Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt, by Robert Parry

Gathered together in one place, for easy access, an agglomeration of writings and images relevant to the Rapeutation phenomenon.

Re: Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt, by Robert Parry

Postby admin » Mon May 24, 2021 2:16 am

Part 1 of 2

Meet the Riot Squad: Right-Wing Reporters Whose Viral Videos Are Used to Smear BLM
by The Intercept
May 13, 2021



In the year since George Floyd’s murder, conservative news outlets have endlessly hyped distorted stories about violence at Black Lives Matter protests. Key videos they used come from a tight-knit group of eight young journalists: Brendan Gutenschwager, Drew Hernandez, Elijah Schaffer, Kalen D’Almeida, Jorge Ventura, Julio Rosas, Richie McGinniss, and Shelby Talcott.

This informal club of right-wing reporters roam from city to city, feeding the conservative media's hunger for images of destruction and violence on the margins of left-wing protests.

The impact of their work is hard to overstate. Even as they remain relatively unknown, Riot Squad members have 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.

But the broader picture is that Black Lives Matter protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful. According to the researchers, there was no looting, arson, or violence of any kind at 94 percent of the protests associated with Black Lives Matter. And in many cases in which there was violence, it was inflicted on protesters, either by the police or right-wing vigilantes.

It’s been a year since the horrifying cellphone video of George Floyd’s murder drove millions of Americans to the streets to demand justice. But it’s important to keep in mind that the conservative media has been working almost non-stop to undercut the movement for Black lives, by spreading the lie that the nation’s main problem is the protesters, not the police.

*********************

MEET THE RIOT SQUAD: RIGHT-WING REPORTERS WHOSE VIRAL VIDEOS ARE USED TO SMEAR BLM
In the year since George Floyd’s murder, conservative news outlets have endlessly hyped distorted stories about violence at Black Lives Matter protests. Key videos they used come from a tight-knit group of eight young journalists.
by Robert Mackey and Travis Mannon
May 13 2021, 8:38 a.m.
Video by Robert Mackey and Travis Mannon.

THE SOUND OF glass breaking, on Inauguration Day in Portland, Oregon, was music to the ears of Julio Rosas, a young video journalist.

That’s because Rosas, who works for the right-wing website Townhall, specializes in shooting viral video of mayhem at left-wing protests. On this day, black-clad, anti-capitalist protesters were attacking a Democratic Party office, and Rosas managed to record them from close range without being spotted.

Within minutes of the vandalism, by a handful of activists who broke off from a small #J20 march, Rosas posted his video on Twitter, where it racked up over 1 million views.

Image
Julio Rosas
@Julio_Rosas11
On the ground in Portland, Ore. for @townhallcom. A group of Antifa marchers just attacked the city's Democratic Party office. They broke windows and spray painted the building.
Some of them had a hard time breaking the windows.
4:57 PM Jan 20, 2021


With his tweet, Rosas had also beaten his friend and rival, Jorge Ventura of the conservative Daily Caller, by six minutes.

Image
Jorge Ventura Media
@VenturaReport
The Democratic Party of Oregon building was vandalized moments go by an Antifa group in Portland Oregon. The group gathered at Revolution Hall and blocked roads off as they made their way towards the building.
5:03 PM Jan 20, 2021


Ventura, who went undercover to infiltrate the protest movement in Portland last summer, got less dramatic footage of this incident, but his 15-second clip, which showed that there were more people photographing the destruction in Portland than taking part in it, was still seen by more than 100,000 people.

When Rosas joined Laura Ingraham on Fox News that night, giving national attention to what would have been, before the era of viral video, just a local news story, Ventura held the camera for the live shot.

We know that because a third member of the conservative protest paparazzi that descended on Portland that day, Newsmax contributor James Klüg, gave viewers of his video blog a behind-the-scenes look at how the viral video-to-Fox News pipeline works.

On the air, Ingraham attributed the destruction to “antifa thugs,” using the right-wing shorthand that lumps everyone with left-of-center politics into one undifferentiated mass. Rosas, who was standing in front of a Circle-A — a symbol for anarchism, not anti-fascism — that had been spray-painted beside the ruined front door of the Democratic Party office, made no effort to correct her.

“The antifa groups here, they do not like Biden just as much they don’t like Trump,” he said. “They just hate America in general.” (In fact, Rose City Antifa, the Portland group that helped revive the Nazi-era concept of anti-fascism in the United States, released a statement making clear that this attack on the Democratic office was not the work of anti-fascists but rather of anarchists and anti-capitalists. “While many of the people involved may consider themselves antifascists in ideology,” the activists said, “we narrowly define antifascism as actions taken to oppose the insurgent right-wing.”)

As a reporter focused on protest movements, I’ve been studying video of chaotic events at demonstrations for more than a decade, since I live-blogged Iran’s disputed election and then covered the Arab Spring and Occupy protests, from the United States to Brazil. And one thing I’ve learned is that, whether a clip was posted online by a witness in Cairo or Kenosha, it always helps to know who shot the video, and why.

Over the past year, as I researched viral clips of contested incidents at protests against racist policing and far-right movements, I found that I was coming across the names of the same handful of videographers again and again. At protests in Minneapolis, Dallas, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Louisville, Philadelphia, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, I discovered that many of the most viral clips were shot by a handful of field reporters for right-wing sites or freelancers with conservative politics.

Rosas and Ventura are not household names, but it’s important to understand their reporting, because they are members of an informal club of right-wing video journalists who roam from city to city, feeding the conservative media’s hunger for images of destruction and violence on the margins of left-wing protests.

In the year since George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin was documented in horrifying detail on the cellphone of a 17-year-old witness, Darnella Frazier, right-wing news outlets and politicians have been desperate to draw attention away from those unbearable images by focusing instead on viral videos of unrest at racial justice protests. That’s been a boon for the careers of conservative video journalists like Rosas, Ventura, and a half-dozen of their friends, who jokingly call themselves the #RiotSquad in Instagram selfies and podcast banter.

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.

Image
Last July, Kayleigh McEnany, White House press secretary, screened video of violence at protests in Portland, Ore., to justify federal intervention in the city. Photo: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

That’s not to say that rioting never happens; it clearly does. And even if you believe that “a riot is the language of the unheard,” it is undeniable that looting and arson did scar some communities where anger over racist policing spiraled out of control.

But the broader picture is that Black Lives Matter protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful.

Conservatives like to mock anyone who says that, usually by pointing to isolated images of chaos, like those recorded by the Riot Squad, or by cherry-picking misleading data. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, recently cited data showing that more than 500 racial justice protests turned violent in the United States last year. But Johnson failed to let readers of his Wall Street Journal opinion piece know that the same researchers — from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project — counted nearly 10,000 more Black Lives Matter protests that were entirely peaceful. According to the researchers, there was no looting, arson, or violence of any kind at 94 percent of the protests associated with Black Lives Matter. And in many cases in which there was violence, it was inflicted on protesters, either by the police or right-wing vigilantes.

Image
A screenshot of data on 2020 protests in the United States from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

ACLED
Bringing clarity to crisis
Key Trends: 2020
THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT
Sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in May, the latest wave of protests associated with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement accounts for 47% of all demonstrations in the US last year.2
• ACLED records more than 10,330 demonstrations associated with the BLM movement across more than 2,730 locations in all 50 states and Washington, DC
• States with the most events: California (1,151); New York (615); Florida (487); Illinois (430); Texas (425)
• The vast majority of these events — 94% — involved no violent or destructive activity
• Nevertheless, over 9% of all BLM-linked demonstrations — or nearly one in 10 events — were met with intervention by police or other authorities, compared to just 4% of right-wing demonstrations3
• When responding to BLM-linked demonstrations, authorities used force4 more than 51% of the time, compared to just 33% for right-wing demonstrations
• For more on disparate law enforcement response to different protests, see this report


That’s the wide-angle view of reality missed by conservatives obsessively viewing close-up images of violence, like those shot by the Riot Squad and played on a loop on Fox News and other outlets even further to the right.

“Since the George Floyd protests, conservative media outlets including Fox News (particularly Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity), One America News, Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV, and right-wing YouTubers have been covering Black Lives Matter and other left-wing protests daily, specifically highlighting instances of violence, fighting, and property damage,” media scholar Joan Donovan observed in the MIT Technology Review last summer. “This coverage has come to dominate the right-wing narrative in a new way, flipping the script to suggest that Black protesters — demonstrating because they fear police violence — are themselves a threat to white people.”

“By using riot porn to incite fear in white people,” Donovan added, “the right-wing media ecosystem converts the real pain experienced by Black Americans into fodder for deranged, paranoid fantasies that white vigilantes must take up the functions of the police.”

To understand how this works — and how a group of just eight young journalists have had such an outsize impact on what millions of Americans know about the protests against police violence and systemic racism — it’s useful to take a closer look at some of the most-watched clips posted online in the past year.

The Man Who Threatened Protesters With a Machete

The first and most obvious way that some of the Riot Squad journalists distort reality is through selective, misleading edits of the footage they shoot.

At a protest in Dallas five days after George Floyd was killed, a core member of the Riot Squad, Elijah Schaffer of Beck’s BlazeTV, posted a brief clip that showed the brutal beating of a white man by a group of mainly Black protesters.

Image
ELIJAHSCHAFFER
@ElijahSchaffer
BREAKING: man critically injured at Dallas riots
It appears he attempted to defend a shop with a large sword
Looters ran at him, then he charged rioters
They then beat him with a skateboard and stoned him with medium sized rocks
I called an Ambulance and it's on the way
7:52 PM May 30, 2020


The graphic, disturbing footage was viewed more than 35 million times on Twitter.

What Schaffer knew, but concealed from viewers of his edited clip, was that the man he described as an innocent victim of the mob had, moments earlier, threatened protesters with a machete.

Video recorded by another witness showed that the protesters responded by hurling stones at the man, who then shrieked and charged at them, swinging the blade wildly and cutting one of them, before the others disarmed him and took bloody revenge.



Yoel Measho, a filmmaker who took part in the protest, posted that video of the man’s wild charge on Snapchat, along with a second clip of a protester displaying the machete as protest medics gave the man first aid. (Measho later shared both clips with The Intercept.)



After the other videos began to circulate, Schaffer made the rest of his footage available to broadcasters, which showed that he had recorded but edited out the man’s aggressive behavior.

A Dallas police spokesperson told me the day after the incident that the man had indeed confronted protesters with the machete before being assaulted. The owners of the nearby bar the man reportedly set out to defend confirmed in a phone interview that the business was not looted by the protesters or anyone else. (On a conservative podcast the following month, a man who said he was the victim of the beating confirmed that he did initiate the conflict by confronting the protesters with a carbon steel machete “shaped like an old Roman gladius,” which he had mentioned on Twitter before the incident.)

Among those misled by Schaffer’s edit was then-President Donald Trump, who boosted it on Twitter and then echoed false claims that the man had died, as federal agents were unleashed on peaceful protesters outside the White House.

“Innocent people have been savagely beaten,” Trump told reporters, “like the young man in Dallas, Texas, who was left dying in the street.” (On the night of the attack, Schaffer had passed on the false rumor that the man had died.)

In the months that followed, Schaffer’s misleading clip was used again and again to smear Black Lives Matter. Johnson showed the video at a meeting of the Senate Homeland Security Committee he chaired last summer, presenting it as evidence of what he called “the reality” that protests against racist policing “unleash anarchy.” The clip was also included in a video prepared by Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal team, and then screened by Trump’s lawyers at his impeachment trial, as part of a misleading montage of protest violence, much of it recorded by Riot Squad videographers, which they falsely accused Democratic officials of having encouraged.

A Post-Election Skirmish in Washington

At the first post-election rally of Trump dead-enders in Washington in November, another Riot Squad videographer, Schaffer’s friend and former roommate Kalen D’Almeida, used the same technique to mislead millions of viewers.

The viral clip D’Almeida posted on Twitter (where it was viewed over 3 million times before he deleted it) and Instagram (as the second clip in this slideshow) showed an older white Trump supporter being punched in the face from behind by a young, Black counterprotester.

The video, which lingered on the man’s bloody face, was quickly retweeted by Andy Ngo and shared by Trump, with the comment: “Human Radical Left garbage did this.”

That video was then edited into an attack ad against Democrats that Trump screened for his fans at a rally in Georgia on December 5, much to D’Almeida’s delight.

Image
Kalen From Scriberr
@FromKalen
Technically I'm in the video as well
Trump's campaign used my footage for the Georgia rally!
8:11 PM Dec 5, 2020


But footage of the same clash recorded by Ventura showed that D’Almeida had edited his clip to hide the fact that the Trump supporter had started the fight, by first violently shoving one anti-Trump protester to the ground and then pushing and threatening to punch several others.

