>That story doesn't show what you think it does. The media didn't create the initial misleading cuts of that event, social media users did (i.e. "the internet"). The media reported on those cuts (and the reaction to them), then it reported on the longer cuts that surfaced later. If the internet hadn't existed, the whole thing would have been a literal non-event.

That's not how I see the situation. The 'viral' videos even today only have 200,000 views. They weren't viral. The whole story went viral when Nathan Philips was brought in to be portrayed as a victim. Subtly implying racism and saying this isn't boys will be boys.

Meanwhile, you know what actually went viral. The full video which has 2 million views. Sorry but the numbers dont lie. This one is entirely on the antiquated media. The internet is what forced the retractions.

>While social media "has been able to allow people to get to the truth" it also has been at least as effective in helping people get to lies and disinformation. See QAnon, Pizzagate, and this Covington High School student video, for instance.

Certainly interesting other takes. Qanon and pizzagate are pretty much the same thing. The democrats and clinton(as proven by wikileaks) were hacked. There will be sensitive information leaked in those hacks. Qanon leaked it as if they knew anything new or not-public via wikileaks. Qanon is just a bunch of morons who are pretending like they had a clue. You just had to go read wikileaks and get that information. Qanon and pizzagate had real information at the beginning but then morphed into bullshit when the wikileaks data dried up.

If you ignore qanon/pizzagate and just look at the wikileaks data. Yes, most of it turned out to be true. Pizzagate = Jeffrey Epstein. He was in prison to stand trial for those allegations and somehow cameras malfunctioned just that night and he happened to kill himself? Come on. It's ridiculous to consider pizzagate a conspiracy theory. Unless you also believe epstein was innocent or something.

Which really goes down to exactly the same problem we are discussing. Truth is truth; the newspapers and media calling it a conspiracy theory doesnt make it so.

>Trump was asked to condemn "white supremacists and [right wing] militia groups" and was pretty equivocal and strangely reluctant to do so. That's the story.

That's really not the story. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-... which that source is left-leaning to be fair.

The violence in the USA right now is coming from left-wing groups. Which hey, I understand their concern when it comes down to police brutality that has been regularly caught for decades.

> The Proud Boys were just an example that was thrown out by Biden.

Admittedly I dont see who says it exactly but from my ears, it's CNN saying it. Again this is just entire fallaciousness anyway. The left-wing seems to be consistently just calling the right-wing racists. Sam Harris discussed this with John McWhorter.

>While they probably fit more into the militia group side of that formulation, the they don't seem like the kind of top-down bureaucratic organization that would allow easy inference about the group from it's "leader."

The focus on the proud boys is just part of the media's ploy. I do believe it's the media perpetrating this and not the left-wing in general. I have been enjoying listening to Sam Harris' take on this lately. Sam is pretty left wing; probably up there in terms of understanding and can explain cogently how bad Trump really is. Yet he also points out how the left-wing has started labelling everyone a racist.