Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Right-Wing Videographers, AKA #RiotSquad, Provide Riotporn (Violent Videos of BLM Protests) to Right-Wing Media
May 21, 2021
The right-wing will stop at nothing to slander the Black Lives Matter movement. (Miki Jourdan)
By Bill Berkowitz
If it bleeds it leads, is an aphorism that has long been embraced by the mainstream media. Over the past year, during thousands of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, right-wing videographers – often disguised as protesters -- have made a cottage industry out of supplying footage to right-wing media outlets of violent events at demonstrations, despite the reality that the vast majority of demonstrations have been peaceful. “The footage has a hypnotic, almost balletic quality, designed to influence and overwhelm the sense-making capacity of watchers consuming it from a safe distance online,” Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard Kennedy’s Shorenstein Center, reported for MIT Technology Review. Some critics have taken to calling it Riotporn.
The Republican Party may be rotting from within, but the right-wing media sphere is as strong as it ever was. As one of its go-to segments over the past year, right-wing television outlets delighted in portraying Black Lives Matter demonstrations as cauldrons of violence. In their recent Intercept report titled “Meet the Riot Squad: Right-Wing Reporters Whose Viral Videos Are Used to Smear BLM,” Robert Mackey and Travis Mannon pointed out that there are a coterie of right-wing videographers that traveled around the country “shooting viral video of mayhem at left-wing protests.” Those videos inevitably wind up being played over and over again on right-wing media.
“Since the George Floyd protests, conservative media outlets including Fox News (particularly Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity), One America News, Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV, and right-wing YouTubers have been covering Black Lives Matter and other left-wing protests daily, specifically highlighting instances of violence, fighting, and property damage,” media scholar Joan Donovan observed in the MIT Technology Review last summer. “This coverage has come to dominate the right-wing narrative in a new way, flipping the script to suggest that Black protesters — demonstrating because they fear police violence — are themselves a threat to white people.”
The Intercept’s Mackey and Mannon “researched viral clips of contested incidents at protests against racist policing and far-right movements.” They kept “coming across the names of the same handful of videographers again and again. At protests in Minneapolis, Dallas, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Louisville, Philadelphia, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, I discovered that many of the most viral clips were shot by a handful of field reporters for right-wing sites or freelancers with conservative politics.”
In a mid-March commentary for The Wall Street Journal, Senator Ron Johnson (Republican-Wisconsin) maintained that “Leftists who want to memory hole last summer’s political violence [after the police killing of George Floyd] immediately started lecturing me that the 2020 protests were mostly peaceful. Apparently they’ve forgotten that, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project [ACLED], 570 protests became riots last year.” What Johnson failed to note was that according to researchers from the ACLED and the Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University – which launched the US Crisis Monitor -- there were more than 10,300 demonstrations associated with Black Lives Matter and the vast majority of those demonstrations -- 94% — involved no violent or destructive activity. The research project was created “to provide the public with real-time data and analysis of political violence” in the U.S.
ACLED reported that there was a sharp “increase in right-wing demonstrations over the course of the year, and especially in the weeks following the election, with armed militia groups taking an enlarged role in right-wing mobilization ahead of the Capitol riot in January 2021.” All told, “Over 2,350 right-wing demonstrations took place across more than 1,070 locations in all 50 states and Washington, DC.”
The year started with a spike in right-wing demonstrations against lockdown restrictions imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the summer, right-wing activity largely shifted to more indirect involvement in demonstrations associated with the BLM movement, where armed militia members maintained a presence to purportedly ‘keep the peace.’ Following the election, right-wing events again surged with a spike in activity associated with the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement
Militarized right-wing social movements like armed militia groups have been involved in 11% of all right-wing demonstrations, with this figure rising to 20% following the election, leading up to the Capitol riot. This includes groups such as the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the American Contingency, among others.
In addition to the BLM demonstrations, researchers found that “over 9% of all BLM-linked demonstrations — or nearly one in 10 events — were met with intervention by police or other authorities, compared to just 4% of right-wing demonstrations.”
Mackey and Mannon reported that “In the year since George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin was documented in horrifying detail on the cellphone of a 17-year-old witness, Darnella Frazier, right-wing news outlets and politicians have been desperate to draw attention away from those unbearable images by focusing instead on viral videos of unrest at racial justice protests. That’s been a boon for the careers of conservative video journalists like [Julio] Rosas, [Jorge] Ventura, and a half-dozen of their friends, who jokingly call themselves the #RiotSquad in Instagram selfies and podcast banter.”
As The Intercept’s reporters noted, “By focusing on sensational, graphic images of violence on the margins of protests and entirely ignoring peaceful demonstrators, … members of the Riot Squad … have contributed to a political project: the right-wing media’s campaign to portray racial justice protests as anarchic and dangerous.
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