Image
Jorge Ventura Media
@VenturaReport
BREAKING -- Multiple Trump supporters assaulted by pro-BLM supporters in Washington D.C. One of the supporters assaulted was brutally knocked out. The scene is chaotic right now @MillionMAGAMarch
2:42 PM Nov 14, 2020


When D’Almeida later posted more of his own footage of the incident, it became clear that he had also recorded the start of the confrontation but chose to edit that out to make the white man look like an innocent victim of the Black protester.

Image
Kalen From Scriberr
@FromKalen
Washington DC: 16:07 this violent altercation occurred between multiple individuals at Connecticut.
4:24 PM Nov 14, 2020


Like the beating in Dallas that Elijah Schaffer witnessed, the punch that felled the Trump supporter in front of D’Almeida was obviously a vicious blow. But through selective, misleading editing, D’Almeida contributed in the same way to the sense of innocent victimhood and white resentment nurtured day and night by conservative media outlets and right-wing politicians like Trump.

Three months earlier, D’Almeida had posted a meme on Instagram mocking the mainstream media for supposedly distorting protest coverage. The meme, which uses two panels from a comic strip by the right-wing Colombian cartoonist Jhon Alexander Guerra, shows a TV news reporter telling a cameraperson not to film while a protester is throwing a rock at a police officer. When the police officer then chases the protester with his nightstick raised, the reporter tells the cameraperson to start shooting, because “now it’s news.”

Image
A screenshot of a meme adopted from panels by the right-wing, anti-feminist Colombian cartoonist Jhon Alexander Guerra, which was shared by Kalen D’Almeida on Instagram last August.
[Press BBC] Don't take the picture yet, wait
Perfect!!, Now its news!


Magnifying Two Incidents on the Streets of Portland

It was no accident that Rosas and Ventura chose to spend Inauguration Day this year in Portland. The liberal city’s 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.

In July, for instance, Ventura and the Riot Squad’s Drew Hernandez, a right-wing YouTuber, both recorded an angry confrontation between Portland police officers and a Black, female protester who objected to being shoved forcefully by three officers.

Image
Drew Hernandez
@DrewHLive
BLM PROTESTER TO PORTLAND COP: "I hope someone kills your whole f*cken family"
3:18 AM Jul 12, 2020


“God damn it! I’m disabled, I can’t walk any faster!” the woman could be heard saying in the viral clip Hernandez recorded.

“Go!” one officer replied.

“I hope someone kills your whole fucking family,” the enraged woman responded. “I hope they kill you too. I hope someone burns down your whole precinct with all y’all inside. Can’t wait to see it.”

Hernandez’s clip was immediately boosted on Twitter by Ngo and even screened for the White House press corps by press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, in a montage of Portland unrest intended to justify federal intervention in the city. (The montage also included video shot by Ventura and his boss, Richie McGinniss.)

Image
Jorge Ventura Media
@VenturaReport
Kayleigh McEnany White House Press Secretary just played two videos from my reporting on the ground in #Portland
@RichieMcGinniss reporting was also featured in today's briefing!
11:16 AM Jul 24, 2020


The White House, however, edited the Hernandez clip for McEnany’s presentation, removing the start of the confrontation to conceal from reporters that the protester’s comments were in reaction to having been roughly treated.

The following month, D’Almeida recorded a shocking act of violence on a Portland street, five blocks from the main protest site.

Typically dressed in black to blend in, D’Almeida describes himself on Instagram as an “Undercover Exposé Artist,” making no secret that his aim in filming protests against police brutality is to capture footage that can be used to discredit anti-fascists or Black Lives Matter activists.

While he began that effort in Seattle, D’Almeida finally hit the jackpot in August, when he recorded, on both his cellphone and body camera, graphic video of a white man being kicked in the face and knocked out by a Black man who provided security at Portland protests.

Image
Kalen From Scriberr
@FromKalen
Portland: A man accused of trying to run over protesters crashed his vehicle. BLM & Antifa militants then pull him from the car and violently assault him.
11:15 PM Aug 16, 2020


Hernandez and Ventura were also on hand to capture gruesome video of the aftermath, as the injured man, who was accused by his attacker of trying to run people down with his truck, lay unconscious and bleeding.

The video of the victim shared by Hernandez, with a caption attributing the violence to “BLM militants,” went even more viral.

Image
Drew Hernandez
@DrewHLive
BREAKING: After causing a white man to crash his truck in downtown Portland, BLM militants then beat the man and knock him unconscious
911 has been called
10:37 PM Aug 16, 2020


The incident got so much attention on Fox News that the culprit, Marquise Love, who was later jailed for the assault, became a symbol of Black Lives Matter for many of the network’s viewers.

That this brutal attack had not taken place during a protest, but after one, and at another location, where a long series of confusing, overlapping arguments among people drinking and smoking outside a nearby 7-Eleven escalated to violence was not something D’Almeida tried to explain to viewers of his video.

Hernandez later tried to connect the attack to the protests by claiming that the victim, Adam Haner, had been assaulted for coming to the defense of a trans woman who was assaulted by “Black Lives Matter protesters.” In fact, a careful review of raw footage posted online later by Hernandez shows that the incident started after Love, the self-appointed security guard, left the site of a protest and encountered Haner drinking beer outside the 7-Eleven. The two men eventually took opposite sides in a nasty personal dispute there that had nothing to do with politics or the demonstrations.

What Hernandez left out of the narrative he shared with Fox News is that his footage shows that the dispute between Love and the trans woman at the 7-Eleven only escalated after that person took out a baton and threatened the security guard with it.

Right-Wing Vigilantes in Kenosha

Last August, all eight Riot Squad videographers converged on Kenosha, Wisconsin, to cover protests that gave way to arson and destruction following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

The unrest also prompted members of a libertarian militia to take to the streets.

Almost everything we know about how one member of that militia, Kyle Rittenhouse, ended up killing two men in Kenosha that week comes from the Riot Squad reporters, who were there to document violence by anti-police protesters but instead recorded video of a pro-police vigilante shooting demonstrators.

On the second night of protests in Kenosha, Ventura and Schaffer, who was disguised in a Black Lives Matter shirt, came across protesters arguing with a libertarian militia guarding a gas station.

Both recorded a tense political debate between a young, Black protester and a heavily armed militia leader wearing a tactical vest with an embroidered patch showing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and the slogan “Cowabunga It Is,” a reference to a Reddit meme.

Image
Jorge Ventura Media
@VenturaReport
"F*** you, you ain't with us" woman yells at armed man who is attempting to stop the mob from looting and vandalizing #Kenosha businesses
11:03 PM Aug 24, 2020


“That attempted murder of that citizen was wrong,” the white militia member said of the shooting of Blake. “And I’m all for protests, but you can’t be destroying your neighbor’s houses and businesses,” he added.

“This shit, the fucking value of property, has nothing to do with the value of life,” the protester shouted at him. “If you value this shit more than you value people, you’re not with us! Fuck you! You’re not with us!”

In his Periscope livestream from the same location, Schaffer gushed over the vigilantes.

Image
ELIJAH SCHAFFER
@ElijahSchaffer
Kenosha Riots Night 2
pscp.tv
8:06 PM Aug 24, 2020


“What do you think about vigilantism where the police are not able to protect businesses, so citizens are coming in, and they’re protecting businesses themselves?” Schaffer asked a bystander.

“I feel a hundred percent,” the man replied.

“I’m with it too. I’m jiving with it,” Schaffer agreed. “I like that shit. That shit’s tight. Hell, yeah. These people are like God, right here. They’re protectors.”

Two blocks away, Ventura and Schaffer joined Rosas in front of a burning office furniture store, which provided the perfect backdrop for all three to record dispatches from the scene.

In his stand-up report, Rosas credited the “armed citizens” for stopping the ransacking of a car dealership and threw in a dig at the MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi, who had been accused by conservatives of downplaying arson while reporting from Minneapolis on the first George Floyd protests.

“What’s up everybody, so right now we’re still here in Kenosha,” Rosas said. “Riots are still going on right now where the curfew is still technically in effect, but as you can see, a lot of the people are still out and about. Obviously a burning building behind me, or, as Ali Velshi would say, not an unruly protest.”

When it was Schaffer’s turn to use the same burning building as a backdrop, he let viewers in on the secret that he was just pretending to sympathize with the protesters in order to expose them.

“My name’s Elijah Schaffer, reporting for BlazeTV, undercover, here in Kenosha,” he signed off. “Thank you again so much for watching. Have a great rest of the night and may God bless the United States of America.”

Within days, that stand-up was featured in a BlazeTV commercial for Schaffer’s show. “America’s streets have become a war zone,” a narrator intoned in the ad, “and Elijah Schaffer is right in the middle of it.” The ad copy promised that Schaffer would bring subscribers “what the mainstream media won’t show you”: endless images of fire and property damage, along with the young conservative’s “thought-provoking perspective.”

As he reported on racial justice protests last summer, Schaffer’s commentary on the movement against police brutality became increasingly unhinged. “Ultimately,” Schaffer tweeted in September, “I believe BLM, if left unchecked, would eventually produce genocidal outcomes.”

The next night, Schaffer and the Daily Caller’s head of video, Richie McGinniss, both interviewed a 17-year-old who had joined the militia: Rittenhouse.

Image
Richie McG
@RichieMcGinniss
In interviewed the alleged shooter before the violence started.
Full video coming soon:
9:25 AM Aug 26, 2020 from Kenosha, WI


As that night wore on, protesters eventually tired of being policed by vigilantes and let the militia know. As tensions between the two groups escalated, video shot by Rosas and the Daily Caller’s Shelby Talcott showed the three men Rittenhouse would shoot that night — Gaige Grosskreutz, Joseph Rosenbaum, and Anthony Huber — in the middle of the heated dispute.

Image
Julio Rosas @Julio-Rosas11 Aug 25, 2020
Replying to @Julio_Rosas11
What it's like to be by the armored police vehicles in Kenosha:
Julio Rosas
@Julio_Rosas11
Rioters are getting into confrontations with armed citizens who are out here to prevent looting and destruction to businesses.
9:17 PM Aug 25, 2020


Image
Shelby Talcott @ShelbyTalcott Aug 25, 2020
Replying to @ShelbyTalcott
Took a nice lil hit earlier
Shelby Talcott
@ShelbyTalcott
Fights are breaking out between protesters, many of whom have guns
9:14 PM Aug 25, 2020
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36944
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Re: Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt, by Robert Parry

Postby admin » Mon May 24, 2021 3:28 am

Part 2 of 2

After Schaffer interviewed Rittenhouse, he went to a nearby car dealership that was being vandalized. Moments later, Rittenhouse ran into that car lot, pursued by Rosenbaum, a protester enraged by the teenage vigilante’s presence.

Video recorded by a protest livestreamer showed that McGinniss, who was following Rittenhouse when the chase began, was running just behind Rosenbaum with his iPhone pointed at the two men when Rittenhouse turned and fired four shots, striking the protester from point-blank range.

Because McGinniss was just a few feet behind Rosenbaum when Rittenhouse opened fire and appeared to be filming, the fact that he released no video of the shooting that night led some observers to wonder if he, or the Daily Caller, might have decided to suppress or delete footage that could be used to convict the young right-wing vigilante.

Hernandez captured the shooting from across the lot and then continued filming as he moved in closer.

Image
Drew Hernandez
@DrewHLive
BREAKING: RIOTER HAS BEEN SHOT IN THE HEAD
9:56 PM Aug 25, 2020


While McGinniss ripped off his Black Lives Matter T-shirt and tried to stop Rosenbaum’s bleeding with it, Rittenhouse ran past Hernandez, calling a friend instead of 911.

Close-up images of the scramble to save Rosenbaum, recorded by Hernandez and Schaffer, showed that McGinniss’s cellphone, which was in his left hand as he administered first aid with his right, was in record mode at the time.

The phone’s engaged red record button, the presence of a white shutter button on the screen’s lower right, and the red block around the time code at the top are three signs that an iPhone is recording, and all are visible on McGinniss’s phone in the video recorded by Schaffer and Hernandez.

Image
A screenshot from Drew Hernandez’s video of Richie McGinniss holding his cellphone in his left hand while trying to give first aid to Joseph Rosenbaum, less than a minute after he was shot by Kyle Rittenhouse.

Image
A screenshot of Drew Hernandez’s video appears to show the red time code numbers at the top of Richie McGinniss’s cellphone as he gives first aid to Joseph Rosenbaum.

