Matt Taibbi on the Media Mishandling the Rittenhouse Trial

But anyway, the thing with Biden talking about, you know, white supremacy is the biggest threat. There's clearly something deeply wrong with this country that there clearly is domestic white terrorism. There's no question that it exists. But they've become really, really loose with that term. The Rittenhouse case was a classic example for me of how you just, you have to be more careful about that. They were calling him a white supremacist on the first day. The president called him a white supremacist. Just on the level of libel. We used to be afraid to do that, right? You would have to have something that allowed you to say that this guy was a white supremacist before you put that on the air in print because you'd be afraid of being sued. You'd be the end of your career. And all they really had were some vague cultural markers, right? Like would I tell my kid to pick up an AR-15 and go to a protest? Absolutely not. But you know, as a journalist, I can't call him that unless I have something more. There was a difference between calling it a protest and the air of fear and chaos that was prevalent when that whole thing went down. This was post the George Floyd riots and everything was crazy. In Los Angeles, they were lighting cop cars on fire. There were pallets of bricks that are mysteriously dropped off at protest sites and windows were smashed through Beverly Hills. They had an early curfew. People have quick memories. They have short memories and they forget how fucking crazy it was. Like right after that George Floyd protest, right after George Floyd's murder, when everybody was chaotic, like the country was in a state of chaos. That's when that happened. So this kid was asked by, I think they had to use car a lot. By the way, have you ever seen the guys who he was told to, they're Indian. I think they're Indian. I think if this is accurate, I got another meme for you because I love memes. I'll find it. The other thing about that case was that the protests in Kenosha were about the Jacob Blake case, which was ... I wrote a book about the Eric Garner case, which was unequivocally a brutal police killing where the police were at fault. No question about it. But the Blake incident was much more complicated. If you look at the reasons why the DA and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department didn't file charges in that case, is because there was a lot of stuff about that case that was ... there was a lot of gray area in terms of the decision making that the police made there. People naturally assumed, this is what we do know, we see something on Twitter, we see a 20 second piece of video, we think we know the whole story, but the reality is most of the time the initial impression of news is wrong, at least somewhere. There's usually some kind of error built in and that's why we need the next two and three days and months to sort out exactly what happened. In that case, we just didn't. There were a lot of ambiguities that just got turned instantaneously into a narrative that was really unfortunate. There's also a frantic rush to say that someone was racist or a white supremacist and there was a narrative that was rewarded. This meme that I just sent you, this is why I sent it, I have a whole meme folder on my iPhone that I just can't wait to use. He wanted to protect a business owned by these guys. I don't know if they're Middle Eastern or Indian or what they were. It says, shoots these guys and shoots three white guys. Worst white supremacist ever. Not only that, but one of the guys that he shot was a repeat offender child rapist. The guy in the middle. He raped multiple children. Mentally ill. Yeah, literally one of the worst crimes you could imagine. Without hesitation, people would do things like say, well, it's clearly a problem that there weren't enough minorities in the jury in this case where everybody involved was white. I think a lot of the news consumers were led to believe certain things just by the way, by implication. They didn't always identify whether the people who got shot were white or black or anything. They would just say they were shot. Meanwhile, they would say repeatedly that written house was white. I have friends that are black that didn't know that they were white victims until the trial started. That said, dude, I thought he shot black people. They literally didn't know. The thing was, it was a Black Lives Matter protest. He shot people. They thought he shot black people. They thought he was a racist. Then the president calls him a white supremacist. I got the picture. You can see how that can happen if you're just picking up the newspaper or you're watching CNN and they're just neglecting to leave out certain details. It has to be strategic. Again, this gets back to what I was saying before. It's not like anybody tells you to do this. You just sort of know that the story is going to sell better or it's going to play better if you highlight certain things. I think that's what happens with a lot of the people in this case. It's uncomfortable to talk about this stuff because people assume that you have sympathies with somebody like Rittenhouse or all the people who lionized them on Fox News. You just got to get this stuff right. You have a heightened responsibility to get it right when people are amped up and they're mad and they're ready to go out in the streets and fight each other. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say, especially in media. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say. That's when you have to be super careful about what you say.