Media This Is Easy: Don’t Excuse, Defend, or Encourage Rioters By Kyle Smith
The Left’s privileged commentators don’t have to worry about losing their homes or businesses.
Why do they keep doing it? Decade after decade, generation after generation, progressives keep making the same, elemental mistake: They downplay, excuse, and in extreme cases even encourage urban rioters.
We’ve been down this road before, and it’s a straight stretch of highway with no twists whatsoever. It would take a moral moron to get lost on it, and yet somehow progressives keep managing to do so. This isn’t hard. The people of Minneapolis are right to be angry about the savage death of George Floyd, but rioting will not bring him back or honor his memory, and the riots will make everything even worse. The Democrats and the media should be shouting as loudly as they can: Stop what you’re doing, you’re hurting your cause.
The person closest to Floyd — the deceased man’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross — made exactly this point: “Waking up this morning to see Minneapolis on fire would be something that would devastate” Floyd, Ross told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “He loved the city. He came here [from Houston] and stayed here for the people and the opportunities.” She added that people should “know that I understand their frustration” but “I want people to protest in a peaceful way.”
Yet all over the media, progressives are in effect rubbishing these wishes. They support the riots, starting by downplaying the nightmare in Minneapolis as a series of mere “protests” (no, those are what Martin Luther King Jr. engineered — and they worked). Once you’ve reconceived destruction as mere expression, you’ve mentally prepared yourself to take the side of the destroyers.
The move to euphemize the riots is right out there in the open:
The apotheosis of this absurd tactic was, perhaps, when the MSNBC reporter Ali Velshi tried to balance today’s two principal media objectives (sensationalization and putting a left-wing spin on everything) and wound up saying this: “I want to be clear on how I characterize this. This is mostly a protest. It is not, generally speaking, unruly, but fires have been started and this crowd is relishing that.” A burning building was visible in the shot behind him. Mr. Velshi should note that Minneapolis cops are not, generally speaking, unruly to the point of kneeling on the necks of suspects for no apparent reason until they are dead, but that isn’t really the point, is it? Even if only one cop does that, it’s still enraging. And “fires have been started” has to be a Hall of Fame usage of the passive voice to downplay arson attacks.
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