That fueled speculation that McGinniss might have withheld incriminating visual evidence to shield Rittenhouse, who quickly became a hero to many of the Daily Caller’s far-right readers and was defended by the site’s founder, Tucker Carlson.

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.

As Rittenhouse ran from the lot, Talcott filmed protesters shouting that he had shot someone. Moments later, Rittenhouse tripped and fell in front of Rosas, who recorded the teen vigilante shooting at the men who tried to disarm him.

Rosas, who is in the Marine Reserves, quickly took cover, but another young video journalist, Brendan Gutenschwager, ran past him and got the clearest images of Rittenhouse shooting Huber, who died of his wounds, and Grosskreutz, who was badly injured but survived.



As Rittenhouse rose to his feet, with Huber sprawled on the street in front of him and Grosskreutz retreating, Gutenschwager could be seen just behind the gunman, filming from the sidewalk.

Image
After shooting Anthony Huber, foreground, and Gaige Grosskreutz, left, Kyle Rittenhouse kneeled in the street in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 25, 2020, as Brendan Gutenschwager, right, recorded the scene on video from the sidewalk behind him. Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Within 10 minutes of the first shooting, Hernandez and Schaffer both posted their video of the fatally wounded Rosenbaum on Twitter, along with captions that maligned the victim. Hernandez described Rosenbaum as a “rioter,” while Schaffer made the false claim that the man had been shot “while looting a car shop.”

On his BlazeTV show later that week, Schaffer continued to attack the victims, falsely accusing them of committing crimes and praising the right-wing vigilante for killing them.

“I really don’t have sympathy for them. I just do not. They were rioters, they were vandalizing the place. And, do crimes, get rekt, that’s what I have to say,” Schaffer told his viewers. “I think them attacking Kyle Rittenhouse, with a skateboard, a pistol, and trying to jump him is what makes them deserve to be shot. I think Kyle’s been memed into history.”

“Kyle is a hero in my eyes,” Schaffer added. “Next time commies come up on a patriot like that, watch out.”

Gutenschwager is the only Riot Squad videographer who is not either employed by a conservative news site or openly right-wing. But before he started filming protests, Gutenschwager traveled the country as something of a Donald Trump groupie, attending at least 24 Trump rallies before the 2018 midterms and describing them as “exhilarating” on his video blog.

Gutenschwager’s footage of left-wing protesters behaving badly has earned him invitations from Ingraham to appear on Fox News, but he promises fans of his Twitter feed who provide financial support that they can rely on him to report “the unbiased truth from the ground.” He also sells his footage through the news agency Storyful, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., but licenses video from social media video to broadcasters across the political spectrum.

Even so, Gutenschwager’s video of mayhem at left-wing protests is frequently used by right-wing outlets and meme creators to smear demonstrators.

For instance, when Gutenschwager got viral video of a left-wing protester being set on fire by a Molotov cocktail in Portland last summer, it quickly turned into a right-wing meme mocking the protester’s pain and was retweeted by Trump’s social media caddy, Dan Scavino.

Image
Brendan Gutenschwager
@BGOnTheScene
A man just got lit on fire. Chaotic night in Portland already #PortlandRiots #Portland
10:18 PM Sep 5, 2020 from Portland, OR


Image
Dan Scavino
@DanScavino
Peaceful protesters in SE Portland this evening...
Dan Scavino @DanScavino
twitter.com/TeamTrump/stat...
11:20 PM Sep 5, 2020


Who Rented the U-Haul in Louisville?

When the Riot Squad rolled in to Louisville, Kentucky, in September to cover protests over the decision to not charge the police officer who shot Breonna Taylor with killing her, Gutenschwager was alongside Talcott and Rosas.

All three recorded a scene that quickly became the focus of huge attention on the right: protesters picking up banners and shields from a rented U-Haul truck.

Image
Brendan Gutenschwager
@BGOnTheScene
Unloading the riot shields from the Uhaul #Louisville #BreonnaTaylor
11:03 AM Sept 23, 2020 from Louisville, KY


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Shelby Talcott @ShelbyTalcott Sep 23, 2020
Replying to @ShelbyTalcott
The Crowd just exited the blocked off potion of downtown and have taken over an intersection. Cars are being told to turn around.
The charges are a Class D felony in KY. 1-5 year sentence max, I'm told by a lawyer:
Shelby Talcott
@ShelbyTalcott
A parked U-Haul was waiting for the crowd up the street. It contains supplies such as signs, shields, water etc. I'm not sure how people knew what it contained. Police are up ahead
11:03 AM Sep 23, 2020


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Julio Rosas @Julio_Rosas11 Sep 23, 2020
Replying to @Julio_Rosas11
As the BLM crowd chanted, "If we didn't get it, burn it down!" they have marched outside the barricaded zone in Louisville and have shut down traffic in an intersection.
Julio Rosas
@Julio_Rosas11
While the BLM crowd was marching in Louisville, a U Haul truck pulled up with shields and supplies for the group to use.
11:05 AM Sep 23, 2020


The fact that left-wing protesters prepare to demonstrate should hardly be surprising, but the Riot Squad video of the U-Haul reignited baseless right-wing conspiracy theories that Black Lives Matter protesters must be secretly employed by George Soros.

As the three video clips racked up more than 11 million total views on Twitter and flooded conservative networks, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ingraham all demanded to know who had rented the truck — as if only a billionaire could afford a U-Haul.

“Video Evidence Does Not Lie”

Speaking to Glenn Beck after Rittenhouse killed two protesters in Kenosha, Schaffer scoffed at the notion that the Riot Squad’s reporting was biased and complained that Twitter, in its breaking news section, had featured reports from national newspapers whose writers did not witness the shootings instead of the conservative video journalists who did.

“The people who were there, I would say this: Even if you don’t like their commentary, video evidence does not lie,” Schaffer said. Referring by name to Ventura, Rosas, Talcott, McGinniss, D’Almeida, and Hernandez, Schaffer told Beck that this group of people was “just eager to show America what is actually happening.”

Schaffer, who was caught distorting video of the news event he witnessed in Dallas, was not the ideal spokesperson for the argument that the personal politics of a video journalist should be ignored. But it is true that several of the Riot Squad reporters are not as overtly partisan as Schaffer, D’Almeida, or Hernandez.

McGinniss, who appeared in a reality show about the 2016 election as an undecided voter, worked for the far-right pundit Mark Levin but says he campaigned for Obama in 2008. Talcott denounced the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a riot, and wrote on Instagram last June that she had witnessed “incredible scenes of moving, peaceful protests as well as violent anarchy” while “reporting on a historic #BlackLivesMatter milestone.” Then again, she also spoke at the far-right Conservative Political Action Conference this year, in conversation with Rosas.

And while Gutenschwager once complained of anti-Trump comments in an official New York University publication after he dropped out of the school, his video of the Proud Boys burning a Black Lives Matter banner they stole from the Asbury United Methodist Church was even featured in an impassioned denunciation of the attack on the Black church from Chris Hayes on MSNBC.

But Joan Donovan, the media researcher, argues that the way footage of violence and disorder at left-wing protests is used by right-wing news outlets, and consumed by conservative viewers, is more important than the personal views of the journalists who hold the cameras.

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 media’s campaign to portray racial justice protests as anarchic and dangerous.

What’s more, as Donovan wrote last summer, viewing what she calls “riot porn” often “enrages and traumatizes” those who watch it. Being bombarded with viral videos of violence at left-wing protests might even have motivated some reactionaries to take to the streets, either in anti-anti-fascist fight clubs, like the Proud Boys, or armed militia groups, like the one Rittenhouse joined in Kenosha.

“Fed into a media ecosystem with an established bias toward highlighting violence and rioting, the videos have mobilized white militia and vigilante groups to take up arms against Black Lives Matter and ‘antifa’ protesters,” Donovan wrote. “This feedback circuit has created a self-fulfilling cycle where white vigilantes feel justified in menacing and physically attacking racial justice protesters — and inspire others to do the same.”

Rittenhouse’s legal team made a similar argument in a strange promotional video laying out his claim to have acted in self-defense. The video suggested that his thinking was influenced by episodes of violence at left-wing protests that he’d seen on video.

“Did Kyle Rittenhouse have reason to believe his life was in danger?” the video’s narrator asks at a key moment. That question is answered with a montage of viral videos of violence from earlier in the summer, including D’Almeida’s video of the man being kicked in the face in Portland, Hernandez’s video of a Black woman tackling a white woman just before that incident, and Schaffer’s video of the man being pummeled in Dallas.

The sequence ends with video of Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer who was gunned down by an avowed anti-fascist, Michael Reinoehl, in Portland. But the suggestion that Danielson’s murder might have contributed to Rittenhouse’s fear of left-wing violence is clearly false, since that killing, the first by a self-described anti-fascist in 27 years, took place on August 29, four days after Rittenhouse shot the three protesters in Kenosha, killing two of them.

In other words, even when the Riot Squad videographers accurately record unrest they witness, their selective focus on unrest after police shootings helps conservative outlets demonize Black Lives Matter protesters.

For a textbook example of how this works, look at how the Riot Squad covered a racial justice protest in Philadelphia last October, a week before the election.

Leaving a Peaceful Protest to Film Looting Across Town

Protests erupted in West Philadelphia after a bystander filmed the fatal police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr., a Black man whose family said he was experiencing a mental health crisis.

That night, after the police clashed with protesters in the neighborhood, there was some vandalism and looting, which Wallace’s family forcefully condemned.

The next night, Schaffer, Rosas, Ventura, Talcott, and McGinniss were all on hand to film protesters rallying peacefully at a park in West Philadelphia and then march to a police station. They filmed a tense face-off between protesters and a line of officers outside the station, but since there was no violence, only one of their clips got any traction on social media: video of a woman screaming a racial epithet at the police.

Later that night, there were minor skirmishes in West Philadelphia, but by then the Riot Squad had left the protest and driven across the city to cover a more telegenic scene: the mass looting of a shopping center 10 miles away.

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Jorge Ventura Media
@VenturaReport
BREAKING -- Hundreds of looters break into stores on a strip mall on Aramingo Avenue in #Philadelphia
7:04 PM Oct 27, 2020


As Talcott and Rosas filmed inside a ransacked Five Below discount store there, looters could be heard telling Schaffer to stop recording them and then seen punching him in the mouth.

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Shelby Talcott @Shelby Talcott Oct 27, 2020
Replying to @ShelbyTalcott
This standoff remains tense but not violent in this area -- both sides holding. I've seen police take away one individual, but didn't see what prompted the arrest.
Shelby Talcott
@ShelbyTalcott
Mass looting across the river and @ElijahSchaffer just got beaten up for filming. This is inside the Five Below store. Police are in the same parking lot near the Walmart, but there seems to be too many looters
6:45 PM Oct 27, 2020


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Julio Rosas @Julio_Rosas11 Oct 27, 2020
Replying to @Julio_Rosas11
The BLM crowd marched as close as they could to the Philadelphia Police 18th District. Police in riot gear stopped them from getting closer.
Julio Rosas
@Julio_Rosas11
Stores being looted in Philadelphia while police are guarding the Walmart that was looted earlier.
6:42 PM Oct 27, 2020


That video of Schaffer being assaulted was viewed over 1 million times, as was a clip in which he wrongly identified his assailants as “Black Lives Matter protesters.”

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ELIJAH SCHAFFER @ElijahSchaffer Oct 27, 2020
BREAKING: I was jumped by BLM rioters while they were looting ore than a dozen stores,
Including Wal-Matt, T-Mobile, & 5-below
Though in pain, I didn't stop reporting because
Americans need to see what the corporate media refuses to show
ELIJAH SCHAFFER
@ElijahSchaffer
PHILADELPHIA: This is the footage I was recording when BLM assaulted me.
Other journalists were filming but I was the only white person in the store
I do believe I was targeted for being white as they accused me of being a white supremacist
& did not attack people of color
7:47 PM Oct 27, 2020


“What happened,” Schaffer told viewers, “is I just went into the Five Below to see what was going on with some of the looting, and I was jumped by the Black Lives Matter protesters, who immediately started punching and kicking me.”

In fact, as Talcott later acknowledged in an interview on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the videographers had to drive 30 minutes away from the protest by Wallace’s neighbors, in West Philadelphia, to film at the retail center in another part of the city, where there were no protesters, only looters taking advantage of the overwhelmed police force.

But the viral video of the attack on Schaffer struck a nerve with conservative viewers and helped make the looting in one part of the city, not the peaceful protest in another, the focus of days of misleading, politicized coverage on Fox.

