One of the biggest memes on the Internet during Black Lives Matter protests in summer of 2020 was generated by CNN. CNN national correspondent Omar Jimenez was reporting live in the early hours on Tuesday morning on the unrest that had taken place in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the police-involved shooting of Jacob Blake. Jimenez was standing in front of a raging fire and the chyron at the bottom of the screen read, "FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING." The image quickly spread across the Internet and immediately sparked jokes.
However, one can joke as much as they want but the media really did portray the protests as peaceful and absolutely non-violent. “Time” wrote that the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests than 93%—have been peaceful, according to a new report published by a nonprofit organization that researches political violence and protests across the world.
Other news sources have pointed out the terrible hypocrisy there was. National Review underlines that “only some kinds of protests are always ‘mostly peaceful’”.
Is this framework used with forms of popular protest on the right? Of course not. Networks did not bend over backwards to describe Tea Party protests as “mostly peaceful,” but did quite the opposite, framing even peaceful forms of protest as menacingly dangerous. Example: In November 2009, a Virginia Tea Party protestor was going to burn effigies of House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Virginia congressman Tom Periello. It was CNN and their reporter Peter Hamby that made the story again: “Tea Party organizer vows to burn Pelosi and Perriello in effigy,” and framing the story around Democratic outrage.
Effigies are a longstanding form of peaceful protest in America, quite unlike torching businesses, but the reaction compelled to back down: “Coleman said Sunday that some members of his group were ‘uneasy’ with the idea of counter-protesters and that people might mistake the TEA Party Patriots for being violent.” For good measure, that CBS report compared Coleman to Randall Terry, the notorious anti-abortion extremist.
To conclude, almost all new sources are incredibly biased, portraying the protests as peaceful, even though there are cars on fire and destruction is present in the picture.
Sources:
https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/?amp=true
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/us/protests-divisions-blm.amp.html
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