Corporate Media Can’t Defend LA Deportation Riot, So They Downplay And Deny It Instead
When rioters set dozens of cities ablaze in the summer of 2020, corporate media labeled the mayhem “fiery but mostly peaceful.” Now, as part of Los Angeles is under siege at the hands of taxpayer-funded delinquents, the same outlets that shrugged off the billions of dollars in damage caused by Black Lives Matter agitators are pretending the rowdy resistance is no big deal.
The rock throwing, attacks on law enforcement, and reported explosives surrounding a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in the California city over the weekend resulted in dozens of arrests.
Corporate media quickly realized they can’t defend the violence and anti-American symbolism defining the deportation resistance, so they did their best to downplay and even deny it — even as it heats up in areas outside of LA.
CNN, one of the networks with the most egregious coverage of the summer of rage, called the chaos a “lawful protest” with “some unrest.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter spent his weekend onscreen insisting that the Democrats running the blue state were “trying to bring the temperature down, bring the volume down.” Stelter also declared that “the unrest is isolated” and attempts to cover or crush it are about “spectacle” and “theater.”
According to CNN’s Dana Bash, the bedlam that defined the weekend is not “a real riot.” Even if it was, she claimed, the tumult is “under control.”
The New York Times agreed with Bash that “These Immigration Protests Are Different” than the historic 1992 violence that plagued the City of Angels.
One MSNBC reporter pressed Gov. Gavin Newsom over what he suggested might have been a “peaceful protest.”
MSNBC’s John Heilemann joined the dogpile by pretending Newsom was “right” that “there wasn’t anything like a riot happening on Friday or Saturday.”
NPR even took the time to nitpick Trump and alternative media’s accurate reporting on the uproar as a “riot.”
ABC 7 worked overtime during its Sunday night broadcast to paint law enforcement as the perpetrators of a “massive confrontation,” instead of the people “having fun watching cars burn.”
“Most of those demonstrators were very peaceful,” an ABC7 reporter on the ground stressed shortly before admitting they “started attacking the building.”
When President Donald Trump ordered 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell the “violent mobs,” the corporate media’s shrieking grew even louder.
The New York Times ran multiple articles complaining about the decision, including one that dubbed Trump’s swift action as the “Real Emergency.” Another piece claimed “Trump Jumps at the Chance for a Confrontation in California Over Immigration,” which NYT categorized on its website as “news analysis.”
The Atlantic had the audacity to insinuate that Trump’s response to the disorder could be a blueprint to “incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections” and “assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process.”
Corporate media, it seems, have yet to learn anything over the last five years about how their revisionist attempt to paint criminal furor as routine and uneventful disarray fares with Americans who are rapidly losing their trust in newsrooms to report facts.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
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