Gee, how come the mainstream media’s coverage of the Milwaukee riots is so much more muted than their coverage of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland?
As Jim Geraghty points out at National Review, it’s not as though the damage and mayhem caused by rioters in Milwaukee was paltry: “For a second night, disorder hit Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood late Sunday, with protesters throwing rocks, bricks and glass bottles at police, shots ringing out and a shooting victim rescued by officers and whisked to a hospital in an armored vehicle. The previous night, six businesses were set on fire and either destroyed or heavily damaged, four cops were injured, and multiple gunshots reported.”
So why didn’t the news out of Milwaukee make the front page of the Boston Globe, Washington Post, or New York Times?
Geraghty notes that it is possible that the media learned that its false narrative regarding the Ferguson protests, that Michael Brown was an innocent victim, left the media’s credibility damaged. That would be a difficult narrative to emulate in the case of Milwaukee, where Sylville K. Smith, whose death triggered the riots, was armed and refused to put down his weapon, which had 23 rounds of ammunition. Not only that, but unlike Ferguson, where the police officer, Darren Wilson, was white, in Milwaukee the police officer who fired the bullet that killed Smith was black. Not only that, but Smith was charged last year in a shooting and then charged with intimidating a witness, and arrested or ticketed nine times since 2011.
That’s the rose-colored-glasses view of why the media is reluctant to feature the Milwaukee story; the more “pessimistic” interpretation, as Geraghty posits, is that the media knows that the Black Lives Matter rioters are dead wrong on this issue, and doesn’t want to make them look bad by publicizing their actions.
The media knows that the Black Lives Matter rioters are dead wrong on this issue, and doesn’t want to make them look bad by publicizing their actions.
Speaking of Smith’s death on Monday, The New York Times, in typically leftist fashion, took a shot at the city’s police department, writing, “But in some of Milwaukee’s predominantly black neighborhoods, the killing was yet another outgrowth of what some believe are exceedingly aggressive and misguided police tactics in this city of about 600,000.”