Here’s another of my most unpopular columns. Why? Because I asked people to use their own brains. In this case to listen for themselves to what was said just before Renee Good was shot. From RealClearPolitics.
By FRANK MIELE
The shooting death of Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has quickly become a rallying point in the broader political battle over immigration enforcement under the Trump administration.
It should also be a lesson for the rest of us to wait for all the facts before making judgments and especially to beware of media narratives that try to simplify complicated events.
Videos of the shooting, which took place on Jan. 7, have been widely circulated, including one taken by Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fired the fatal shot. You would think that since the shooting, or the circumstances surrounding it, are on video, it would be easy to determine responsibility for Good’s death.
But instead, we have evidence once again that eyewitnesses – in this case all of us who have watched the videos – cannot be depended upon to get the story straight.
I am talking in particular about the near-universally repeated narrative that Good’s wife, Becca, shouted, “Drive, baby, drive!” in the split second before Good was killed. The phrase appears to have traveled with early write-ups of the Alpha News-distributedagent-perspective video, then hardened into “fact” as larger outlets repeated it. That goes for everyone from right-wing Just the News(“Drive, baby! Drive, drive!”) to left-wing CNN(the more common “Drive, baby, drive!”).
From the time I first read this representation, I began publicly questioning the interpretation by posting comments online. I’ve listened to the audio hundreds of times by now, and there is no way I can hear those words. Instead, I watch Becca Good hear an officer shout, “Get out of the f—ing car” at her wife, try the passenger door handle and realize it is locked, and then recognize that Renee is preparing to accelerate. At that point she screams in panic either “Do not drive!” or more likely “Don’t drive!”
Not only do the words fit the audio pattern better, they make more sense as a response to the circumstances. Yet throughout the media, everyone repeats the “Drive, baby, drive” narrative without any hesitation. I later heard commentator Megyn Kelly argue that Becca Good should be arrested – even suggesting felony liability – based on the assumption that she urged her wife to flee.
Kelly went so far as to say that Becca Good should be in custody now, but that claim depends entirely on a transcription that may not be accurate. What if the wife never even said, “Drive, baby, drive” at all? What if it was all just a media invention?
It’s not like that had never happened before. Do you remember “Hands up, don’t shoot”?
That was the media narrative to describe the shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri, policeman in 2014. The progressive left picked up the battle cry and accused officer Darren Wilson of killing the teenager while he was in the act of surrender.
It wasn’t true, but it took weeks for the truth to come out – that Brown had approached Wilson in his patrol car and tried to wrestle the officer’s gun away from him. Shooting Brown was the only way for Wilson to protect himself and others. Yet because of the media narrative, Wilson was put in danger of arrest and of worse – as angry mobs in Ferguson sought justice based on a fairy tale.
Now, 12 years later, another shorthand narrative was out of control. Unable to find any outlet that had questioned the transcription as I had, I turned to an AI-based audio analysis tool, ChatGPT, to examine the clip more rigorously than the human ear alone allows.
Using slowed playback and spectrogram analysis, it reported its results. Bottom line (short answer):
– The audio does not support “drive baby drive.”
– It is far more consistent with “don’t drive” (or “do not drive”) spoken urgently.
– I would rate confidence moderate-to-high, given the recording quality.
Asked why “Drive, baby, drive” does not fit the sound signature on the audio, ChatGPT responded:
I isolated the quoted moment from the clearest clip available to me and examined it as a time–frequency spectrogram (a standard way to visualize speech). The widely repeated phrase “drive baby drive” doesn’t match what’s in the recording. The utterance is too short for three words, and the audio lacks the distinct consonant bursts you would expect for “baby” (two clear “b” onsets). The sound pattern is more consistent with a prohibitive command such as “don’t drive” or “do not drive,” delivered urgently.
I’m not asking anyone to treat AI as an oracle – only to notice what happens when the slowed audio and the spectrogram don’t match the confident captioning. Perhaps ChatGPT and I are both wrong. But I don’t think so. After repeated playback, I could not hear anything resembling the word “baby.” And if the argument is that the audio portion of the video recording is too ambiguous for a definitive conclusion, then that point should have been made to the hundreds of media outlets that ran with the “Drive, baby, drive” narrative – not with me for questioning it.
Deciding whether Officer Ross was justified in shooting Renee Good does not hinge on what Becca Good said in a moment of panic. But public judgment – and calls for criminal punishment – clearly have. When journalists and commentators repeat an unverified transcription as fact, they do more than simplify a complex event. They create a moral narrative that can endanger real people.
If the audio is ambiguous, that ambiguity should have been reported as such from the beginning. If it is not, then the words attributed to Becca Good deserve correction. Even if I’m wrong about the exact words, the larger point stands: If the audio is ambiguous, it should never have been presented as a definitive quote – and certainly not used to justify calls for prosecution.
In cases like this, restraint is not just appropriate. It is the responsibility that journalists owe their readers. And readers should demand the same restraint from those who claim to inform them.
About Heartland Diary USA
Heartland Diary is solely operated by Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will SUBSCRIBE to www.HeartlandDiaryUSA.com by leaving your email address on the home page. Also please consider purchasing one of my books. They are available through the following Amazon links. My new book is “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends” and is a collection of personal essays that transcend politics. My earlier books include “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution,” “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” and the “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy. Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” As an Amazon Associate, I may earn referral fees for qualifying purchases through links on my website.