Following Schaffer’s lead, Carlson even referred to the looters in Philadelphia as “more than a thousand BLM activists — Joe Biden voters.”

Embedded With the Pro-Trump Thugs

While their work is mainly used to undermine left-wing protesters, Kenosha isn’t the only place Riot Squad videographers have captured images of right-wing political violence.

After a pro-Trump rally in Washington in December, D’Almeida, Gutenschawger, and Talcott recorded a mob of Proud Boys ripping Black Lives Matter banners from Black churches and trashing or burning them.

Image
Kalen From Scriberr
@FromKalen
This happened right in front of me.
Scriberr News @ScriberrNews
Saturday Dec. 13th, Proud Boys in Washington, DC tore down a Black Lives Matter from the front of Metropolitan African Methodist Church during a late night march through the city.
4:27 AM Dec 14, 2020


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Brendan Gutenschwater
@BGOnTheScene
Proud Boys tear down another Black Lives Matter board from the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church #DC #MarchForTrump #DefendDC @ProudBoys
8:53 PM Dec 12, 2020 from Washington, DC


Image
Shelby Talcott @ShelbyTalcott Dec 12, 2020
Replying to @ShelbyTalcott
Proud Boys sitting outside of Harry's cheer as more members come down the street with a large BLM banner.
Shelby Talcott
@ShelbyTalcott
The Proud Boys and Trump supporters burn the BLM banner while chanting and cheering in downtown DC:
6:55 PM Dec 12, 2020


And on January 6, Gutenschwager’s viral video of Proud Boys member Dominic Pezzola using a stolen police riot shield to break a window and gain entry into the Capitol was one of the iconic images of the day. It was later used to indict Pezzola, and it was screened by the House managers at Trump’s impeachment trial.

Image
Brendan Gutenschwater
@BGOnTheScene
Trump supporters break into the U.S. Capitol Building after storming the police line here in Washington #DC #Trump #DC Rally #BreakingNews
12:39 PM Jan 6, 2020 from Washington, DC


Nearby, Hernandez filmed Trump supporters described as “patriots” attacking the police.

Image
Drew Hernandez
@DrewHLive
DC: Patriots storm the capital of the USA #Tatumreport
11:49 AM Jan 6, 2021


Schaffer tweeted viral footage of police lines being breached and then followed people he called “revolutionaries” into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.

Image
ELIJAH SCHAFFER
@ElijahSchaffer
IMPORTANT: this is exact moment the siege of the Capitol building began as the two men in front ripped down a preliminary barrier & rushed officers who were behind a 2nd barrier
They then encouraged others to follow their lead. Officers appeared to be taken completely off guard
4:46 PM Jan 6, 2021


Image
ELIJAH SCHAFFER
@ElijahSchaffer
IMPORTANT: This is a video I captured inside on of the offices of Nancy Pelosi after dozens of alleged Trump supporters occupied it
It seems that staff left in such a hurry that they forgot to lock the doors because there were not signs of forced entry
Some vandalized it
12:44 PM Jan 7, 2020


Rosas showed Trump cultists battering the doors of the Capitol and then trashing the camera equipment of television crews trying to report on the raid.

Image
Julio Rosas @Julio_Rosas11
Rioter uses a metal barricade to try to break open a Capitol building door.
Julio Rosas
@Julio_Rosas11
Rioters just mobbed camera crews and destroyed their equipment.
2:58 PM Jan 6, 2021


McGinniss ended up scoring a viral hit with a friendly interview of a Trump supporter smoking a joint under the Capitol dome.

Image
Richie McG @RichieMcGinniss Jan 6, 2021
Replying to @RichieMcGinniss
Once the doors were secured, we were pushed back into The Capitol Dome
Richie McG
@RichieMcGinniss
A man lit up a doobie under the Capitol Dome
4:18 PM Jan 6, 2021 from United States Capitol Rotunda


Still, on Fox News and elsewhere inside the conservative media bubble, 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.

Left-Wing Activists Target Riot Squad Video Journalists

While the Riot Squad video journalists are still mostly unknown to people who are not addicted to Fox News, some of their faces have become familiar to left-wing activists. That’s led to the violent suppression of their reporting on more than one occasion in recent months.

At an anti-eviction protest in Detroit in April, several activists tried to stop Gutenschwager from filming, blocking his lens and ordering him to leave. As Gutenschwager objected, one of them, a man wearing a pin with an anti-fascist symbol on it, replied: “Get out of here you fucking Nazi.”

Image
Brendan Gutenschwater
@BGOnTheScene
Just got assaulted attempting to cover an anti-eviction march in Detroit this afternoon. A member of the protest 'security' ran up, grabbed my camera and forced me against a building #Detroit #DetroitProtests
12:05 PM Apr 10, 2021 from Detroit, MI


When Gutenschwager asked what he had done, another activist, who was livestreaming the protest himself, replied: “Dude, you were in the Capitol!”

Image
Brendan Gutenschwager
@BGOnTheScene
Just got assaulted attempting to cover an anti-eviction march in Detroit this afternoon. A member of the protest 'security' ran up, grabbed my camera and forced me against a building #Detroit #DetroitProtests
12:05 PM Apr 10, 2021 from Detroit, MI


Moments later, an activist photographer got in Gutenschwager’s face and told him: “You’re not fucking welcome here.”

Image
Brendan Gutenschwater @BGOnTheScene Apr 10, 2021
Replying to @BGOnTheScene
A man wearing an Antifa pin committed the first assault during the march. Camera stopped a few times while he attempted to steal it. Eventually, others in the group urged him aside to release me from against the building. #Detroit #Antifa #DetroitProtests
Brendan Gutenschwater
@BGOnTheScene
"You're not f***ing welcome here." A man wearing a Press patch then accosts me and tries to force me to leave, as the crowd marched through Greektown in Detroit @Detroit @DetroitProtests
12:25 PM Apr 10, 2021 from Detroit, MI


The left-wing livestreamer then made it plain to his own viewers that he knew Gutenschwager’s work by referring to him, imprecisely, by his Twitter handle. “So this is BGOonTheScene. He’s not welcome here,” the man said, as he filmed Gutenschwager from close range. “He’s not welcome here and he continues to be here, ’cause this guy was in the Capitol building on the 6th.”

According to Gutenschwager, he was then slammed into a barrier by another man, who put him in a chokehold, bloodied his mouth, and hurled his camera over a fence.

Image
Brendan Gutenschwater @BGOnTheScene Apr 10, 2021
Replying to @BGOnTheScene
Was able to capture a brief portion showing the original purpose of today's demonstration, an anti-eviction march. The crowd chanted "Black homes are under attack, tell me what do we do, rise up fight back." #Detroit #DetroitProtests
Brendan Gutenschwager
@BGOnTheScene
A man rammed me against a concrete fence and barricade, bloodying my mouth and elbow as well as putting me in a chokehold while stealing my camera. That was then thrown over a fence, which I eventually was able to retrieve and continue recording #Detroit
12:45 PM Apr 10, 2021 from Detroit, MI


After he retrieved his camera, Gutenschwager was threatened by the activist photographer, who accused him of selling footage to Breitbart that could be used to identify protesters, opening them up to harassment.

There have been similarly troubling scenes at right-wing rallies, where Proud Boys and other militant right-wingers have attacked video journalists they suspect of being left-wing activists.

Image
Zane Sparling @PDXzane Sep 26, 2020
Replying to @PDXzane
Proud Boys waiting in line for Honey Buckets in Portland
Zane Sparling
@PDXzane
Man pushes live-streamer to the ground and kicks him in the face at Proud Boys is rally in Portland
12:58 PM Sep 26, 2020


At a Proud Boys rally in Portland last September, an armed man even told the videographer Ford Fischer, who is suspected by some on the left of harboring right-wing sympathies, “We know that you’re antifa.”

Image
Ford Fischer @FordFischer Sep 26, 2020
Replying to @FordFischer
"Kyle's life matters" says one sign borrowing the Black Lives Matter style/font
Ford Fischer
@FordFischer
Ok, I hate that I have to do this, but here an explainer of what just happened to those who saw some people come up on me earlier.
"We know that you're antifa" claimed armed security for the event, demanding I leave.
2:13 PM Sep 26, 2020 from Portland, OR


Fischer, who was overheard in another videographer’s recording telling the right-wing security guards who wanted him to leave, “I’m, like, very friendly with a lot of people here,” tweeted that he was eventually saved by the Proud Boys’ leader, Enrique Tarrio, who “told them I’m independent and to leave me alone.”

Kalen D’Almeida’s Cover Gets Blown

In this hyperpartisan environment, activists on both the right and the left fear that video will be used against them and are increasingly trying to insist that their events should be documented only by like-minded videographers.

That’s one of the main reasons that so much of the video of the right-wing raid on the Capitol was recorded by people who at least seemed to the participants to be on their side.

Two months before the attack on Gutenschwager, right-wing protesters in Huntington Beach, California, even tried to stop D’Almeida from filming their rally, accusing him of being “antifa” because he was dressed in black and wearing a mask.

The confused face-off amused left-wing activists monitoring a right-wing livestream of the rally in support of Tito Ortiz, a former MMA fighter-turned-city council member who has been leading local conservative resistance to mask-wearing and racial justice protests.

Image
Borrachinha Depot
@FullContactMTWF
At the Tito Ortiz protest, a conservative journalist got accused of being Antifa by other conservatives
9:01 AM Feb 11, 2021


“You’re filming us, and you’re trying to dox us, so why are you doing that? You’re not welcome here,” a rally organizer with a bullhorn told D’Almeida. “How about you leave. We don’t want lying journalists like you. Get out of here, scum.”

D’Almeida, who had spent months posing as a supporter of left-wing protests in order to undermine them, tried to signal to this crowd that he was on their side. “Does anyone want to look me up right now?” he said. “My name’s Kalen D’Almeida, I’m a reporter. I’ve been retweeted by Donald Trump.”

When one right-wing protester asked who D’Almeida worked for, he named the news site he founded with two graduates of a Christian college outside Los Angeles. “Scriberr News,” D’Almeida said. “We’re out of Fountain Valley, we’re nonpartisan.”

“Nonpartisan? What does that mean?” the man with the bullhorn asked skeptically.

In April, D’Almeida ran into more serious trouble when he was recognized by people on the left who are familiar with his work while livestreaming a Black Lives Matter march for Daunte Wright in Los Angeles.

Image
Chad Loder
@chadloder
Right-wing propagandist and Proud Boy simp Kalen D'Almeida tried to infiltrate the Daunte Wright protest in Los Angeles tonight. Looks like it did not go well for him.
11:13 PM Apr 15, 2021


After one protester snatched D’Almedia’s cellphone, video from a left-wing livestreamer showed that other marchers surrounded him and jeered at him to leave. “Nazis go home! Nazis fuck off!” protesters chanted as D’Almeida was surrounded. “Get the fuck out of here you piece of shit!”

D’Almeida was then punched and briefly knocked out, before a female protester intervened. Another undercover right-wing videographer, Tomas Morales, showed that before the woman sent D’Almeida on his way, she scolded him for undermining the protest movement.

“Listen, people are fighting for their fucking lives, this is not a joke. Leave us the fuck alone! Look at my face. I saved you this time,” the woman told D’Almeida.

Image
Tomas Morales
@TomasMorales_iv
Aftermath footage of @FromKalen getting knocked out by BLM/Antifa in Hollywood.
A protestor yells in his face & slaps him (look closely) "I saved you this time"
Police were close to the situation.
2:59 AM Apr 16, 2021


As he rose uneasily to his feet and tried to get his bearings, the woman pushed D’Almeida away. “Get the fuck out of here,” she told him. “’Cause this is your last chance. You’re lucky. Get out of here.”

One left-wing activist suggested later that D’Almeida had brought the attack on himself by acting more like an undercover political operative looking for dirt on the protesters than a truly nonpartisan journalist. “Don’t be a fucking fascist and this shit wouldn’t happen, Kalen,” the activist tweeted at D’Almeida. “Fascism is an extremely poor life choice.”

The next day, left-wing activists in Portland assaulted a well-regarded local video journalist — apparently for failing to accede to demands to “protect” protesters who wanted to conceal their identities from right-wing enemies. In Oakland that night, a left-wing blogger reported that he was harassed by protesters for just having a camera, and witnessed assaults on two other photographers.

