Thread by @DrewHolden360

🧵Thread🧵

Today’s “Justice for J6” rally consisted mostly of reporters, cops & FBI agents, fizzling out in about an hour.

But in the last few days, the corporate press fearmongered constantly about it.

Will they follow up now that it, unsurprisingly, amounted to nothing? ⤵️

Perhaps the worst of it came from @CNN, who pushed nonsense for days leading up to the event.

“Renewed fears of political violence grip Capitol Hill” actually turned into “more press than protestors.”

Will CNN tell that story now?

Bringing on a former FBI official who abused his power for political reasons to talk about this “rally” and why it should be taken “very seriously” is laying it on a little thick, don’t you think, @CNN?

Just wall-to-wall fear porn from @CNN.

Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t that right wing media downplayed the rally, they just didn’t deceive their viewers into thinking the rally was going to amount to much of anything, unlike left-wing media, @brianstelter?

But of course it wasn’t just CNN.

@MSNBC gave the event wall-to-wall coverage in recent days. The “700” people estimated proved to be off by a factor of, oh, 7 or so, but who’s counting?

They had their chief voices trying to convince their viewers that this was the second coming of January 6th, because that’s what gets people to tune in.

Here’s @maddow and @AriMelber, both breathlessly concerned about today’s nothingburger.

There was a terrorist attack that killed a Capitol Police officer (and almost killed another) two months after January 6th, but according to @NPR, a couple dozen losers showing up for a protest is the “biggest security test since Jan. 6”

Deranged. Absolutely deranged.

As someone who resides in the Capitol area, I promise you, @nytimes, people aren’t actually “on edge” and it’s now pretty clear that there was never going to be any “turmoil”

@nytimes probably did more to “valorize” January 6th by breathlessly covering today’s gathering of reporters than the handful of people who showed up today.

In the days leading up to it we also had breathless coverage of Capitol Police’s prep for the non-event, like here from @nytimes and @ABC

This opinion piece from @drsarahspeaks for @NBCNews presented without comment.

“Police ready this time” @AP assured us, as if today’s protestors could’ve overwhelmed an internet chatroom.

@USATODAY snuck in “where protestors may arrive with weapons” completely absent evidence, just in case some of their readers weren’t sufficiently scared or fired up.

Serious question: was there ever a reason to believe this, @ryanbort /@RollingStone? Doesn’t this sound a little hysterical in retrospect?

I’ve written plenty about Jan 6 & why it was terrible (medium.com/arc-digital/im… and google.com/amp/s/www.news…) but the way the media continues to torture the narrative around it to score clicks is really shameful.

And this is just the latest example of it. Surely we’ll have more.

What these outlets have done is exploit unfounded fears for clicks, and in so doing they’ve painted their political opponents - all Republicans - as anti patriotic lunatics for not being vocal enough about something that never mattered to begin with.

It’s shameful.

Will these outlets explain how they got this frightening predictions wrong, and why? And how they’ll avoid hyping up a “security threat” that isn’t in the future?

Something tells me that won’t happen.

But the page will turn, there’ll be a new “outrage” tomorrow, and everyone will have forgotten how the media blew this completely out of proportion before the next time they pull this stunt again.

Stunning that these people have lost the trust of the American people, isn’t it?

And it’s interesting how this non story got so much more coverage than real problems, like the humanitarian crisis happening on our border.

A coincidence, surely.

https://twitter.com/billfoxla/status/1439229084182224899