Thread by @AaronWorthing

One more thing with the #RittenhouseTrial

One serious problem is how much the media has been increasingly become part of the story—including part of the trial. Thread

As much as possible a reporter should not allow him or her self to become part of the story. Obviously that’s not always possible. If a reporter is doing an expose on human rights conditions in China and he gets captured by Chinese authorities, he’s now part of the story.

So I get that sometimes it can’t be avoided. But as much as possible it should be avoided. But now we see the media going all “Leroy Jenkins” on this.

first, the level of misinformation and disinformation coming out of the media has always been off the charts.

When there were riots, many in the media pretended that they were not riots. So naturally when you find out that someone started shooting these supposed peaceful protesters who are seeking racial justice (🙄) it was easy to shift to a narrative that KH was some kind of racist

Of course now we know this guy he shot was the only confirmed bigot on the scene, shouting the N-word at pretty much everyone who could hear it. This is not a disputed fact. It is on video.

early reports made it sound like as if KH was pretty much stalking his victims

Now we know he was running away from them. There is no longer any doubt that Rittenhouse was being attacked. Maybe you feel his force was excessive. Maybe you feel he provoked it somehow. But he was attacked. He shot because he was attacked.

And I’m glossing over a ton of other “facts” that aren’t really facts. It wasn’t illegal for him to have that rifle. He didn’t travel with it across state lines. And when he did travel across state lines it was about a 20 minute ride, because he lives practically at the border.

And I can go on and on but the point is that the media created such a false image of him, painting him to be a monster when he was at worst a scared kid who panicked, then now we face the real prospect of riots if he is acquitted. Which now might impact his fair trial rights

And now we find out that apparently personnel from a news organization might have been terrorizing the jury. Now they are front and center of the story. Now we have to discuss whether or not their behavior is a crime. Now we have to discuss whether or not they engaged…

… in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. How can they hope to have any objectivity when discussing these events? How can other news organizations hope to have any objectivity when discussing these issues and whether or not the judge was correct to exclude them from…

…the courthouse. These organizations are their competition. That is an instant conflict of interest on all parties.

and by the way a conflict of interest cuts both ways. Let’s say a defendant is the son of the judge in a case. Obviously the prosecutor would have standing…

…to say the judge should recuse himself but a lot of people don’t understand that in that hypothetical the defendant would have grounds to exclude the judge too. This is because it is observed in human nature that a judge in that situation might go harder on his son…

… then he would for any other defendant just to prove how “unbiased” he is. In other words an obvious source of bias can backfire. So CNN might feel some desire to hobble its competition, and to prove they are not they might be nicer to them than they should be.

Or they simply might see this now as the media versus the judge.

all of this is the media inserting itself into the story more and more, and it makes it harder and harder to find anyone you can trust to tell the truth about what’s going on.

A reflective media might realize this is a time to stop and pull back a little bit.

So we know that won’t happen

But it should.

/end