Image
Mitch O'Farrell Hates Freedom
@desertborder
Jfc man Oakland black bloc is way too touchy about cameras. Like, I get it, but if people are operating in good faith then maybe try talking to them first before just kicking their ass? Fash propagandists are a different story of course but if it's a friendly journo...
LEFT COAST RIGHT WATCH @LCRWnews
Replying to @LCRWnews
Well I lost 'em. I dunno maybe I should just go home. Yeah fuck this. I saw two people get assaulted not for getting in peoples faces and filming but for just having fucking cameras in their hands... while they just *let* And for fucking what?

9:32 PM Apr 16, 2021


Violence against journalists, even ones operating in bad faith, is inexcusable. Unfortunately, videographers like D’Almeida 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.
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Site Admin
 
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Re: Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt, by Robert Parry

Postby admin » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:29 pm

A Court Ruled Rachel Maddow's Viewers Know She Offers Exaggeration and Opinion, Not Facts
"Maddow’s show is different than a typical news segment where anchors inform viewers about the daily news," an Obama-appointed judge ruled.

by Glenn Greenwald
Jun 22, 2021

Image
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on her program that a court ruled is understood even by her own viewers to offer exaggeration and opinion, not facts

MSNBC's top-rated host Rachel Maddow devoted a segment in 2019 to accusing the right-wing cable outlet One America News (OAN) of being a paid propaganda outlet for the Kremlin. Discussing a Daily Beast article which noted that one OAN reporter was a "Russian national” who was simultaneously writing copy for the Russian-owned outlet Sputnik on a freelance contract, Maddow escalated the allegation greatly into a broad claim about OAN's real identity and purpose: “in this case,” she announced, “the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda."

In response, OAN sued Maddow, MSNBC, and its parent corporation Comcast, Inc. for defamation, alleging that it was demonstrably false that the network, in Maddow's words, “literally is paid Russian propaganda." In an oddly overlooked ruling, an Obama-appointed federal judge, Cynthia Bashant, dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that even Maddow's own audience understands that her show consists of exaggeration, hyperbole, and pure opinion, and therefore would not assume that such outlandish accusations are factually true even when she uses the language of certainty and truth when presenting them (“literally is paid Russian propaganda").

In concluding that Maddow's statement would be understood even by her own viewers as non-factual, the judge emphasized that what Maddow does in general is not present news but rather hyperbole and exploitation of actual news to serve her liberal activism:

On one hand, a viewer who watches news channels tunes in for facts and the goings-on of the world. MSNBC indeed produces news, but this point must be juxtaposed with the fact that Maddow made the allegedly defamatory statement on her own talk show news segment where she is invited and encouraged to share her opinions with her viewers. Maddow does not keep her political views a secret, and therefore, audiences could expect her to use subjective language that comports with her political opinions.

Thus, Maddow’s show is different than a typical news segment where anchors inform viewers about the daily news.
The point of Maddow’s show is for her to provide the news but also to offer her opinions as to that news. Therefore, the Court finds that the medium of the alleged defamatory statement makes it more likely that a reasonable viewer would not conclude that the contested statement implies an assertion of objective fact.


The judge's observations about the specific segment at issue — in which Maddow accused a competitor of being “literally paid Russian propaganda" — was even more damning. Maddow's own viewers, ruled the court, not only expect but desire that she will not provide the news in factual form but will exaggerate and even distort reality in order to shape her opinion-driven analysis (emphasis added):

Viewers expect her to do so, as it is indeed her show, and viewers watch the segment with the understanding that it will contain Maddow’s “personal and subjective views” about the news. See id. Thus, the Court finds that as a part of the totality of the circumstances, the broad context weighs in favor of a finding that the alleged defamatory statement is Maddow’s opinion and exaggeration of the Daily Beast article, and that reasonable viewers would not take the statement as factual. . . .

Here, Maddow had inserted her own colorful commentary into and throughout the segment, laughing, expressing her dismay (i.e., saying “I mean, what?”) and calling the segment a “sparkly story” and one we must “take in stride.” For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context. The context of Maddow’s statement shows reasonable viewers would consider the contested statement to be her opinion. A reasonable viewer would not actually think OAN is paid Russian propaganda, instead, he or she would follow the facts of the Daily Beast article; that OAN and Sputnik share a reporter and both pay this reporter to write articles. Anything beyond this is Maddow’s opinion or her exaggeration of the facts.


In sum, ruled the court, Rachel Maddow is among those “speakers whose statements cannot reasonably be interpreted as allegations of fact.” Despite Maddow's use of the word "literally” to accuse OAN of being a "paid Russian propaganda” outlet, the court dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that, given Maddow's conduct and her audience's awareness of who she is and what she does, “the Court finds that the contested statement is an opinion that cannot serve as the basis for a defamation claim."

What makes this particularly notable and ironic is that a similar argument was made a year later by lawyers for Fox News when defending a segment that appeared on the program of its highest-rated program, Tucker Carlson Tonight. That was part of a lawsuit brought by the former model Karen McDougal, who claimed Carlson slandered her by saying she “extorted” former President Trump by demanding payments in exchange for her silence about an extramarital affair she claimed to have with him.

McDougal's lawsuit was dismissed in September, 2020, by Trump-appointed judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, based on arguments made by Fox's lawyers that were virtually identical to those made by MSNBC's lawyers when defending Maddow.
In particular, the court accepted Fox's arguments that when Carlson used the word “extortion,” he meant it in a colloquial and dramatic sense, and that his viewers would have understood that he was not literally accusing her of a crime but rather offering his own subjective characterizations and opinions, particularly since viewers understand that Carlson offers political commentary:

Fox News first argues that, viewed in context, Mr. Carlson cannot be understood to have been stating facts, but instead that he was delivering an opinion using hyperbole for effect. See Def. Br. at 12-15. Fox News cites to a litany of cases which hold that accusing a person of “extortion” or “blackmail” simply is “rhetorical hyperbole,” incapable of being defamatory. . . .

In particular, accusations of “extortion,” “blackmail,” and related crimes, such as the statements Mr. Carlson made here, are often construed as merely rhetorical hyperbole when they are not accompanied by additional specifics of the actions purportedly constituting the crime. . . . Such accusations of crimes also are unlikely to be defamatory when, as here, they are made in connection with debates on a matter of public or political importance. . . . The context in which the offending statements were made here make it abundantly clear that Mr. Carlson was not accusing Ms. McDougal of actually committing a crime. As a result, his statements are not actionable.


When discussing Carlson's show generally and how viewers understand it, the court used language extremely similar to that invoked to protect Maddow from defamation lawsuits: namely, that Fox viewers understand that Carlson is, in addition to presenting news, offering his own subjective analysis of it:

In light of this precedent and the context of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the Court finds that Mr. Carlson’s invocation of “extortion” against Ms. McDougal is nonactionable hyperbole, intended to frame the debate in the guest commentator segment that followed Mr. Carlson’s soliloquy. As Defendant notes, Mr. Carlson himself aims to “challenge[] political correctness and media bias.” Def. Br. at 14. This “general tenor” of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not “stating actual facts” about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.”

Fox News has convincingly argued that Mr. Carlson was motivated to speak about a timely political cause and that, in this context, it is clear that his charge of “extortion” should not be interpreted as an accusation of an actual crime. Plaintiff’s interpretation of Mr. Carlson’s accusations is strained and, the Court finds, not reasonable when the entire segment is viewed in context. It is true that Mr. Carlson added color to his unsubstantiated rhetorical claim of extortion when he narrated that Ms. McDougal “approached” Mr. Trump and threatened his career and family. See Am. Compl. ¶ 10. But this overheated rhetoric is precisely the kind of pitched commentary that one expects when tuning in to talk shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight, with pundits debating the latest political controversies.


This is worth noting because of how often, and how dishonestly, this court case regarding Carlson is cited to claim that even Fox itself admits that its host is a liar who cannot be trusted. This court ruling has become a very common argument used by liberals to claim that even Fox acknowledges that Carlson lies. Indeed, Maddow's own colleague Chris Hayes — whose MSNBC program is broadcast at the same time as Carlson's and routinely attracts less than 1/3 of the Fox host's audience — has repeatedly cited this court case to argue that even Fox admits Carlson is a liar, without bothering to note that his companies’ lawyers made exactly the same claims about his mentor, Rachel Maddow, to defend her from a defamation lawsuit:

Twitter avatar for @chrislhayes
Chris Hayes
@chrislhayes
Similar to Fox News’ defense in court of Tucker Carlson: these people are obviously bullshit artists who no one should trust.

Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney
JUST IN: Chief of staff MEADOWS tells a court that Trump didn't mean it when he said he was ordering the declassification of all Russia-probe documents.
Trump was just referring to his delegation of declassification authority to AG Barr, Meadows says. https://t.co/jBAjKXWEAc
October 20th 2020
568 Retweets2,106 Likes


This claim — even Fox admits that Carlson is a liar who cannot be believed! — has become such a common trope among liberals that it is impossible to count how many times I have heard it. And that is because the liberal sector of the corporate media blared this claim in headlines over and over after the lawsuit against Fox was dismissed.

Image
-- You Literally Can't Believe the Facts Tucker Carlson Tells You. So Say Fox's Lawyers, by David Folkenflik, 9/29/20, NPR

-- Fox News won a court case by 'persuasively' arguing that no 'reasonable viewer' takes Tucker Carlson seriously, by Sonam Sheth, 9/25/20, Washington Post

-- Judge Rules Tucker Carlson is Not a Credible Source of News, by Elliot Hannon, 9/25/20, The Slatest

-- Sidney Powell's Tucker Carlson-esque defense: 'Reasonable people' wouldn't take her wild voter-fraud claims as fact, Except lots of Trump supporters clearly did, by Aaron Blake, 3/23/21, The Washington Post


It is virtually impossible to find similar headlines about Maddow even though the judicial rationale justifying dismissal of the lawsuit against her was virtually identical to the one used in Carlson's case. Indeed, lawyers for MSNBC and Fox cited most of the same legal precedent to defend their stars and to insist that their statements could not be actionable as defamation because viewers understood it as opinion rather than fact.

I personally agree with the rationale cited in both cases: it becomes dangerous when defamation claims are used to punish or otherwise forbid the expression of political opinion. And of course it is the job of lawyers to mount every possible argument when defending a client, which is why both MSNBC and Fox's lawyers essentially insisted that viewers of these programs understand that they are not being presented with objective truth and neutral news but political and subjective commentary. That is what made these widespread attempts to weaponize the ruling in Carlson's case so preposterous.

Indeed, it was Maddow's statement — that OAN is "literally paid Russian propaganda”— that seems far more actionable than Carlson's obviously figurative assertion that McDougal was "extorting” Trump. Falsely accusing people of being paid Kremlin agents has a long and ugly history in the U.S., having destroyed reputations and careers, yet this smear has once again become utterly commonplace in Democratic Party politics (a protracted and ugly feud among liberal commentators was initiated earlier this month when The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur baselessly and falsely claimed that journalist Aaron Maté was "paid by the Russians”).

But whatever else is true, those who want to claim that this court ruling proves Carlson is a lying propagandist who cannot be trusted have no way out of applying the same claim to Maddow. In both cases, it would be unfair and irrational to use these court rulings to suggest that, given that the arguments made were standard ones lawyers advance to defend a defamation defendant. Ironically, those most guilty of being unreliable liars and propagandists are those in the media and even Maddow's own MSNBC colleagues who repeatedly cite this court ruling to delegitimize Carlson without ever mentioning that Maddow’s lawyers successfully used the same arguments in her defense.
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Re: Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt, by Robert Parry

Postby admin » Mon Oct 25, 2021 11:54 am

In Just 21 Days, Facebook Led New India User to Porn, Fake News
by Saritha Rai
Bloomberg
Sat, October 23, 2021, 4:36 PM·6 min read

(Bloomberg) -- In February 2019, Facebook Inc. set up a test account in India to determine how its own algorithms affect what people see in one of its fastest growing and most important overseas markets. The results stunned the company’s own staff.

Within three weeks, the new user’s feed turned into a maelstrom of fake news and incendiary images. There were graphic photos of beheadings, doctored images of India air strikes against Pakistan and jingoistic scenes of violence. One group for “things that make you laugh” included fake news of 300 terrorists who died in a bombing in Pakistan.

“I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past 3 weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” one staffer wrote, according to a 46-page research note that’s among the trove of documents released by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

The test proved telling because it was designed to focus exclusively on Facebook’s role in recommending content. The trial account used the profile of a 21-year-old woman living in the western India city of Jaipur and hailing from Hyderabad. The user only followed pages or groups recommended by Facebook or encountered through those recommendations. The experience was termed an “integrity nightmare,” by the author of the research note.

