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Honestly with Bari Weiss

The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse

Honestly with Bari Weiss

The Free Press

Society & Culture, News

4.67.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2021

⏱️ 58 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse in the last days of August 2020: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020 he had done just that: killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third. It turns out, I was mostly wrong. And if you relied on the mainstream media when it came to Kyle Rittenhouse, you would have been too. Today, a conversation with Jesse Singal, one of the independent journalists who got this story right, and about why so many got it so wrong. Follow Jesse’s work at jessesingal.substack.com Read my full column on the Rittenhouse trial: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-medias-verdict-on-kyle-rittenhouse Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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I'm Barry Wieson. This is honestly.

0:47.3

On January 18th, 2019, there was a video of Catholic high schoolers that went viral. It showed them on the steps of the Capitol sort of facing off against an older Native American man. And he was singing and banging a drum in the face of one particular teenage boy who maybe or maybe not was

1:04.9

smirking. And this quickly became evidence of open hatred in Trump's America.

1:10.8

It's no exaggeration to say that every media organization in the country did a story about

1:16.9

how shameful this was. Vox called it the nation's biggest story. The recalls for

1:22.1

violence against the boys, including from a hosted

1:24.8

CNN. Covington High School, that was their school, had to be shut down because of safety concerns.

1:31.6

Then it was revealed that down to almost every single detail, the story was

1:37.2

completely untrue. CNN said yesterday, settled a lawsuit with

1:40.7

Covington High School student Nicholas Sandman.

1:43.0

The settlement comes after Sandman brought a suit against CNN, the Washington Post,

1:46.8

and the Associated Press to the tune of $275 million.

1:51.0

And these news organizations played a key role in demonizing

1:54.3

newspapers made corrections defamation suits were filed huge settlements

1:59.6

were made with TV networks it was mess. And then just two weeks later there was the story

2:06.2

of Jesse Smolay. That was when an actor claimed that he had been assaulted by two men in Chicago in the dead of winter in the middle of the night

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