The true definition of the Drive-By Media is: They fly into a situation; they arrive on the scene of major breaking news; they make up stuff. They stir up emotions to a frenzied fever pitch. They spread lies, and then, after a few hours or a few days when the real facts emerge, they’re gone.  They’re down the road doing it again on the next story, while everybody else is left in their wake with a mess that real Americans have to clean up.  And that is exactly what has happened in Ferguson, Missouri.

And before you start shouting at me, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, Rush, the media didn’t do anything wrong here because they didn’t know about the video and the pictures at the convenience store with the cigar robbery.”  Yes, they did.  Don Lemon on CNN today actually admitted, “Some of us have heard rumors of a robbery involving the ‘gentle giant.'”  Why didn’t you tell us of those rumors?  Rumors have never stopped you before.  They had heard.

Everybody asking, “Why did the cops hold this information all this time, why did they not release it?”  I don’t know.  But I’ll tell you, in one sense, they really set up the media well.  I mean, they allowed the media to establish their narrative.  In the process, a lot of violence took place at the same time.  But, regardless, if you are just tuning in and if your station has not preempted us for the press conference that’s going on now in St. Louis — by the way, we’re gonna be repeating this, folks, when this press conference is over.  Maybe not immediately but, for example, our affiliate in St. Louis is covering what’s happening there and the audience there is not hearing the program, so I don’t want them to miss this.  So later on in the busy broadcast today there will not be a formal repeat of this.  I’ll just go through this all again.  Because, of course, until I’ve said something, it hasn’t really been said.

And in this case, all this time, what has been the assumption?  And there was one eyewitness.  The assumption has been that an 18-year-old ‘gentle giant,’ Michael Brown, was walking down the street minding his own business, bothering nobody, much like I do this program, bothering nobody, minding my own business, and he was set upon by a police officer.  Yes, the gentle giant was unarmed.  Yes.  Of course. Gentle giants, by definition, are unarmed.

The gentle giant was unarmed, his friend was unarmed, and out of the blue here comes a cop, and the cop eventually shoots the gentle giant.  The town erupts, thinking this is typical. The gentle giant hasn’t done anything. The gentle giant hasn’t provoked anybody, neither had his buddy. They were just walking down the street and as is typical, a white cop, black gentle giant, bammo.  Shot with his hands up.  Oh, yes, he was surrendering, he was surrendering.

And this caused night after night of tumult and chaos in Ferguson, Missouri.  You know the rest of the story.  I don’t need to go through the details, the timeline. But now what we have learned, as announced today, let’s listen to the police chief, Tom Jackson.  The police chief held a press conference to talk about the shooting death of Michael Brown.  The purpose was to announce the name of the cop that shot the gentle giant with his hands up, surrendering.  We have two bites.  This is the first.

CHIEF:  I’m going to be releasing information about a robbery that occurred on August 9th immediately preceding the altercation and shooting death of Michael Brown.  What we’re making available today are the dispatch records and the video footage of a robbery, a strong-arm robbery, with use of force that occurred at a local convenience mart.  I cannot discuss the investigation about the attempted apprehension of the suspect in that strong-arm robbery.

RUSH:  Strong-arm robbery?  Strong-arm robbery?  What’s this, video footage of a robbery, strong-arm robbery, use of force?  Local convenience mart?  What’s this?  Nobody heard anything about this, except the media had.  There were rumors floating around, as it turns out.

Here’s more from the chief.

CHIEF:  The officer that was involved in the shooting of Michael Brown was Darren Wilson.  He’s been a police officer for six years, has had no disciplinary action against him.  He was treated for injuries which occurred on Saturday.  I won’t be taking any questions at this time but the packets will be handed out by my officers.

RUSH:  And he promised a press conference later today, which is going on now. And speaking at the press conference now is the governor who came in yesterday and took the county cops off case, which drew a lot of criticism from people. But the governor, Jay Nixon, pulled the county cops off and put the state police, the highway patrol, in charge.  Captain Johnson is heading up that command.

He’s from Ferguson.  He’s African-American.  He joined the protest march.  He brought peace and tranquility to the streets of Ferguson last night.  He is beloved there.  He is now participating in actually conducting the press conference along with the governor, and I assume the police chief.  But Captain Johnson did indeed bring peace and calm to the situation last night.