While Haugen’s disclosures have painted a damning picture of Facebook’s role in spreading harmful content in the U.S., the India experiment suggests that the company’s influence globally could be even worse. Most of the money Facebook spends on content moderation is focused on English-language media in countries like the U.S.

But the company’s growth largely comes from countries like India, Indonesia and Brazil, where it has struggled to hire people with the language skills to impose even basic oversight. The challenge is particularly acute in India, a country of 1.3 billion people with 22 official languages. Facebook has tended to outsource oversight for content on its platform to contractors from companies like Accenture.

"We’ve invested significantly in technology to find hate speech in various languages, including Hindi and Bengali,” a Facebook spokeswoman said. “As a result, we’ve reduced the amount of hate speech that people see by half this year. Today, it’s down to 0.05 percent. Hate speech against marginalized groups, including Muslims, is on the rise globally. So we are improving enforcement and are committed to updating our policies as hate speech evolves online."

The new user test account was created on Feb. 4, 2019 during a research team’s trip to India, according to the report. Facebook is a “pretty empty place” without friends, the researchers wrote, with only the company’s Watch and Live tabs suggesting things to look at.

“The quality of this content is... not ideal,” the report said. When the video service Watch doesn’t know what a user wants, “it seems to recommend a bunch of softcore porn,” followed by a frowning emoticon.

The experiment began to turn dark on Feb. 11, as the test user started to explore content recommended by Facebook, including posts that were popular across the social network. She began with benign sites, including the official page of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and BBC News India.

Then on Feb. 14, a terror attack in Pulwama in the politically sensitive Kashmir state killed 40 Indian security personnel and injured dozens more. The Indian government attributed the strike to a Pakistan terrorist group. Soon the tester’s feed turned into a barrage of anti-Pakistan hate speech, including images of a beheading and a graphic showing preparations to incinerate a group of Pakistanis.

There were also nationalist messages, exaggerated claims about India’s air strikes in Pakistan, fake photos of bomb explosions and a doctored photo that purported to show a newly-married army man killed in the attack who’d been preparing to return to his family.


Many of the hate-filled posts were in Hindi, the country’s national language, escaping the regular content moderation controls at the social network. In India, people use a dozen or more regional variations of Hindi alone. Many people use a blend of English and Indian languages, making it almost impossible for an algorithm to sift through the colloquial jumble. A human content moderator would need to speak several languages to sieve out toxic content.

“After 12 days, 12 planes attacked Pakistan,” one post exulted. Another, again in Hindi, claimed as “Hot News” the death of 300 terrorists in a bomb explosion in Pakistan. The name of the group sharing the news was “Laughing and things that make you laugh.” Some posts containing fake photos of a napalm bomb claimed to be India’s air attack on Pakistan reveled, “300 dogs died. Now say long live India, death to Pakistan.”

The report -- entitled “An Indian test user’s descent into a sea of polarizing, nationalist messages” -- makes clear how little control Facebook has in one of its most important markets.
The Menlo Park, California-based technology giant has anointed India as a key growth market, and used it as a test bed for new products. Last year, Facebook spent nearly $6 billion on a partnership with Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in Asia, who leads the Reliance conglomerate. “This exploratory effort of one hypothetical test account inspired deeper, more rigorous analysis of our recommendation systems, and contributed to product changes to improve them,” the Facebook spokeswoman said. “Our work on curbing hate speech continues and we have further strengthened our hate classifiers, to include four Indian languages."

But the company has also repeatedly tangled with the Indian government over its practices there. New regulations require that Facebook and other social media companies identify individuals responsible for their online content -- making them accountable to the government. Facebook and Twitter Inc. have fought back against the rules. On Facebook’s WhatsApp platform, viral fake messages circulated about child kidnapping gangs, leading to dozens of lynchings across the country beginning in the summer of 2017, further enraging users, the courts and the government.

The Facebook report ends by acknowledging its own recommendations led the test user account to become “filled with polarizing and graphic content, hate speech and misinformation.” It sounded a hopeful note that the experience “can serve as a starting point for conversations around understanding and mitigating integrity harms” from its recommendations in markets beyond the U.S.

“Could we as a company have an extra responsibility for preventing integrity harms that result from recommended content?,” the tester asked.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
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Re: Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt, by Robert Parry

Postby admin » Tue Jun 07, 2022 7:44 pm

"The Typhoid Mary of Disinformation": Nicolle Wallace. Nobody Spreads it More Relentlessly. From her days as Bush/Cheney propagandist, to her stint on The View, to her role as beloved-by-Democrats MSNBC host, Wallace has perfected the art of sociopathic lying.
by Glenn Greenwald
May 19, 2022


Full Video


Trailer
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Re: Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt, by Robert Parry

Postby admin » Fri Dec 09, 2022 11:27 pm

MSN Fired Its Human Journalists and Replaced Them With AI That Publishes Fake News About Mermaids and Bigfoot
by Frank Landymore
Futurism
December 2, 2022

Earlier this month, we reported that the Microsoft-operated news site MSN had run a clearly bogus story claiming that Claire "Grimes" Boucher had publicly called out ex-boyfriend Elon Musk on Twitter for not paying child support. The tweet the story based its claims off was an obvious fabrication, but that didn't stop the Inquisitr from publishing it, or MSN from distributing it to a much wider audience.

It turns out that was only the tip of the iceberg in MSN's sloppy propagation of patently fake news.

Take its affinity for Exemplore, a hokey paranormal and conspiracy news site that peddles tales of cryptids, signs of Atlantis, and magical crystals. Here are a few recent — and clearly preposterous — Exemplore articles that MSN has syndicated to its vast readership:

-"Fishermen Catch Mermaid Creature in Their Nets"

-"Woman Films Bigfoot Jumping Out of a Tree in California"

-"Party Stops as Giant UFO Flies Directly Over It"

-"Mars Rover Appears to Catch 'Dark Beast' Roaming the Surface of Mars"

-"Someone Swears They Caught a Biblically Accurate Angel Floating in the Sky Over LA"

Needless to say, if any of these stories were remotely credible, they'd have completely upended the scientific establishment. Instead, the source material for each of these sensational headlines is invariably a grainy and unconvincing video that does nothing to convince us that mermaids, bigfoot, angels, or aliens are real.

While Exemplore's headlines on MSN are blatantly ridiculous, others, like the Grimes story, are more insidious in their plausibility. A cursory examination of the MSN comments section under Grimes-Musk affair shows that many readers were easily fooled.

Futurism reached out to MSN for comment regarding both the Grimes story and the many Exemplore stories and received no response. After we published this story, MSN deleted all the hoax articles — but without a retraction note or anything else documenting the removal.

Is it Exemplore's right to run clickbait garbage? Sure, and maybe its readers have fun suspending their disbelief, like the readers of supermarket tabloids in decades past. Believing in bigfoot isn't exactly harmful, although it probably does indicate a weaker-than-average grasp on reality.

But there's no excuse for MSN, a media giant with the extraordinary resources of Microsoft behind it, to be amplifying — and monetizing — this ridiculous and inaccurate content. Its audience is vast, with the analytics service Similarweb estimating that it attracts nearly a billion readers per month.

Furthermore, MSN wields enormous SEO power that pushes its content to the top of search results, oftentimes superseding the original publication. If by happenstance a reader Googles something that resembles one of MSN's many fake headlines, a search engine will return MSN's republication of a story while sometimes omitting the original, lending it undue credibility.

Many in that immense audience will see lazy and false stories by Exemplore, the Inquisitr and other bottom-tier publishers alongside other legitimate outlets syndicated by MSN, like Bloomberg, The New York Times, and The Daily Beast. The effect, inevitably, undermines the good work done by hardworking and ethical publishers, rewards the nonsense published by low quality content farms, and undermines the public's faith in science and tech journalism.

As such, MSN's seemingly nonexistent editorial standards illustrate the perils of the contemporary media industry. In particular, recent years have seen Microsoft embrace an increasingly callous and cynical strategy toward the site: in 2020, for instance, it gutted MSN by firing dozens of workers, including journalists, editors, and other production staff, vowing to replace them with automated systems instead.

"I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am," one fired MSN staffer told The Guardian at the time. "AI has taken my job."

That anonymous staffer imparted a prescient warning: that though the human team had employed close editorial guidelines to vet the material that appeared on MSN's site, the new automated system would likely struggle to bring the same level of nuance and skepticism.

MSN makes lofty promises that there's still "human oversight" over the stories it syndicates, but given the desultory deluge of fake nonsense it appears to run constantly, it seems very unlikely that the site's remaining skeleton crew is accomplishing much at all.

And with its dwindling human staff, fewer still are left to hear readers' concerns, effectively erecting a brick wall that imposes a worrying opacity. Requests for comments go unanswered, and MSN publishes more bogus stories all the time.

Microsoft's end goal, it seems, was to automate its news distribution system, while cutting costs in the process. To that end, Microsoft may have been successful, but in the process has poisoned the well of a news reading public.

That would be worrying at any widely read news aggregator. But MSN isn't just popular; it's the default source of news for many Windows users. Open a new tab on Microsoft's Edge browser and it lands you on an MSN hub. And if you still use Internet Explorer for some reason, MSN is the default home page of that, too. Hell, even the Windows Start Menu will show you its articles. It's even hooked into competitors' systems, picking up untold new pageviews on Google News.

In sum? It's yet another cautionary tale about the growing corporate hunger to offload decision making to flawed AI systems that eliminate important jobs, exercise poor judgment with little oversight, and generally make society worse for the humans still living in it.
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Re: Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt, by Robert Parry

Postby admin » Wed Oct 09, 2024 7:31 pm

Meet the Head of Biden’s New “Disinformation Governing Board”. Nina Jankowicz is a veteran information warrior. But her “experience” working with StopFake should have set off alarm bells.
by Lev Golinkin
The Nation
May 12, 2022
https://www.thenation.com/article/polit ... ing-board/



Image
Official portrait of Nina Jankowicz as executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board.
(UHS)


Late last month, the Joe Biden administration publicly confirmed that a “Disinformation Governing Board” working group had been created within the Department of Homeland Security. The news prompted a flood of concern about the impact of such an Orwellian organ on America.

But there’s no need to engage in hypotheticals to understand the dangers. One has to only consider the past of Nina Jankowicz, the head of the new disinformation board.

Jankowicz’s experience as a disinformation warrior includes her work with StopFake, a US government-funded “anti-disinformation” organization founded in March 2014 and lauded as a model of how to combat Kremlin lies. Four years later, StopFake began aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence, including war crimes.

Today, StopFake is an official Facebook fact-checking partner, which gives it the power to censor news, while Jankowicz is America’s disinformation czar.

If the Biden administration is serious about combating threats such as white supremacy, perhaps it should first reflect on the old Roman question: Who will guard the guardians?

StopFake was founded right after Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan uprising ousted the country’s president and swept a new, US-backed government into power. Formed by professors and students from the Kyiv Mohyla Journalism School, StopFake presented itself as a plucky, grassroots group wielding hard facts and semi-permanent smirks as it shredded Russian propaganda. It gained notoriety by producing slick videos hosted by dynamic disinformation warriors debunking the Moscow lies of the day.

Western reporters—and checkbooks—were paying attention. Shortly after its creation, StopFake began receiving funding from Western governments, including the National Endowment for Democracy—an organization mainly funded by the US Congress—and the British embassy in Ukraine. It was also supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. (StopFake has run numerous episodes that cover Soros but fail to disclose this potential conflict of interest—a violation of basic tenets of journalism.)

Among StopFake’s hosts was Jankowicz, a graduate of Bryn Mawr and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service who was already part of the burgeoning disinformation warrior industry while in Ukraine as a Fulbright Clinton Public Policy Fellow. On January 29, 2017, she hosted StopFake Episode 117, whose lead story dealt with a perennial obsession of Russian propaganda: Ukraine’s volunteer battalions.

These are the dozens of paramilitaries formed in 2014 to fight against Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region. From the beginning, Moscow focused on the violent and far-right nature of many of these units.

At the time of Jankowicz’s piece, the Russian press was bristling at Kyiv’s creating a new holiday to honor military volunteers—Moscow commentators depicted this as a celebration of far-right butchers. Jankowicz offered an emphatically different take.

“Volunteer battalions organized throughout the country and they supported weak Ukrainian armed forces and prevented further Russian separatist encroachment. Today the volunteer battalions are part of the official Ukrainian armed forces, overseen by the Defense and Interior Ministries,” she said in her StopFake debunking segment.

“The volunteer movement in Ukraine extends far beyond military service. Volunteer groups are active in supporting Ukraine’s military with food, clothing, medicine, and post-battle rehabilitation, as well as working actively with the nearly two million internal refugees displaced by the war in Ukraine,” she added.

