Intercept Touts Lies About Riots While Maliciously Attacking Conservative Journalists For Reporting On Them – The Federalist

The Intercept released a video report touting lies about the violent riots that broke out over the summer of 2020 and targeting the conservative journalists who reported on them.

By focusing on sensational, graphic images of violence on the margins of protests and entirely ignoring peaceful demonstrators, even members of the Riot Squad who are not as far right as Schaffer have contributed to a political project: the right-wing medias campaign to portray racial justice protests as anarchic and dangerous, Intercept claimed.

In the media outlets video, a narrator details how conservative reporters made up an informal Riot Squad that followed the violence, destruction, vandalism, and arson that occurred in cities all over the U.S. last year. While the riots, 95 percent of which are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, caused more than $2 billion in damages from May 26 to June 8, corporate media organizations, including The Intercept, hold fast to the idea that these protests were mostly peaceful.

the broader picture is that Black Lives Matter protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, the Intercept claimed without evidence.

Not only does The Intercept downplay the violence that destroyed businesses, cities, and ended in more than 47 riot-related fatalities, but also targets conservative reporters, many of whom were some of the only on-the-ground journalists in ravaged areas, for choosing to cover the destruction. Reporters Elijah Schaffer, Shelby Talcott, Julio Rosas, and Jorge Ventura are slandered as spurring on false narratives in exchange for appearances on Fox News and fueling online conspiracy theories.

These reporters choices to turn their cameras away from peaceful marches over racist policing to the dangerous and violent looting and rioting that occurred, The Intercept claims, is just meant to add fuel to the fire.

The impact of their work is hard to overstate. Even as they remain relatively unknown, this tight-knit group has produced many of the most viral videos of Black Lives Matter protests over the past year. And those images have helped create the false impression, relentlessly driven home by Fox News and Republican politicians, that the nationwide wave of protests that erupted after George Floyd was killed was nothing but an excuse for mindless rioting, The Intercept narrator said.

The Intercept also accused conservative journalists covering the riots of staking out in aggravated areas such as Portland to record and exaggerate.

It was no accident that Rosas and Ventura chose to spend Inauguration Day this year in Portland. The liberal citys strong anti-fascist protest culture, in a metro area surrounded by ultraconservative exurbs, has for years provided right-wing video journalists with a steady stream of skirmishes to record and exaggerate, the narrator stated.

Reporters were faulted for their coverage of the shooting by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin and The Intercept even speculated that the Daily Callers Chief Video Director Richie McGinniss refused to release video of the shooting right away because he decided to suppress or delete footage that could be used to convict the young right-wing vigilante.

That fueled speculation that McGinniss might have withheld incriminating visual evidence to shield Rittenhouse, who quickly became a heroto many of the Daily Callers far-right readers and wasdefended by the sites founder, Tucker Carlson, the narrator continued. McGinniss, however, told The Intercept that while he thought he had recorded video of the shooting, he discovered later that he had accidentally hit the wrong button on his iPhone and it did not start recording until after the shots were fired.

Even the one reporter in the so-called Riot Squad who does not work in conservative news faced scrutiny from Intercept for attendingat least 24 Trump rallies before the 2018 midterms and describing them as exhilarating on his video blog. And despite almost all of the reporters coverage of the Capitol riot and pro-Trump thugs, The Intercept still blamed the journalists because all this video evidence of right-wing violence was not used to vilify the rioters the way that clips of far less significant events at left-wing protests were last summer.

The Intercept concluded by scolding Scriberr field reporter Kalen DAlmeida and other reporters for contributing to an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust, making assaults on journalists more frequent.

Violence against journalists, even ones operating in bad faith, is inexcusable. Unfortunately, videographers like DAlmeida have contributed to an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust, making assaults on journalists more frequent. And this has also made the work of scrupulous and fair reporting on the politics that plays out on our streets much harder, and more dangerous, The Intercept concluded.

The narrator ends the video with a propagandist statement lamenting the fact that attention on the riots has taken away from criticizing law enforcement.

Its been a year since the horrifying cellphone video of George Floyds murder drove millions of Americans to the streets to demand justice, he said. But its important to keep in mind that the conservative media has been working almost nonstop to undercut the movement for black lives by spreading the lie that the nations main problem is the protesters, not the police.

Some journalists targeted by The Intercept report responded to the outlets attacks on Twitter.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Intercept Touts Lies About Riots While Maliciously Attacking Conservative Journalists For Reporting On Them - The Federalist