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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

I remember while back there was a Chapo interview with him where he was like… arguing about how you would get absolutely destroyed by the media for talking about looters during the Floyd protests.

All while basically all coverage had this angle! Even (especially) from the “precious liberal media” like the times and the Washington post. But of course people Taibbi know complained about this, and he didn’t like it.

The conservative mindset is not satisfied just by winning on the fundamentals. They must have everyone also like them as well. This explains the whining by Taibbi, the packed room of multi-millionaires to billionaires to listen to Bari Weiss talk about cancel culture, and to pg tweeting about how rich people are under attack because people dare to not like him.

Given that this is a mindset basically focused around being liked, it would be nice to say “social media caused this” but this has probably been around for much longer.

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> All while basically all coverage had this angle!

It's nearly impossible to analyze this because each person can point to their personally curated news feed and "prove" any sort of bias. If you listen to a lot of Chapo Trap House, you are getting one view. If you listen to a lot of Daily Wire you are getting another. The point here is how the big, mainstream, corporate news rooms reacted to the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. You can show the editorial decisions to not use the word "rioter" or "looter" in favor of "protester". You can see how many of them gave air time to radical left-wing positions such as "In Defense of Looting"[0]. My personal read of the situation lines up with Matt Taibbi's. Basically, you had to publicly show support for all BLM riots/protests or risk losing your reputation or job.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

I put NYT and Wapo in scare-quote “liberal” for a reason. Those are the mainstream things.

Fox News is hiring, OAN is hiring. And hell, if you’re an opinion writer you could get away with a bunch of factual flexibility at the Times as well.

Yeah Code Switch covered a book release covering a way of describing the issue one way. Do we need to dig up all the air time given to people who thought cops should start “applying the law”?

I do agree that establishing what the “real bias” was is hard. But Taibbi is just wrong on this. Like Weiss, they are confounding “people will yell at me” with “I will lose my job”, and confounding that with “I will not be able to practice journalism”.

Taibbi and Weiss, in particular, are interesting (along with Greenwald) because they are giving voice to the concerns of smaller journalists who can't muster a living on Substack. I don't think they are bemoaning their own status so much as pointing out the new yellow journalism of a post-Trump corporate news world. Non-celebrity journalists were not allowed to portray BLM riots as anything but virtuous. Again, hard to prove because of endless counterpoints on all things, but to consume CNN in every waiting room, lobby, etc. in 2020 was to know these protests as "fiery, but mostly peaceful".

They can totally be anti-BLM, they might not be able to do it at the outlets they like. But that’s their own moral conflict.

Weiss tried to get a professor fired, her anti-cancel culture screeds are disingenuous

Yep and she is not a journalistic peer to Taibbi or Greenwald.

>Weiss tried to get a professor fired, her anti-cancel culture screeds are disingenuous

What are you referring to here?

> were not allowed to portray BLM riots as anything but virtuous

Gold star for framing there!

Your tell was referring to all of that as BLM riots vs BLM protests. The protests themselves were by definition virtuous (a first amendment action at its core), whereas the riots were an ugly aftermath of that.

If those riots bother you, are you bothered by the fact that outside agitators might have fanned the flames? Case in point: https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/06/02/whats-up-with-umbre...

>outside agitators might have fanned the flames

This was absolutely the case, as clip after clip showed umbrella man and others performing and inciting vandalism and chaos. Meanwhile, actual protestors were pleading with them to stop or directly intervening to stop them.

In each case, the instigators were young, white and frequently dressed in all black. Early arrestees matched this description and were frequently from out of town.

There was absolutely an infiltration/false flag operation. It amazes me how little this has been covered and how successful they were at establishing their narrative, even while so obvious.

Likewise, I'm amazed by how "Antifa" magically materializes at such opportune times for driving certain political narratives, then disappears again, yet there's very little questioning as to who these anonymous people really are. Instead, media and others just accept that they are who they say and assign them to a political "side".

> certain political narratives

It's bogeyman story telling all over again, and depressingly effective.

>depressingly effective

Indeed. It's an efficient engine by now: create fear of other; convert to anger; implant puppeteers' bidding; repeat.

In fact, they've been so effective at instilling a persistent, generalized fear, they can skip straight to the anger/action step.

Yep, and I don't see any indication of that abating, quite the opposite in fact.

The creation of Team Red v. Team Blue was a masterstroke of political manipulation, cementing American society into a never-ending genteel gang war.

Reframing riots as protests and vice versa was exactly my point in the post above. It's not a "tell", I explicitly stated it. The official media story was that these were "protests" and even if they were riots, well it was the "good kind of riot". The BLM riots didn't bother me any more than anti-mandate protests bother me. It's all well within Americans' constitutional rights to do so. If you want to kneel during the national anthem or shout "Let's Go Brandon", it's all fair play. However, it's not controversial to simply notice the major news outlets valorize any protest movement that has progressive aims while demonizing any protest by conservatives.

Could you provide a link from mainstream media saying that a riot was "the good kind"?

And again, there was documented subterfuge to provoke these riots -- but according to you "it's all fair play"?

What I see reported about the anti-mask/vaccine protests are about as neutral as one could hope for such a crowd.

Let's see, one side is asking for the police to refrain from abuse of power and the other is people who don't want to take simple steps to help mitigate a pandemic. Hmmmmmm.....

The conservative persecution complex is a hell of a drug.

I'm not going to run down an article that uses that exact quote, but you get a great sense of the acquiescence in WaPo pieces like this[0]. They hilariously glamorize rioters vandalizing, trespassing, and attempting arson on a federal building, all the supposed hallmarks of the Jan 6 "insurrection". An "insurrection" that had the same level of agent provocateurs and subterfuge and flame fanning by government agents. Simply put, if a riot is left-wing then journalists glamorize it. If a riot is right-wing then they'll demonize it. It's that simple. It's not difficult to track this mentality out of universities and into newsrooms.

Reporting on lockdown/mask/covid protests has been so egregious and lopsided as to put Poe's Law to the test. Peacefully protesting business closures and weird, shifting mitigation mandates are apparently the worst kind of racist (journos' favorite smear). [1][2] If by "simple steps" you mean people losing their jobs because they can't Zoom into work from their pajamas or the "simple step" of showing medical papers to get sushi or the "simple step" of not seeing a dying loved one because of a bonkers government covid policy -- we might have different ideas of simple.

I'm not conservative, so the persecution complex insult doesn't really work on me, but I agree. Partisans love to feel persecuted because it gives them a sense of purpose. Conservatives are full of hypocrisy, just like liberals. But leftists and liberals are certainly not against abuses of power. They simply want state power to come down on political enemies in the right-wing.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/08/trump-sent-...

[1] https://www.salon.com/2020/05/04/anti-lockdown-movement-powe...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/anti-lockd...

I doubt this is very accurate. I don't even know Taibbi, but he already made a good impression by his distractors to be honest. Just because it relays a perspective how anyone that disagrees is a conservative or billionaire or has other alleged character flaws.

Of course to not fall into the same trap of an reactionary echo chamber, I will still listen to the arguments itself, but I would lie if I said it doesn't already convey a bonus.

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