While Janowicz extolled the battalions, an on-screen graphic displayed patches of four paramilitaries: Aidar, Dnipro-1, Donbas, and Azov. All four have a documented record of war crimes, while Azov is an outright neo-Nazi group.

On September 10, 2014, three years before Jankowicz’s warm portrayal of volunteer battalions, Newsweek ran an article titled “Ukrainian Nationalist Volunteers Committing ‘ISIS-style’ War Crimes.” The story, which covered a report by Amnesty International, featured Aidar, one of the battalions lauded in Jankowicz’s segment. According to Amnesty, Aidar fighters amassed a record of “widespread abuses,” ranging from kidnapping and torture to “possible executions.”

Three months later, Amnesty issued an urgent report about Aidar and Dnipro-1—another paramilitary featured in Jankowicz’s segment—blocking food from eastern Ukrainian towns and villages. “Using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime,” Amnesty stated.

(Of course, almost every war crime charged against one side in this conflict has also been charged against the other; Russia has reportedly recently been blocking food in its siege of Mariupol.)

The Donbas Battalion—the third paramilitary in Jankowicz’s segment—is another unit notorious for torture, as documented by the UN, among others. The fourth group, Azov, not only has its own history of war crimes, but is avowedly neo-Nazi; indeed, the Azov patch shown in Jankowicz’s video has a stylized Wolfsangel (the “N” with the sword)—a popular white supremacist rune used by groups like Aryan Nations.

Azov—which is now a premier hub of transnational white supremacy—has been extensively covered by Western media outlets, including by me in The Nation. Its nature was well known by the time of Jankowicz’s 2017 StopFake video. (In a 2020 book, Jankowicz briefly acknowledged Azov is a “far-right group,” but immediately pivoted to portraying them as victims of a Russian hoax.)

During Jankowicz’s tenure with StopFake (her last known episode aired May 21, 2017), the disinformation site continued being touted as a pioneer in combating Russian propaganda. In March 2017, a fawning Politico story heralded StopFake as the “grand wizards” of the anti-fake news ecosystem. It was an ironically prophetic description, given that Jankowicz’s misleading “nothing to see here” report about the battalions turned out to be a mere fraction of what StopFake has done for Ukraine’s far right.

By 2018, StopFake started defending C14, a neo-Nazi gang that conducted horrific pogroms of Ukraine’s Roma. After media outlet Hromadske described C14 as neo-Nazi, one of StopFake’s founders tweeted “for Hromadske, C14 is ‘neo-Nazi,’ in reality one of them—Oleksandr Voitko—is a war veteran and before going to the war—alum and faculty at @MohylaJSchool, journalist at Foreign news desk at Channel 5. Now also active participant of war veterans grass-root organization,” as if the fact that the gang has a veteran somehow precludes it from being neo-Nazi.

In 2020, StopFake defended C14 in a press release. The same year, news broke that C14 was aiding Kyiv police in enforcing Covid quarantine measures; StopFake labeled this fake news, denying C14 is far-right, describing it as a “community organization” instead, and citing C14’s own denial of carrying out anti-Roma pogroms as “evidence” of its innocence.

In reality, C14’s ties to Ukrainian authorities have been verified by Radio Free Europe (US government–run media), among others. By now, even the US State Department classifies C14 as a “nationalist hate group.”

StopFake has also continued defending the Azov Battalion. Last month, StopFake tweeted that the unit—which was formed out of a neo-Nazi gang, uses two neo-Nazi symbols on its insignia, and has been documented as neo-Nazi by numerous Western outlets—“doesn’t profess #Nazi views as official ideology,” labeling stories about Azov and neo-Nazism as fake news.

This is particularly disturbing because in February, Facebook reversed its ban on praising Azov. Facebook had previously banned the Azov battalion’s account as well as posts celebrating the neo-Nazi organization. The reversal is stunning, given the platform’s professed commitment to combating far-right extremism.

It’s unclear whether StopFake played a role in Facebook’s decision to lift its Azov ban, but considering StopFake is Facebook’s official fact-checking partner, it’s hard to believe the group’s track record of whitewashing Azov wasn’t a factor.

The “grand wizards” of battling fake news have even dabbled with Holocaust distortion, downplaying WWII-era paramilitaries who slaughtered Jews as mere “historic figures” and Ukrainian nationalist leaders, while attacking members of the US Congress who had denounced Ukraine’s glorification of Nazi collaborators.

Astonishingly, when Jankowicz herself was quoted in a July 2020 New York Times story about StopFake’s going off the rails, the article failed to disclose the fact that the disinformation expert being quoted used to work with the group.

Painting neo-Nazi paramilitaries with an extensive record of war crimes as patriots helping refugees, all while working with a “disinformation” group that turned out to run interference for violent neo-Nazi formations—that’s the experience Biden’s new disinformation czar brings to the table.
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Re: Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt, by Robert Parry

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2024 10:45 pm

Israeli Soccer Attacks: Amsterdam Photographer on What Really Happened
by Mehdi Hasan
Zeteo
Nov 12, 2024 #maccabitelaviv #israel #amsterdam

“They told the opposite of what happened in that footage.”

Photographer Annet de Graaf captured the Israeli Maccabi soccer fan violence in Amsterdam. In her first interview with US media, she tells Mehdi Hasan that outlets like Sky News, the New York Times, BBC, and CNN misused her footage and twisted the narrative to frame the Maccabi fans as victims of antisemitic attacks and overlook the anti-Arab racism that fueled the clash.



Transcript

[Mehdi Hasan] violence erupted in Amsterdam this
weekend when what started as a soccer
match between makabi t Aviv and aax
devolved into violent chaos across the
city headlines poured in about
anti-semitic attacks in Amsterdam but
these stories largely overlooked on
camera blatant anti-arab racism from
makabi supporters well beforehand and
yet it was barely a footnote in the
coverage despite the fact that footage
showed macabi supporters chanting racist
and genocidal slogans like death to the
Arabs and the IDF win they were seen
throwing stones and planks of wood at
police after the match Dutch officials
also confirmed that fans attacked a taxi
driver and burned the Palestinian flag
Sky News in the UK posted a video
detailing these attacks noting that
makabi fans are quote notorious for
their racism and physical violence
however that video was quickly deleted
and the network stated that the original
version failed to meet their standards
for balance and impartiality whatever
that means footage taken by Dutch
photographer Anette degraph was used in
both versions of the sky video showing
makabi fans attacking a Dutch resident
media Outlets like CNN the BBC the New
York Times also used or misused the very
same video twisting The Narrative to
suggest that macabi fans were the ones
being attacked we saw headlines about
pogroms and world leaders denouncing
anti-Semitism in Amsterdam as if these
Hooligans were just minding their own
business as if this was an attack not on
Israeli soccer hooligans but on all
Dutch Jews it wasn't the graph has
called On Media Outlets to apologize
stating that journalism is about finding
truth not about making money on a Twist
of the script and I couldn't have said
it better myself look no one is
disputing that there were also reports
of anti-Semitism of a person for example
calling for a Jew hunt which is
outrageous and should be condemned all
violence on all sides should be
condemned but the media's onesided
coverage painting macabi fans these
well-known racist soccer hooligans
chanting genocide and anti-arab slogans
painting them as the innocent victims
has once again proven that our media and
our political class deem the suffering
of Israelis to be more important than
the suffering of Arabs the attacks in
Amsterdam didn't occur in a vacuum and
this Erasure of responsibility this
cuddling of the Israeli farri right this
misuse of words like anti-Semitism and
pogram and this blatant media bias make
the racist violence we saw in Amsterdam
more more likely not less likely to
happen again joining me now is Annette
degraph who captured the events in
Amsterdam she's a renowned iPhone
photographer who's even photographed Tim
Cook H Annette thank you so much for
joining me on Med unfiltered you were on
the streets of Amsterdam as this chaos
took place can you tell us what you saw
and how the events
unfolded yes of course uh I was there
already at 6 o' before the game and um
that was uh well after some incidents
Dom square and uh it was pretty quiet so
the police guided the the supporters to
the Central Station and afterwards I was
thinking like okay let's go back at 11:
so 11:15 I was
there uh waiting and uh two groups of
supporters came one that directly from
Central Station where they also uh left
for the game and the other group was uh
approaching me on the right
side and um there you know I tend
uh how do you say some sort of
aggression they were definitely up to
something so I thought like uh better
watch to watch out uh what are they
doing you know and then uh they went uh
straight
to Dom square and when they were at Dak
that's the street uh between Central
Station and um Dom Square they lit
heavily
fireworks and it was a group of maybe
like 50 people and they went
away and they gathered in front of the
Victoria Hotel and these are makabi fans
you're referring to yes makabi
supporters uh so in your view these
people were behaving violently they
weren't just minding their own business
innocence no not at all what was your
reaction to seeing Outlets like CNN the
New York Times and others using your
footage of what happened but twisting it
to make it look like the macabi fans
were the
victims I was really
surprised I was following the group to
uh the whole route I was there for two
hours when I came back and yeah it was
like a war on uh on Twitter let's say x
and uh people framed my work and of
course uh that's terrible because they
told the opposite of what happened in
that
footage mainstream leading journalist
told the opposite of what happened in
your word Sky News in the UK has been
accused of misrepresenting your footage
as well at first Shing it saying it
showed makabi fans attacking locals maab
fans were seen attacking locals as a
police car can be seen driving by and
then switching it around and just saying
a large group of hooded men striking
people at random a video posted on
social media shows a large group of
hooded men dressed in black running down
the street and striking people at random
what do you make of that and was your
footage muge by Sky and
others yes so um they invite me to a
live show on Friday night that was uh 30
P 9 and uh I was I really had the
feeling that I was in a live show later
on I asked Sky News uh can I have a link
to the to the episode and they said oh
yeah we find it I never received the
link to the live show then I heard in
some sort of clip that was my voice over
and the second clip that was a clip of
Alice Porter uh they changed the whole
narrative again so yeah I was really
flabber guested you've received one
apology so far from a news organization
that misused your footage have any other
networks taken accountability do you
think they will do you think this will
improve reporting practices going
forward yes uh the first apology I
received was from tager Sha and that
that seemed really cool because first
they did um a
revision uh a rectification and then uh
they also um said uh apologies in a in a
broadcast so that was cool but um yeah
from the other um platforms like BBC
News and um and Sky News I didn't
receive any you know so that is really
frustrating when you see when you see
the president of the United States
putting out a tweet talking about the
victims of anti-Semitism in
Amsterdam and there was anti-Semitism
I'm sure from some of the people there's
been reports of people talking about Jew
hunt and others no one's questioning
that but the idea that the president
United States is tweeting about a group
of people who he makes sound like they
were just minding their own business and
they were attacked for being Jewish
you're saying that you are an eyewitness
who took footage on your phone of these
people
attacking an Arab Taxi Driver attacking
a Palestinian flag attacking locals just
to be clear that's what you saw
yeah it it's shocking it's it's really
shocking it's it's unbelievable I really
think it's very dangerous also for our
city you know we have a city with a with
a large history and
uh I think the the the game
uh I think they didn't have to uh invite
the supporters to our uh City I think
that's a mistake yeah these makabi fans
have a history of saying racist things
and doing outrageous things like they
did at the weekend um you haven't only
faced a misrepresentation of your work
but according to what I saw on social
media you've also dealt with character
assassination people attacking you
personally is that what's been happening
since the
weekend yeah especially the Dutch media
the Dutch right-wing media they are they
are after me right now and uh well I'm
not scared not really because yes I have
the truth of my footage and that's the
only thing you know why are they after
you why do you think they're after
you because the truth is unconvenient
they they want it to be about Arab
Muslim mobs attacking innocent Jews when
it was actually Israeli football
Hooligans and people violently
responding to Violent football
holigans well let me be clear uh I can't
say things about other incidents because
I was not there I was not witnessing
that and it's bad you know what happened
in in in all over is bad uh but the
chaos of course uh existed only by the
presence of the israelian
holigans former Israeli Prime Minister
naftali Bennett and the mayor of
Amsterdam among many others have likened
the violence at the weekend in Amsterdam
to a pogram against the Jewish people
was you filmed a
pogram um
no not at all not at all it's even so
that uh the Amsterdam locals the
Amsterdam youngsters who were
provocative of course they were present
I saw only one Palestinian
flag so of course there was provocation
on one hand to the other but I have
haven't seen a flag in that whole two
hours I was there but what I also
witnessed was uh I got messages uh in my
direct message afterwards from Neighbors
who live there and uh definitely knew
that it were israelian Hooligans banging
on the doors and shouting and they were
very scared I think that's a shame for
my City last question Annette what do
you think happen happens to people's
faith in the media when you're saying
that you saw one thing you photographed
and filmed one thing and some of the
world's biggest media
organizations told their viewers and
listeners the exact
opposite it's going on for years so I'm
not surprised but it's definitely
different when it's your own footage you
know I consume sometimes fake news but
yes I do your own research you know but
when you are the witness of your own
footage and they put it in a totally
different perspective yeah that's very
dangerous and of course I have the
responsibility as a world citizens to do
something about it well Annette We
Appreciate You exercising that
responsibility and speaking out and
correcting all of these major media
organizations on your own and facing
these threats from the Dutch far right
please do stay safe uh thank you for
filming what you filmed and thank you
for coming on May the unfiltered today
you're welcome
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Re: Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt, by Robert Parry

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2024 10:47 pm

Amsterdam riots: what really happened
by ABC News In-depth
Nov 18, 2024 #ABCNewsIndepth #ABCNewsAustralia

What really happened in Amsterdam’s soccer riots between supporters of Ajax Amsterdam and Maccabi Tel Aviv? We look at how the truth got lost in the rush to judgement.



