News Station Somehow Uses McDonald’s Logo When Covering Laquan McDonald Case

Today, the case against the officer who shot and killed black teen Laquan McDonald went to court, which has been a long time coming. A video of Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times was released last November, over a year after the killing. Last month, emails were released that showed a coordination between the office of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and the police department. The main concern expressed in the emails was how to make sure Chicago came out of the incident looking as good as possible.

There were protests calling for Emanuel to resign and he ultimately ended up firing his police chief. Obviously, nothing about this story is lighthearted in any way. There is no room for error or humor when discussing the convoluted facts of the case.

Someone should tell that to the people at ABC 7 Chicago.

Today, while Terrell Brown sat at the anchors’ desk and told viewers that some groups believe the Cook County State’s Attorney, Anita Alvarez, has a “conflict of interest” when it comes to the case, someone in the control room had a conflict of judgment and threw up a background graphic of the McDonald’s logo.

To recap quickly, during a very serious story about the trial of an officer who shot a teenager 16 times and whose entire department has been embroiled in police brutality accusation scandals for decades, someone casually played word association with the dead child’s last name.

We can’t be too quick to judge, of course. Maybe the graphics person was just really hungry. Alternately, maybe he was sad. Remember the subplot in Breaking Bad wherein Walter White let Jesse Pinkman‘s girlfriend Jane Margolis die by choking on her own vomit while she was high on heroin just so Pinkman would focus harder on making meth for him? And then Margolis’ dad was so bummed out that he didn’t pay attention to his job as an air traffic controller and let two planes collide in mid-air, killing a whole bunch of other people? Maybe what happened was something like that.

It’s a Friday and I’m feeling optimistic. I would rather imagine a complex, contrived explanation for this than accept that it was the result of stupidity, racism, a bad sense of humor, or a mixture of all three. I knew a lot of guys in college who suffered from a grimy combination of those traits. They grew out of it or dropped out. None of them went on to work in the control room of a news station, and quite rightly.

[h/t] Andrew Kirell.
[image via screengrab]

For more from Lindsey, follow her on Twitter.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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