Video of Border Shooting of 15 Year Old Disproves “Self Defense”

This video from a Mexican news broadcast  is nominally off topic for this blog, but I thought I’d include it precisely because it illustrates one of the mechanisms of propaganda: how the non or under reporting of key facts is used to manage popular perceptions. This video appears getting play only on CNN and some local newstations in the US (and I see the YouTube has only a bit over 1000 viewings thus far).

The newswoman says the teenagers were throwing rocks, but as you can see from the video, unless they were using slingshots (and there is no evidence of that) they were so far away as to pose no threat to the border cop.


Gonzalo reports: “It’s getting a lot of play not only in Mexico, but in the rest of Latin America. The emerging consensus in Latin America is, the US is a country of trigger-happy crazy-people.”
As sad as this case is, in the overall scheme of things this is a minor incident, but it serves to illustrate how news reporting is tailored to fit conventional (and authority-flattering) narratives.

Update: A Google search does show The Daily News with a writeup of the video. It also points out the body of the slain Mexican teenager was found on Mexican soil. Since he appears to have fallen in place, this raises further problems for the “official” version of the story.