And he said things like, “If people get scared of a person in uniform, that’s not good and we’ve gotta fix that.  We cannot have just the sight of people in uniform scaring citizens.  That’s not good.”  There’s been a lot of talk, folks, about demilitarizing the police, demilitarizing the police force. Not just in Ferguson, but all over the country.  Rand Paul has picked up on this movement to demilitarize the cops.

We learned yesterday that the defense department distributes leftovers and hand-me-downs that they don’t need anymore to local police all over the country.  Armored personnel carrier-type vehicles, powerful weapons, and the ammunition go in those powerful weapons.  I want to offer you an explanation for why this is happening, because I think maybe a lot of people have forgotten this.

In the nineties, in California, do you recall the bank robbery in which the robbers were wearing vests?  They had AK-47s, massive… They had hand grenades; they had mortars. They had all kinds of things, and the cops are firing with nine millimeter whatevers?  And everybody was wringing their hands, “My God, look at this gang of crooks! My God, they’re overpowering the cops! The cops can’t even compete.”

The cops were carrying, you know, pistols, basically, because that was all was thought that beat cops needed to keep the peace.  Any more would be unnecessary show of force.  The cops were overwhelmed and overrun by this one gang.  It was a bank robbery in California.  I forget specifically when and what the bank was.  But ever since then there were calls that the cops had to have more  powerful weapons.

It was not just one incident.  There were a whole bunch of them where the bad guys — and of course the left started using these events to advance their whole gun control agenda.  “My God, look at what the bad guys got out there!  Look at all the weapons the bad guys have. We gotta have gun control.” (laughing) I said, “Look, those are not the kind of weapons that you just walk in off the street and buy.

“No matter what gun control law you pass, these kind of bad guys, if they want weapons like that, are gonna be able to find them.”  So that began the rethinking of how the cops should be armed.  It was actually real world.  It was not a desire to militarize police departments.  It was a reaction to the kind of weapons that bad guys were able to arm themselves with.  It was the “AK-47 Bandits.” It was a Hollywood robbery.

Here’s Don Lemon.  I want you to hear this.  He was on CNN today.  He’s on the scene in Ferguson, and he was reporting from the press conference after the police chief had announced (summary), “Hey, we’ve got video inside the convenience store of the gentle giant essentially robbing the place of a box of cigars.”  It turns out, Swisher Sweets.  Do you know what…?

Have you ever smoked a Swisher Sweet, Snerdley?  (interruption) Well, I have.  They’re actually  good for when you’re 16 and 17 and just starting to smoke.  They’re sweet.  It’ll cigarillos and stuff.  (interruption)  Oh, yeah, I smoked them for real. (interruption)  No, no, no. I didn’t make blunts out of ’em.  I smoked them for real.  But the Swisher Sweet today is purchased by people that love marijuana.

They get the Swisher Sweets. They’re cheap, and they come in a number of different cigarillo shapes and lengths. The longer the better, and you take a razor blade, as I understand… I’ve never done this.  You take a razor blade, and you cut it open lengthways, put all the Swisher Sweets tobacco out of it, and then you refill it/rewrap it with your marijuana.

If you want to, you can mix the real tobacco, the Swisher Sweets tobacco, back in with the marijuana to add a sweet taste to it, and then it’s not called a blunt. It’s called a “split” or some such thing, as I’ve been told, and they roll it back up.  That’s why people buy Swisher Sweets these days, or why some people do.  That was the box of cigars being stolen from the convenience store.

By the gentle giant.  The video changes everything.  Folks, it totally changes the story.  MSNBC went to paid programming while they had editorial conferences to figure out how to deal with this! CNN almost decided to leave the story and go back to covering the missing airplane.  It took the wind totally out of the media’s sails.  It totally, totally changed the template and the narrative.

The template and narrative was, yet again, “A racist white cop in a racist white America had fired at a gentle giant harmless black man — with his hands up in surrender — for no reason whatsoever. And when are these horrible events going to stop? And when is Obama going to do something about it?  And when is the governor gonna act? When are we going to love each other again?” and all of this.

It turns out now, with the release of the video and the accompanying still shots of the robbery, that the police officer, whose name is Darren Wilson, was stopping the gentle giant, Michael Brown, because he was a suspect.   The gentle giant made a move for the cop’s weapon.  That’s not what you do.

If you’re arrested, if you are ever stopped for a moving violation in your car, you do nothing but what the cop tells you to do — and you certainly don’t try to grab the cop’s gun. You do not. I don’t care how big you are, there just certain things that you just don’t do.  So the entire complexion of this thing changed in a matter of minutes.  Here’s Don Lemon acknowledging they had heard a rumor of this.

