Journalist Matt Taibbi said the media should learn from its coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse and not “caricature people based on a couple of cultural markers.”
During an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Taibbi explained that there was not a lot of information on Rittenhouse during the trial as it was difficult to get information from him directly.
“This is the problem with media and this is the problem with this case is that you can’t caricature people based on a couple of cultural markers, which is what happened in this instance,” Taibbi said. “We didn’t know a whole lot about this person, we didn’t hear from him directly from the very beginning. We knew that he carried an AR-15, which is something that most cosmopolitan liberals would never imagine themselves doing, or their kids doing, so they made a lot of assumptions about him that, frankly, maybe, didn’t turn out to be correct, and that framed coverage for the entire year of this whole case.”
Taibbi said he was shocked at how loosely the media used the term “white supremacist” during the case. During an interview on Monday with Tucker Carlson, Rittenhouse said he believed President Biden defamed him when he suggested while running for president in 2020 that the teen was linked to white supremacists.
“As a reporter, I would be afraid to use that word about someone that I didn’t have a pretty serious collection of evidence [they had] beliefs like that because I would be afraid of libel suits,” he said.
“It was a seat change in the way we talk about people,” he added.
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