-alarm crisis of someone purportedly shoplifting diapers, opening fire into a car whose driver “allegedly drove toward them.”

But in the meantime, please think hard about reporting that tells you to calm down, that suggests that, just maybe, nothing wrong happened at all. As ABC News (6/18/26) put it in a piece on how the “officer involved in shooting outside Walmart that killed 1-year-old boy” has been placed on leave: “One-year-old Kohen Wiley was killed, according to the family’s attorney.”

So maybe he’s not dead? Or he died from something other than the gun of the “involved officer”? Caution in reporting is valuable, but when it’s mainly deployed to protect the inflicters of state violence (FAIR.org, 7/11/16), you have to ask if it’s really a principle at all.

Police
Police Killings
Corporate Media
media bias

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


Related Stories

Community Movement Builders - Newark
CMB Newark Statement on the Killing of Wali Bey by Newark Police
04 March 2026
The media cycle has moved on, but the family of Wali ‘Grillz’ Bey is still waiting for answers after his murder by Newark Police.
Aja Arnold
From the Atlanta Race Massacre to Cop City: The AJC Incites Harm
16 July 2025
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution never stopped printing racist lies—it just upgraded its fonts.
Jon Jeter
As the State’s Complexion Darkens, Minnesota’s Liberalism Wanes
18 June 2025
Minnesota’s progressive myth shatters as its racial gaps in income, education, and housing eclipse even Deep South states, and right wing white
Black Alliance For Peace
Oppression Breeds Resistance, Organization Sustains It
11 June 2025
Defeating the war on Black/African people requires solidarity with all who are oppressed and resistance against our common enemy.
Tunde Osazua
Surveilled and Controlled: The High-Tech War on Working Class Black Atlantans
20 November 2024
Under the shield of public safety, Atlanta's police and political leaders have turned it into the most surveilled city in the country, where Bl
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
How to Protest for Sonya Massey
31 July 2024
Sonya Massey’s brutal murder at the hands of the police has resulted in anguish and anger but no differ
Pan-African Community Action PACA 2568)
Pan-African Community Action Condemns the U.S. Settler State for the Murder of Sonya Massey
31 July 2024
The murder of Sonya Massey by the Illinois police is a symptom of a larger, deeply rooted, systemic assault on Black and Brown working-class co
Cartoon comic about mass shottings
Danny Shaw
Murder Thy Neighbor A Recap of Mass Shootings in 2023: An Anti-Imperialist Perspective
20 December 2023
Mass shootings have become ubiquitous in the US, as part of a gun-obsessed culture that manufactures and exports violence around the world.
Believe Absolutely Nothing the US Government and Media Say About ...Anything
Glen Ford , BAR executive editor
Believe Absolutely Nothing the US Government and Media Say About ...Anything
02 August 2023
It is true now just as when Glen Ford wrote these words in
The Honey Trap: The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes
Trevor Aaronson
The Honey Trap: The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes
29 March 2023
In 2020 law enforcement continued their practice spying on activist groups and attempting to entrap them.

More Stories


  • Cop pointing gun at Aaron Bushnell
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    What Aaron Bushnell Had to Teach Us
    28 Feb 2024
    Aaron Bushnell was desperate for the world to know what was happening to the people of Gaza. So much so that he died by his own hand, publicly, and in a painful way. But Palestinians are dying…
  • Haiti
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    STATEMENT: By the Minister for Foreign Affairs of France, Dominique de Villepin, on the situation in Haiti, 25 February 2004
    28 Feb 2024
    Remembering France’s odious participation in the 2004 coup d’etat in Haiti.
  • Army in Haiti
    Jemima Pierre, BAR Editor and Contributor
    Haiti: 20 Years After the Coup
    28 Feb 2024
    Jemima Pierre’s presentation at a forum to commemorate the US-France-Canada-sponsored 2004 coup d’état in Haiti. The forum was hosted by the Center for Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto…
  • February 17 Eritrean Independence Day Celebration
    Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Investigations of Attacks on the Eritrean Diaspora Are Underway
    28 Feb 2024
    Ann Garrison spoke to Eritrean British attorney Feven Yemane regarding attacks on Eritrean diaspora festivals and gatherings and the investigations underway.
  •  Linda Thomas-Greenfield
    Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    United Nations Negroz
    28 Feb 2024
    "United Nations Negroz" is the latest poem from our Poet-in-Residence, Raymond Nat Turner.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us