LEMON:  Some of us had heard about it earlier, the possibility of a videotape of a robbery, and believed to be Michael Brown.  We did not get confirmation from police on that, so it — it was not reported.  That was just a rumor.  But now we’re finding out from the Ferguson police chief that they do believe that they have video, and they think that in that video that it is Michael Brown, um, stealing cigars, punching the store clerk.

RUSH:  Oh. No longer a gentle giant now.  It just totally changes it.  But they knew.  They had heard about it, and they say (mumbling), “Well, it’s unconfirmed. The police had an unconfirmed rumor; we can’t report that.”  They deal in rumors all the time, if they like what the rumor is.

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RUSH: The attorney for the family of the gentle giant.  Now, let me read this as it’s written by the Associated Press.  This just cleared the wire.  “The attorney for the family of an unarmed teenager fatally shot by a police officer in a St. Louis suburb says police are trying to assassinate the victim’s character by saying he committed a robbery that day. Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson on Friday identified Darren Wilson as the officer who shot 18-year-old [gentle giant] Michael Brown last Saturday.” (interruption) Well, the media called him the gentle giant, why can’t I?  The media did, over and over again.

“The attorney, Benjamin Crump –” is this the same attorney that represented the Trayvon Martin family?  I think it is.  “The attorney, Benjamin Crump, says Brown’s parents are ‘incensed’ by what he calls ‘the old game of smoke and mirrors.’ He says the family was blind-sided by Friday’s announcement.  Crump says ‘it’s bad enough they assassinated him, and now they’re trying to assassinate his character.'”

So now the attorney for the gentle giant’s family is, I guess, implying that the cops are committing character assassination.  Is he denying the videotape?  Is he saying that that’s not a gentle giant on the videotape, or is he saying that pointing it out is character assassination?

You knew this was gonna happen, too.  And you know why you knew this was going to happen?  Because nobody can figure out why the cops waited all this time.  If they knew this four days ago, why didn’t they have it and use it and say it?  Why did they let all this time go by before they announced this?  Did it take all this time to get the video, analyze it, and confirm it was the gentle giant?  Why do it only on the day they announce the name of the cop?

So it’s kind of understandable here that the attorney for the family of Michael Brown would now say that the cops are trying to assassinate his character by saying he committed a robbery that day.  Now, based on the story I have here, the lawyer is not denying that the gentle giant participated in a robbery.  That’s not what he’s saying.

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RUSH:  We’re gonna get to the phone calls immediately here.  Just one observation.  I had a chance just now during the obscene profit break to listen to a little bit of press conference going on in St. Louis. And at the time I was able to listen to it, the highway patrol captain, Ron Johnson, was answering questions, and he was… I think the guy’s great. He’s done masterful job. 

This guy’s gonna be the next governor.  It’s in the cards.  Just wait ’til he announces that he’s a fan of Jay-Z and Robin Williams and it’s over. The Republicans don’t even have to nominate anybody; it’s over.  He’s the next governor.  He’s answering all these question; he’s doing a great job.  But the people asking them are really mad.  They are really mad, folks.

He was calm and cool and collected in answering the questions, and he wasn’t saying anything more than what’s already been said.  He was assuring them that calm can continue, that there’s no need to protest, that he’s going to be there.  As long as they stay on the sidewalks, everything’s gonna be fine and dandy and cool and all that.  But the people asking the questions were mad.

I’m not gonna attach a meaning to it.

I’m not even gonna make a prediction.

It’s just an observation, and it’s understandable.  Look at what’s happened here.  For whatever number of days, the whole week, the people of that town have believed the story that’s been out there.  People generally believe what’s in the media, sadly, and the narrative and template of this story is the narrative and template that always accompanies an incident like this.

“An entirely innocent young African-American male — who in this case was just walking the street, even attempting to surrender, had his hands up — was nevertheless shot in cold blood by a white cop.  This is because of the ancient racism and discrimination and bigotry that was inculcated into this country from its founding and it’s never gotten any better.” 

The people of Ferguson, African-American population, thought they’d be jobbed again.  It’s the same old thing, and this was reported for days, and then all of a sudden at the press conference this morning and the chief says (summarized), “Well, you know, there was a strong-arm robbery that happened before this incident.  We’ve got video, and it looks like the suspect, Michael Brown, is in this video stealing a box of cigars.