Transcript

Amsterdam riots
first the streets of Amsterdam Vision
reportedly showing Jewish soccer fans
hunted like animals the Dutch have been
shamed and shocked by a Jew hunt by
Muslims in the streets of Amsterdam also
full coverage tonight of the Amsterdam
pgam hello I'm Paul Barry welcome to
Media Watch and there were pograms and
Jew hunts making headlines on Sky News
last week after clashes between Pro
Palestinian protesters and Israeli
soccer fans in Amsterdam and newspaper
leads were almost as frightening with
the Australian declaring planes rush to
save Jews in Amsterdam and the New York
Times telling Americans anti-semitic
attacks prompt emergency flights for
Israeli soccer fans but nowhere was
there more fear and outrage than on Sher
markson's Sky News show on Monday where
she reminded us it was Remembrance Day
and launched into this emotional oration
on this precise day this sacred day the
very values our Allied soldiers
sacrificed their lives for are at grave
risk as Islamic fundamentalists and woke
leftists join forces to weaken western
civilization and to rip away at the
fabric that holds our society together
that is some claim the Dutch politicians
were also ramping it up with Amsterdam
mayor fem Halima saying the attacks on
the fans from makabi Tel Aviv reminded
her of Nazi pogroms and telling the
media
so how many soccer fans were killed or
injured thousands hundreds scores in
fact no one died and as the New York
Times reported after 24 hours five
Israelis who had been hospitalized with
injuries were discharged so not exactly
AOG which is defined as an organized
Massacre
but it wasn't just The Usual Suspects on
Sky who were turning ugly street fights
into Echoes of the Holocaust a video
from the Murdo London son also claimed
Israeli football fans had been hunted by
an anti-semitic mob and had the chairman
of the European Jewish Association
calling it all very shocking but
unfortunately very not surprising it is
already from month after month that we
are calling European authorities to
understand that the level of
anti-Semitism in Europe break its record
every single day the rabbis fears of
rising anti-Semitism are undeniable but
that distressing footage actually showed
Israeli fans doing the hunting as Dutch
photographer Anette degraph who filmed
the Rampage made clear on X at the time
and later told zos Mar Hassan and these
are makabi fans you're referring to yes
makabi supporters that's terrible
because they told the opposite of what
happened in that footage and the New
York times admitted they made the same
mistake removing the video and
Publishing a correction that put the
blame on Reuters who distributed the
footage the videoos author told the New
York Times it shows a group of makabi
fans chasing a man on the street a
description the times independently
confirmed with other verified footage
from the scene but it wasn't just the
Sun and New York Times who got it wrong
on x a number of pro Zionist accounts
had already used the video to spread
their message Muslim mobs in Amsterdam
are hunting news tonight with that
single post viewed over 7 million times
and a host of TV networks were doing the
same including NBC zdf Sky News
Australia the ABC and BBC which used it
in its opening shots for newsight and
its Flagship 10 p.m. bulletin and why
were they all running the same vision
because there was really nothing else
the same rampaging macabi fans were also
captured by 14-year-old Dutch vlogger om
who tagged his YouTube video Israeli
holligans turn Amsterdam upside down and
as New York Times visual investigations
expert Christian trebert noted Bender's
17-minute video showed macabi fans
stealing steel pipes putting on masks
and chasing someone a metal pipe appears
to be thrown at a police vehicle but the
media weren't just guilty of missing
this they ignored or glossed over half
the story the day before the match
against local team ax makabi fans ripped
down and burnt a Palestinian flag while
groups of supporters also beat up a taxi
driver and vandalized several taxes and
on Match Day around 1,000 fans masked in
the city center and let off
flares then March to the stadium
chanting racist anti-arab
[Applause]
chants some meter reports did mention
these provocations but only as an
afterthought with ABC's 7 p.m. news
framing its story like this tensions in
the Middle East spilling onto the
streets of
Amsterdam groups of young men scour the
Dutch capital hunting down Israeli
soccer fans now you know how it feel sir
many are ambushed kicked and beaten
before their attackers flee that ABC
report casts the pro Palestinian news as
hunters and attackers
and the macabi soccer fans as prey even
though once again its key footage showed
the macabi fans doing the hunting and
when it eventually came to describing
the actions of the fans the language of
the report was very different this video
emerged on social media one day earlier
and police say the Israeli football fans
set fire to a Palestinian flag and
attacked a
taxi on their way to the game they
masked on the streets setting off FL
playes chanting let the IDF win and
directing swear words at Arabs
Amsterdam's mayor says it's no excuse
that report was rightly picked apart on
Instagram by Jan Fran host of the ABC's
question everything who noted that the
Israeli fans violence and aggression was
framed as allegations not fact and she
continued they weren't chanting let the
IDF win the full chant was let the IDF
win with will [ __ ] the
Arabs here it
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
is that ABC report which was up for a
week has now been taken offline with the
ABC telling Media Watch after being
informed by the agency Reuters that the
description of the vision was incorrect
the ABC removed the story on Friday
otherwise the story was an accurate
snapshot of the information available at
that time Britain's Sky News offered a
far more balanced version of the clashes
with Alice Porter one of the handful to
use the footage of makabi fans correctly
and concluding her report by saying
Dutch Israeli and British leaders
denounced the attacks as anti-semitic
and even referred to it as a pogram but
their statements failed to mention the
assaults by the Israeli Hooligans
against Dutch citizens but as talk of
Jew hunts and pogroms ramped up Sky News
deleted a tweet about the makabi fans
anti-arab slogans and took down the
report re-editing it with a new strap
line that called the violence
anti-semitic taking out Porter's end
comment and adding a grab from the Dutch
pm to say this is simply anti-semitic
violence against Israelis that actually
defies description and having initially
described the key footage thus McVey
fans were seen attacking locals as a
police car can be seen driving by Sky
got Alice Porter to record new
commentary calling them A large group of
hooded men dressed in black running down
the street and striking people at random
all of which resulted in at least one
complaint to the UK media regulator so
what did go down in Amsterdam and how
should the media have reported it
certainly better than they did because
two angry mobs were involved with
violence on both sides and while
anti-Semitism was an ingredient the
claims of a Nazi pogram were ridiculous
and even Dutch authorities have now
toned down their claims with a
preliminary report blaming a toxic
combination of anti-Semitism hooliganism
and anger about the conflicts in
Palestine and Israel yes it's related to
the war in Gaza but it's also complex
and nuanced unlike much of the reporting
which is almost always one-sided often
wrong and at times hysteric
2GB spears and fears
irle but now to Sydney's top rating
breakfast show and a dramatic scoop that
no one else got wind of wait till you
see this footage out of the top end it's
filmed from a police car and there are
two groups throwing Spears at each other
that is 2gb's Ben forom expressing alarm
over a violent video from the top end
which he posted on X and to avoid
reigniting tensions in the community we
have been asked not to show it one is
HIIT in the shoulder another in the leg
and one in the chest the audio Paints
the picture though with police right in
the thick of
it window up window up that was a spear
hitting the police car the video was
filmed on Groot Island and shot from a
nearby police vehicle with running
commentary from officers in the car oh
in the
lake come your
ass oh
s we got to
go forom called it a terrifying incident
and promis listeners Spears flying in
the Northern Territory some wild footage
there we'll talk to our mate Darren
Clark and who is he Darren Clark is an
Alice Springs local his long campaign
against the crime wave in his town he
posted the spear throwing video on his
action for Alice account on X the day
before and he was busting to tell forom
all about it it's insane to watch that
footage um where people actually in this
day and age are getting speared looked
place the police just wouldn't have got
out of their car then because it's just
too unsafe with Clark then taking aim at
the NT police for keeping the public in
the dark we haven't heard a thing about
that there hasn't been a police media
release up here on that um not a thing
mate um so it just gets kind of covered
up and brushed to the side yes a cover
up scandalous but it doesn't take long
to discover it's not true because there
are at least four media releases from
the police about the spe which are all
available online and they're all dated
November 2015 making forum's amazing
scoop 9 years old yet he told his
listeners I'm going to sound really
naive here Darren but I had no idea that
people were still going to war with
Spears in the top end in
2024 no idea that would be right Ben
even though two men were killed during
the riot as the headlines from 2015 make
clear meantime ENT police had to issue a
new press statement last week to say the
footage was old and contains images and
references to Aboriginal people who have
passed away and it may be distressing to
some viewers particularly to family
members a warning 2GB failed to include
so why did forom and Co assume this had
all just happened simply because nobody
checked with forum's mate Darren Clark
apparently taking the video from an
anonymous Tik Tok account and then
turning up in 2gb's breakfast show the
next day to say my
you can't make it up and and we're in
2024 and we've got this stuff going on
yep you can't make it up on Friday we
asked nine why forom had failed to do
any checks and why the story was still
on the 2GB website given police had
warned two days earlier that it was old
this morning Ben forom responded telling
listeners we accept the correction and
apologize for the mistake the first wi
knew about this was Friday afternoon
when we received a media inquiry we
immedi complely removed the website
article and the social media post
relating to the video and I accept full
responsibility for the mistake good on
him shame they didn't check before
hitting the moral panic button but
Coked up ACT
finally let's spin back more than a year
to this warning on the front page of the
Daily Telegraph Top Cop fears byes users
will flood Australia's C up Capital
sydneys Siders are expected to flock to
canra for drug fueled parties yes the
party capital of Australia canra with
that warning coming from the AFP Deputy
Commissioner after the ACT brought in
Drug law reforms which decriminalized
small amounts of illicit drugs like
cocaine cannabis and Ice which saw
Nine's Today Show also pushing the alarm
button this is not a proposal this is
not a thought this is a thing this is
happening that is heroin that is cocaine
that is ice meanwhile Sky Steve price
was also issuing a warning of his own
camber is now a petri dish of lunatics
it's going to become a drug adult druggy
Central and the Daily Mail was ripping
off the Telly story and warning the ACT
would become a fantasy land of drugs
while embedding an alarming video of
fentanyl addicts in Philadelphia and
claiming there were fears the peaceful
streets could be turned into a cesspool
of criminal activity similar to parts of
the United States where drug adult
zombies roam the Pavements and who
feared that apart from the mail it's
didn't say so 15 months on have these
scary headlines about CRA come true
you'll be shocked to hear they have not
with the ABC hitting the streets at
night to discover well not very much
these volunteers haven't seen any
difference I haven't seen an increase or
decrease in in Behavior there's still
drugs around there's still intoxicated
persons we don't see too many hard drugs
out in the city yes pissed punters but
no drug zombies and that was confirmed
by wi News 12 months on from polarizing
policy the game makers of drug
decriminalization calling it a success
the legislation pushing more at risk
hand bearance to Community Support
facilities which is what it was designed
to do but what about Ray Hadley's claim
that vicious bikes would be turning the
capital into a dangerous drug Den
they're saying to these people who deal
in Murder Mayhem rape and
drugs come to camera
and how has that turned out certainly we
haven't seen a significant change in
Behavior at all so have the scaremongers
in the media who made those shock
predictions had anything to say one year
on not that we could find except this
reverse feret from The Daily Mail which
ran an AAP story which all but confirmed
the original fears were just a beat up
half and puff warnings over drug laws
lack
substance no kidding and we'll be
keeping an eye out for all those media
apologies that we sure must be on their
way that's all from us for tonight you
can read a statement from the ABC on our
website
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