CNN called the riots ‘lawful protests’ with ‘some unrest.’ An ABC affiliate described rioters as ‘a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn.’
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the media coverage of the immigration riots in Los Angeles and cover more media misses.
Journalists Look the Other Way as L.A. Riots RageAs Los Angeles rioters set fire to cars, injured law enforcement officers, blocked the 101 Freeway, and damaged government vehicles over the weekend, major media outlets flipped back in their playbooks to the “fiery, but mostly peaceful” page.
CNN, which was responsible for the phrase that defined the mainstream media’s coverage of the George Floyd riots in 2020, described Saturday’s rioting in the city as “lawful protests” with “some unrest.”
“So there’s unrest. Let’s start with, there’s protests, lawful protests, which is allowed in this country,” said CNN senior national security analyst Juliette Kayyem. “There is some unrest, generally dealt with by local law enforcement and if there needs to be state support through state police, and sometimes even national guard under a governor’s authority.”
After downplaying rioting in its Saturday evening broadcast, CNN cut away from their riot coverage to air George Clooney’s broadway play about journalism, Good Night, and Good Luck.
Questioning president Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard, MSNBC’s John Heilemann, meanwhile, claimed “there wasn’t anything like a riot happening on Friday or Saturday.”
ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons might care to disagree.
“Our brave officers were vastly outnumbered, as over 1,000 rioters surrounded and attacked a federal building,” Lyons said in a Saturday morning statement. “It took over two hours for the Los Angeles Police Department to respond, despite being called multiple times. The brave men and women of ICE were in Los Angeles arresting criminal illegal aliens including gang members, drug traffickers and those with a history of assault, cruelty to children, domestic violence, robbery, and smuggling.”
The riots erupted after federal officials conducted immigration raids in Los Angeles County on Friday. Trump ordered the deployment of the National Guard after immigration authorities driving in L.A. were hit with rocks, stones, and concrete, causing damage to government vehicles.
The FBI is searching for a suspect who “threw rocks at law enforcement vehicles on Alondra Boulevard in Paramount, California, injuring a federal officer and damaging government vehicles” on Saturday.
But as rioters set fire to vehicles over the weekend, a local ABC News affiliate downplayed the violence — “just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn” — and warned that any attempt to confront the rioters would only…enflame the situation.
According to the New York Times editorial board, the “real emergency” unfolding in L.A. was Trump’s decision to send in National Guard members to control the situation.
“There was no indication that was needed or wanted in Los Angeles this weekend, where local law enforcement had kept protests over federal immigration raids, for the most part, under control,” the board wrote, arguing that sending in the National Guard was creating “the very chaos it was purportedly designed to prevent.”
Apparently not much has changed since Senator Tom Cotton’s 2020 op-ed calling for the National Guard to put down the George Floyd riots sparked a rebellion at the Times that ended with the firing of the editor who handled the op-ed.
On Sunday, Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) called the riots “peaceful” and blamed President Trump for the chaos.
“The reality is, we see peaceful protests launching in Los Angeles,” the New Jersey senator said. “A lot of these peaceful protests are being generated because the president of the United States is sowing chaos and confusion by arresting people who are showing up for their immigration hearings.”
While Democrats and their media allies insist that Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard was needlessly provocative, Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell admitted on Sunday evening that his department did not, in fact, have the situation under control.
“We are overwhelmed,” McDonnell said at a Sunday evening press conference. “Tonight, we had individuals out there shooting commercial-grade fireworks at our officers. That can kill you.”
“They’ll take a backpack, and the backpack will have a cinderblock in it,” he added. “They’ll break up the cinderblock and use that, pass it around to throw at officers, to throw at cars and other people.”
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi similarly blamed Trump for the unrest. “This didn’t start as a fight between the LAPD and the protesters. This has been escalated with the activation of the National Guard. You point out the National Guard is not roaming the streets of LA right now but the idea that they’re there at the behest of the president has inflamed passions.”
While the rioting began Friday, the demonstrations grew exceedingly violent on Sunday, as thousands of rioters in downtown L.A. set off fireworks and torched several self-driving Waymo taxis. At least three were set on fire while protesters slashed tires and smashed windshields. Rioters also tossed Lime electric scooters ito the flames.
In a statement, LAPD warned people to stay away from the area, as “burning lithium-ion batteries release toxic gases, including hydrogen fluoride, posing risks to responders and those nearby.”
As law enforcement attempted to quell the unrest on Sunday, an Australian news reporter was shot with a rubber bullet live on air.
Nine News’ U.S. correspondent Lauren Tomasi was struck in the leg by a rubber bullet fired by a Los Angeles Police Department officer.
Headline Fail of the Week
NBC News chose an interesting framing of two recent antisemitic attacks: “Lone wolf attacks on Jewish Americans in Boulder and D.C. highlight the difficulties in securing public spaces.”
“In less than two weeks, there have been two hate-fueled attacks on Jewish Americans by suspects not previously known to law enforcement,” a subheading reads.
The article says the attacks are “raising questions about why security wasn’t stronger in the wake of an earlier attack in Washington, D.C.”
Media Misses
• ABC News suspended senior national correspondent Terry Moran after he posted a rant about White House adviser Stephen Miller and President Trump on social media.
“The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism,” Moran wrote in a post on X. “Yes, he is one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy. But that’s not what’s interesting about Miller. It’s not brains. It’s bile. Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”
“Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end his his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment,” he concluded.
• CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour said last week that, as a foreigner from Britain, she recently prepared to travel to the U.S. as if she were traveling to North Korea.
“I must say I was afraid,” Amanpour said on her podcast, The Ex Files, of a recent trip to the States. “I’m a foreigner. I don’t have a green card. I’m not an American citizen. I’m fairly prominent, and I literally prepared to go to America as if I was going to North Korea. I took a burner phone. Imagine that. I didn’t take a single . . . not my mobile phone, not my iPad, nothing, and I had nothing on the burner phone except a few numbers.”
But she said she ultimately found that she was welcomed into the U.S. by an immigration officer who “could not have been nicer.”
• Former MSNBC host Joy Reid recently speculated that her show on the network was canceled because of her race. During a conversation with Katie Couric about her show’s cancellation, Couric noted there is no difference, politically, between Reid and other MSNBC hosts like Nicolle Wallace or Rachel Maddow.
“Only in one way was I different. I’m a black woman doing the thing,” she said.
“I think that there is a difference for Trump in hearing the kinds of criticisms specifically out of a black woman, it bothers him in a way it doesn’t bother him like anything else. He’s got this sort of tick about race, you know, and about, sort of criticism coming specifically from a black woman because we’ve seen him lay out and dish out real abuse against black women journalists,” Reid said.