“And, by the way, he’s got an accomplice.  The accomplice happens to be his big buddy that was the sole eyewitness to what the cop did to Michael Brown.”  So now the witness may be compromised in terms of credibility, and the people of Ferguson who thought that they had justice on their side — not in what had happened, but in what was going to happen — all of a sudden feel like they’ve had the rug pulled out from under them.

“Oh, no! What are you trying to tell us?  The gentle giant was committing a crime?” and here comes the lawyer for the family saying that the family says the cops are trying to assassinate the victim’s character by saying he committed a robbery that day.  “The attorney, Benjamin Crump, says Brown’s parents are ‘incensed’ by what he calls ‘the old game of smoke and mirrors.’

“He says the family was blind-sided by Friday’s announcement.”

So was the whole community, and so they’re all now… I’m telling you, I heard anger in the questions being asked.  I didn’t hear any satisfaction at the answers.  That’s just an observation.  Pure and simple.  Here’s Lieutenant Governor Missouri, Peter Kinder, who was on Fox this morning.  Bill Hemmer said, “When you have people in the streets of Ferguson for the past six nights, why is this information about the robbery just coming out now?  What explains that?”

KINDER:  That’s a good question to put to the responsible law enforcement authorities on the scene.  I assume… I have not asked them that question or spoken to them about that, but I assume they had their reasons.  Their reasons can be questioned.  It’s a fair question to ask them, and it should be put to those folks who’ve been there on the line the last six days.

RUSH:  Nobody knows.  The lieutenant governor doesn’t know.  He thinks he should know, thinks we all should know, but he doesn’t know. He thinks he should ask and he’s gonna ask ’em.  He doesn’t know what they’re gonna say when he asks but we gotta ask anyway because we should ask these questions.  It’s perfectly permissible to ask these questions.  We don’t know the answers.

Bottom line.

So while the media is deflated — and they are. The media is just… I mean, you talk about the wind going out of a bunch of people’s sails? It has, and you can see it. You watch MSNBC, watch CNN. Read some of the blog posts. I mean, they thought they had… I don’t know what they thought they had here.  But since everything to these people is political, they just think they’ve had a setback in whatever political agenda they thought was gonna be advanced here.

It’s just… It’s clear as day.

But once they collect themselves, ’cause they’re all saying… I mean, they’ve got their legal analysts, “Oh, well! Oh, man! This totally changes the complexion of this case. Why, this just changes everything! Everything we thought we knew is out the window.”  This is on CNN.  MSNBC, like I said, practically went off the air for a while to have behind-closed-doors meetings to figure out how to deal with this new revelation.

So I suspect the next focal point is gonna be, “Wait a minute.  Why all this time before the cops revealed this detail?”  Even though Don Lemon of CNN said (paraphrased), “Oh, no, no. It’s been rumored all week long. We didn’t report it ’cause it was just a rumor.”

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RUSH:  Now, this is interesting.  This is interesting.  The highway patrol commander Ron Johnson, Ronald Johnson, he’s saying that he wishes that the Ferguson cops would have consulted with him before releasing the name of the officer.  So more drama here.  That is very interesting.  The guy now in charge of peace on the streets in Ferguson, the highway patrol commander, says he wishes the cops had consulted with him before the release of the officer’s name.  What does that tell you?  That tells you he thinks maybe the release of the name is gonna give him some problems keeping the peace.

I saw a bit of the video.  I didn’t see it all and I didn’t hear anything accompanying the video, but if what I saw is what I saw, it was Michael Brown looking like grabbing a box cigars and giving it to his buddy, with no question that it was Michael Brown, no question it was the gentle giant.  And if I saw what I saw, the family lawyer can say whatever he wants to say and it isn’t gonna matter.

Also, I got an interesting e-mail.  “Rush, it sounds like you’re defending rioting and looting.”  Defending rioting?  “Yeah, you’re saying that they had a reason to because the cops didn’t announce that they had the video of the robbery.”

No, no.  No.  That’s actually a good point.  I’m not justifying. I wasn’t even trying to explain the looting and all of the violence that went on.  I don’t think that’s ever called for.  In fact, there could be a reasonable answer to the question, “Why didn’t they release the video?”  Because there’s an investigation ongoing.  Maybe they’re gonna say, “Hey, this is what we do in every case like this.  We don’t release evidence piecemeal, under no circumstance.”  I think it’s a slippery slope, folks, if we start going down that street where we say rioting and looting is acceptable because it’s understandable, because we must understand the rage.  We don’t want to go there.

