Name: Matt Taibbi on the Media Mishandling the Rittenhouse Trial
Uploaded: 2021-12-07T18:32:39.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Matt Taibbi on the Media Mishandling the Rittenhouse Trial' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-12-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Matt Taibbi on the Media Mishandling the Rittenhouse Trial' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-12-07. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience.
But anyway, but yeah, no, the thing with Biden talking about, you know, how
white supremacy
is the biggest threat, it's clearly, 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 become really, really loose with
that term.
Like the Rittenhouse case was a classic example for me of how you just, you
have to be more
careful about the, like they were calling him a white supremacist on the first
day.
The president called him a white supremacist.
The president called him, like just in the level of libel, we used to be afraid
to do
that, right?
Like 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 or in print, because you'd be afraid of being
sued.
It'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, go to a protest?
Absolutely not.
But you know, as a journalist, I can't call him that unless I have something
more, you know?
There was a, the 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 or right after George Floyd's murder,
when everybody
was chaotic, like the country was in a state of chaos.
Right.
That's when that happened.
Right.
So this kid was asked by, I think they had a used car a lot.
By the way, have you ever seen the guys who he was told to, they're Indian.
Uh huh.
I think they're Indian.
I think, I think if this is accurate, I got another meme for you because I love
memes.
Oh, I'll find it.
Um, I mean, the other thing about that case was that, you know, the, the, the
protests in
Kenosha were about the Jacob Blake case, which was, and you know, I wrote a
book about the
the Eric Garner case, uh, which was, you know, unequivocally a brutal police
killing where
the police were at fault, like no question about it.
But the, the Blake incident was much more complicated, right?
And there's a reason, like if you look at the reasons why the, the DA and, uh,
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, you know, made it, made it,
there was
a lot of gray area in terms of the decision making that the, that the police
made there.
And people naturally assumed, and this is, this is what we do now.
We see something on, on Twitter.
We see like a 20 second piece of video.
We think we know the whole story, but the rea, you know, the reality is most of
the time,
that the, the initial impression of news is wrong, uh, 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.
But you, and in that case, you know, we, we just didn't, um, it, uh, there were,
there were
a lot of ambiguities that just got turned instantaneously into, into a
narrative that, um, you know, it was really unfortunate.
There's also a frantic rush and to say that someone was racist or a white
supremacist.
And there was a narrative that, that was rewarded, pull 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.
So he wanted to protect a business owned by these guys.
I don't know if they're a middle Eastern or, um, Indian or what, what they were.
It says, shoots these guys and shows, 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.
Right.
The guy in the middle.
I mean, he, he raped multiple children.
Mentally ill.
I mean, yeah, literally one of the, it's just one of the worst crimes you could
imagine.
But they, sort of without hesitation, people would do things like say, well, it's
clearly
a problem that there, um, you know, there weren't enough, uh, minorities in the
jury in
this case where there, everybody involved was white.
Um, I think a lot of, a lot of the news consumers were, were just sort of led
to believe certain
things just by the way that, by implication, they, they, they didn't always
identify whether
the people who got shot were, were white or black or anything.
They would just sort of say they were shot.
Meanwhile, they would say repeatedly that, that, that Rittenhouse was white.
I have friends that are black that didn't know that they were white victims
until the
trial started.
Right.
And that said, dude, I thought he shot black people.
They didn't, they literally didn't know.
And so 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.
And then the president calls him a white supremacist.
I got the picture.
Right.
Right.
And, and, and you can see how that can happen if you, if you're just picking up,
you know,
the newspaper or you're watching CNN and they're just neglecting to leave out
certain details,
um, which, you know, it has to be strategic.
And again, this is, this, this gets back to what I was saying before.
It's not like anybody tells you to do this.
Right.
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.
Right.
And, and I think that's what happens with, you know, with, with, with a lot of
the
people in this case.
And I, it's, it's uncomfortable to talk about this stuff because people assume
that
you have sympathies with somebody like Rittenhouse or, you know, all the people
who lionized them
on, you know, on Fox, Fox news.
That's not it.
You just, 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, and they're mad and they're ready to go
out in
the streets and, and fight each other.
Yeah.
That's when you have to be super careful about what you say, you know,
especially in media.
Yeah.
Yeah.