DC Trawler

CNN: Latest Portland Riot Caused By ‘Tangled Web Of Emotions’

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Let’s say that you work for CNN. (Calm down, it’s a hypothetical.) You’ve been assigned to report on the latest violence in Portland, but it soon becomes clear to you that the instigators were anti-Trump, “anti-fascist” fascists. How do you report that without blaming the people on your side who actually did it?

Here’s how. Paul Vercammen, Bill Kirkos, Traci Tamura, and Emanuella Grinberg, CNN:

At least 14 people were arrested on Sunday amid competing protests in Portland, Oregon, over a tangled web of emotions to arise from a deadly commuter train stabbing in May…

What began as a tense exchange of name-calling and profane insults took a turn when counterdemonstrators began throwing glass bottles, bricks and balloons of “foul-smelling liquid” at officers, Portland police said…

That’s right: “Counterdemonstrators” threw bricks and bottles and piss-filled balloons at the cops, and the cause of this “protest” was “a tangled web of emotions.”

I don’t condone any sort of political violence, and I hope Jeremy Joseph Christian, the lunatic who stabbed those people in Portland, is punished to the full extent of the law. But “emotions” weren’t to blame. Everybody has emotions. Most of us are able to control them, or at least we don’t run around breaking things and hurting people. That murderer is responsible for his own actions, and so are these rioters.

Yet “a tangled web of emotions” was what these CNN reporters cited in the first paragraph of their story on this latest political violence. And their editor okayed it.

“Sure, people shouldn’t commit violence, but you know how tangled up their emotions can get. It’s not like they’re Trump supporters. It’s not like they’re the bad guys. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

P.S. “Mostly peaceful.”