You never want to send a signal that that’s okay.  And I didn’t mean to do that.

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RUSH:  So what do we have here, folks?  I tell you what we have.  We have Drive-By politicians, we have Drive-By agitators, we have Drive-By Media, all trying to cash in on narratives and templates as opposed to facts.  “You see, the facts weren’t in yet, and we couldn’t wait for the facts, so we had to advance our agendas based on our narratives,” and now they all look like fools.

JOHNNY DONOVAN:  And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH:  Now everybody involved in this thing looks like an agitator.  The politicians that got all worked up look like agitators.  The agitators don’t have to look like agitators ’cause they were agitators.  The media, the Drive-By Media look like agitators.  All of that looting! Cashing in on a phony narrative, too.  All of it was so unnecessary, and all of it serves to make Americans think their country is not so hot.

What an absolute travesty this week has been.  It was totally unnecessary.  The looting was all based on a phony narrative.  The violence was all based on a phony narrative.  Drive-By politicians, Drive-By agitators, Drive-By Media, all trying to cash in on narratives as opposed to facts.  “The facts weren’t in yet, you see, and we couldn’t wait for the facts. Do you know why we couldn’t wait for the facts?

“Because we didn’t need them! We knew what happened.  The media knew what happened,” because they know what a rotten place this country is.  That’s right.  The media knew what happened.  The agitators knew what happened, too, because they’ve been told for all these years what a rotten country they live in.  The politicians? They never wait for the facts.

They act on narrative to advance the agenda whenever there is crisis on the scene.

So a bunch of fools, agitators all — with looting and violence totally unnecessary — and that’s what the president weighed in on last night. All of this just ’cause nobody can wait for the facts, because everybody thought they knew them.  They didn’t need to wait, because everybody’s prejudice had already told ’em what had happened there and why it had happened and who was guilty and who was innocent and all of that.

I meant to mention this yesterday.  I had a friend send me an Internet page that he thought was brilliant.  It was one of these websites that analyzes foreign affairs, foreign events.  He said, “You know, I don’t send you stuff.”  Most of my friends know not to do that, ’cause they have learned I see it on my own.  They don’t need to send me stuff.  So when they do, it’s rare.

When they do, they think they’ve really spotted something and I’m going to appreciate it.  They’re trying to be helpful, don’t misunderstand, and I’m not gonna identify the website.  It’s not the point.  What was sent to me was gobbledygook.  It was foreign policy analysis that didn’t say anything.  I’m gonna tell you what it said, and I’ll tell you what I wrote the guy back.

I said, “You know what?  This is brilliant!  I agree wholeheartedly.  Obama might do that.  But he meant not — and if he does, we won’t know why, and we won’t know when. So we just have to wait for him to do or not do whatever he doesn’t want to do.  Things could go that way or the other way or the way over there, or some way we can’t predict!  It’s really bad out there. There are some really mean, bad people out there — I mean, really mean.

“We wish they weren’t there, but they are there, or they’re over there. Or maybe they’re behind us waiting while we look over there. But while we wait — because that’s all we can do! Because we don’t know anything, except we think we know Obama doesn’t care.  But we know we care, but about what?  And why?  Well, who knows?  No one knows except for the ones who do know.

“But we don’t know who they are, and neither do they, because they can’t be sure that we don’t know who they are, and what they’re gonna do, or when, if ever.  We just don’t know.  We wish we did, and we happily charge people hundreds of dollars a year for this.”  So he wrote back, “Okay, okay! I get it. I get it. I get it.”  I said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.  I’m just trying to be, in my own way, illustrative, ’cause we really don’t know.”

Yet the Drive-By Media tells us, and one of the things that I have often asked people to do is to just understand that there is politics and an agenda to everything that you see on the news.  Folks, it is hard not to get sucked in by it.  It’s hard.  It takes a daily application.  It takes a seasoned veteran.  Even Snerdley walked in to me today and he said, “You know, I got caught up in it, Rush. I actually believed it.

“I actually believed what I was hearing on TV. I bought the whole thing. I just I did because, I mean, the way they made it look it was impossible not to.” Now look.  The video has been released, the evidence so forth! Snerdley found out everything he thought had just been blown to smithereens, and he felt embarrassed that he fell for it. (interruption) “And betrayed.”  Exactly.

He felt betrayed because he had, by quirk of fate, believed what he had seen and been told in the media about this.

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