MSNBC, CNN, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News Ignore Extraordinary “Cop City” RICO Indictment

A sprawling attack on free press, free assembly, and free speech is met with silence from much of the mainstream media.

A survey of media coverage over the past 24 hours shows that the extraordinary RICO indictment of over 60 protestors opposing the creation of a “police training” facility in Atlanta has been met with conspicuous silence by several major media outlets, namely MSNBC, CNN, CBS News, ABC News, and NBC News. 

On September 5, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr filed indictments against 61 people allegedly involved in Stop Cop City, using the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, as well as domestic terrorism and money laundering charges. The 109-page indictment paints the movement to oppose the construction of a massive police training center in the Atlanta area’s Weelaunee Forest as a criminal conspiracy, and it goes back to the Minneapolis police department’s killing of George Floyd, which took place almost a year before Cop City was announced. By doing so, the National Lawyers Guild said in a press statement, the indictment “attempts to render all mass protest against police violence and racism—including the killing of Rayshard Brooks by Atlanta police—an ‘unlawful conspiracy’ or ‘racketeering.’” 

The indictment has clear political motives, openly demonizing anarchism as an ideology, and depicting the self-publishing of zines, and distrust of media, as somehow criminal or threatening in nature. It also rails against the national movement against police violence, provoking concern from mainline civil liberties groups. “We are extremely concerned by this breathtakingly broad and unprecedented use of state terrorism, anti-racketeering, and money laundering laws against protesters,” said Aamra Ahmad, senior staff attorney with ACLU’s National Security Project, in a press statement. 

Protesters argue that the training center, which is to include a mock city and shooting range, will intensify the problem of police violence, and exacerbate climate change by destroying an important carbon sink. The center is slated to be constructed in a majority-black area of the Atlanta metro area, raising further concerns about environmental racism. A plurality of black Atlanta residents oppose building Cop City, according to a March 2023 Emory University poll.  

Steadfast public protests against the site have been met with a tremendous law enforcement crackdown that has already resulted in domestic terrorism and money laundering charges, and the death of one forest defender, Manuel ​“Tortuguita” Terán, shot to death on January 18 by Georgia state troopers.

To be fair, MSNBC and CNN have published opinion columns and blog posts on their website about the struggle against Cop City in recent months, but their coverage of the subject rarely airs on TV. Neither cable networks have, as of the publishing of this column, done an on-air segment on the Cop City RICO indictments.

The indictments include historically lawful support for protestors such as bailing out arrestees, providing material support for protests. As Devin Franklin, counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, told Democracy Now, “We see that organizations that were bailing people out for protests or conducting business in otherwise lawful manners have been deemed to be part of some ominous infrastructure. This is really clearly a political prosecution.”

Such an extraordinary threat to free speech, free assembly, and free press, if it occurred in a country out of good standing with US centers of power, would no doubt solicit widespread outrage from US media. But when it happens stateside, it's met with either silence or lifeless, “both sides” reporting. Today there was no mention of the RICO indictment in the opinion pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post. No coverage on NBC, CBS, or ABC’s evening news or morning news programs. No mention on MSNBC or CNN’s 24/7 news networks. Like the equally egregious political prosecution of the J20 protests in 2017—which was ultimately thrown out and led to dozens of successful lawsuits—the attack on the Cop City protestors doesn’t fit into our neat and simple partisan media framework, so it’s deemed unimportant and unworthy of outrage, much less sustained or meaningful coverage.

Update: this piece originally stated the story wasn’t covered in The Washington Post, which it wasn’t at the time of publishing but literally one minute after we posted this story (12:19EST), the Post published this story (12:20EST) on the RICO cop city indictment.