The Media Outlets That Gave A Pass To Black Lives Matter And Antifa Violence
As riots broke out over the summer following the death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police, many media organizations adopted a sympathetic approach toward covering the violence that wracked the nation’s cities, effectively giving a pass to agitators who incited deadly demonstrations that leveled downtowns.
Nearly a year later, the nation’s most prominent outlets have not corrected that narrative, even as last year’s numerous deadly clashes and property destruction is projected to cost insurance companies up to $2 billion in an economy already groaning under the coronavirus pandemic.
The day after Floyd’s death, rioters in Minneapolis took to the streets, shattering storefronts and burning police cars as they clashed with law enforcement. Similar violent demonstrations broke out in New York City, Portland, Dallas, Atlanta, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities across the country.
Meanwhile, mainstream outlets published headline after headline declaring the demonstrations to be “peaceful protests,” even as the violence turned deadly and as marching and chanting turned to burning and looting.
In late July, CBS News described the details of violent demonstrations around the nation, some of them deadly, and blamed the descent into violence on then-President Trump’s decision to send federal officers into some metropolitan areas.
Perhaps the most memorable instance of the media narrative that the protests were largely peaceful came in May from MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, who stood in front of a burning liquor store in Minneapolis and downplayed the destruction clearly visible behind him.
“I want to be clear in how I characterize this. This is mostly a protest. It is not, generally speaking, unruly, but fires have been started and there’s a crowd that is relishing that,” Velshi told MSNBC anchor Brian Williams. “There is a deep sense of grievance and complaint here, and that is the thing, that when you discount people who are doing things to public property that they shouldn’t be doing, it does have to be understood that this city has got, for the last several years, an issue with police, and it’s got a real sense of the deep sense of grievance of inequality.”
Just beforehand, Velshi said he could see “at least four fires” from where he was standing and pointed to the Third Precinct police station, which was set ablaze that night, May 28, when rioters decided to “try and take that police station from the police,” after which they started two liquor store fires. Velshi added, however, that “for most of the day” the demonstrations had looked “a lot calmer” than they had the previous day.
Towards the end of August, CNN was ridiculed for an on-air graphic attempting to make a similar point, that the protests were largely peaceful even as a fire burned in the background of a live shot.
The network ran a chyron at the bottom of the screen reading, “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests After Police Shooting” as CNN national correspondent Omar Jimenez stood in front of a large blaze in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where unrest erupted following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
ABC was also mocked in July for publishing a report and a tweet stating that a “peaceful demonstration intensified” in Oakland, California when demonstrators set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station, and assaulted police officers.
Oakland police declared the July 25 riot an “unlawful assembly” and said some in the crowd were throwing projectiles and pointing illegal lasers at officers.
While the forgiving language might be less surprising from certain media organizations with a palpable political bent, even some outlets that purport to offer mostly unvarnished straight news handled the violence with a light touch.
The ABC report that prompted laughter from critics originally came from the more subtly biased Associated Press, which used the same language saying a “peaceful demonstration intensified.” ABC parroted the language in the network’s tweet.
The AP dug its heels in a few months later at the end of September, when the AP Stylebook, whose guidelines are adhered to as gospel by outlets nationwide, instructed journalists to avoid using the term “riot” to describe the violent unrest sweeping the country.
“Focusing on rioting and property destruction rather than underlying grievance has been used in the past to stigmatize broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality, or for racial justice, going back to the urban uprisings of the 1960s,” the AP stated in new guidelines.
The updated guidelines also advised that a “protest” can be either “legal or illegal” as well as “peaceful or violent.”
Another wire service that publishes ostensibly cut-and-dry news articles, Reuters, in September lamented the situation of anti-racism protesters calling for equal justice, saying that “for all their peaceful protests, scenes of burning buildings will hand U.S. President Donald Trump the images he needs for his ‘law and order’ re-election campaign.”
NBC decried the characterization of the demonstrations as violent in a September article, declaring it “all part of an effort to rewrite the history of peaceful movements, tarnishing legitimate protests with the specter of violence,” adding that, “in the case of Black Lives Matter, it is notably false.”
That article also included a lengthy section citing research backing up the claim that former President Trump’s use of the word “thug” to describe violent demonstrators has racial implications. However, it acknowledges that former President Obama and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake both also used the term in 2015 to describe demonstrators who rioted in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death in police custody.
Along with the television news networks, the New York Times and Washington Post also refrained from using language that evoked the idea of violence in their coverage of the riots.
“Protests, Mostly Peaceful, Continue Across the Country,” read one Times headline on June 4, when Portland had been enveloped in nightly violence for a full week.
Meanwhile, questions about members of Antifa, a militant anti-fascist movement, infiltrating protests and contributing to the violence went largely uninvestigated and unreported by mainstream outlets.
“Tangible evidence of Antifa’s involvement is scant,” read a June 22 fact-check by the Post. The difficulty in ascertaining Antifa’s involvement is partly due to the fact that “Antifa is a moniker, not a single group with a clear organizational structure or leader,” the analysis stated, contrary to information provided by law enforcement officials.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said on June 4 that “anarchists like Antifa and other agitators” are “exploiting this situation to pursue violent, extremist agendas.”
“These individuals have set out to sow discord and upheaval rather than join in the righteous pursuit of equality and justice,” Wray said.
Police officials in New York and Pittsburgh also said they were fairly confident that “anarchist” elements had infiltrated protests in their cities and contributed to the violence.
At least 19 people died in the George Floyd protests nationwide, and more than 14,000 people were arrested.
In early June, two of Floyd’s grieving brothers called for peace even as riots continued to swell in cities across the country.
“I’m outraged too. Sometimes I get angry, I want to bust some heads too,” Terrence Floyd said on ABC. “My brother wasn’t about that. My brother was about peace. You’ll hear a lot of people say he was a gentle giant.”
“If his own family and blood is trying to deal with it and be positive about it and go another route to seek justice, then why are you out here tearing up your community?” Floyd said, adding, “Just relax. Justice will be served.”
Floyd’s other brother, Rodney, said around the same time that peace is “the best option we have to bring justice.”
Meanwhile, many powerful media outlets continued to insist that Black Lives Matter’s actives were essentially peaceful. Eventually, some who dealt with the fallout of the summer’s protests disagreed.
In late July, Daryl Breaux expressed his disgruntlement with Black Lives Matter after his car was seriously damaged during a demonstration in Seattle, saying the violence was obscuring the positive message.
“Almost 45 years I’ve been black. This is what Black Lives Matter does? I’m not with it,” Breaux said.
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