I’m going to botch how it’s pronounced: antifa?
Antfee?
Antifa?
Yeah, antifa.
Antifa, short for anti-fascist.
It’s an umbrella term for a group that shows up at protests to confront neo-Nazis and white
supremacists.
They dress in all black, they wear masks, and they occasionally engage in violence.
Once again, antifa members attack peaceful demonstrators.
The group’s tactics and appearance have garnered them a lot of media attention over
the past few months.
America is waking up to the menace of antifa.
They’re known as antifa, and they’re also known for being violent.
But for a group that’s getting so much airtime for being violent and dangerous, they’re
not causing that much havoc.
In Berkeley, where about 4,000 people showed up to protest a white supremacist rally, there
were 100 antifa, nine injuries, and a total of 13 arrests.
In Boston, where 40,000 protesters showed up, no major injuries, 33 arrests.
In Portland, thousands of protesters at opposing rallies, no major injuries, 14 arrests.
That might sound like a lot, but it’s about the number of arrests you’d expect at a
rowdy NFL game.
Antifa look scary, but they make up a tiny part of the protests they show up at.
So why have they become such a powerful boogeyman in protest coverage?
What is antifa?
To understand why the media focuses on outliers like antifa, I talked to Doug McLeod.
He’s been studying the way the media covers protest movements for…
Basically 30 years.
Anti-war movements, anti-pornography movements, various civil rights movements, anarchist
protests, abortion protests.
Okay, don’t brag.
You’re already in the video
The specific panic about antifa might seem new, but McLeod says it’s part of a much
older media problem.
You can see the media’s fixation on radical protesters in coverage of a lot of big protests.
During the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, cameras focused on anarchists destroying property.
A group we now know as anarchists called the black bloc began terrorizing the city.
With Black Lives Matter in Baltimore, peaceful protests against police brutality were overshadowed
by images of violence and property damage.
Rioting has broken out in the street.
During Occupy Wall Street, reporters focused on protesters who looked weird or destroyed
property.
Anarchists sprang out of the crowd and launched this full-on assault.
You cannot cede public space to thugs and lawbreakers.
Lawlessness, violence, filth.
Now, it’s antifa.
The peaceful counterprotest against racism turned violent.
The result is a type of outlier bias, where a small group of violent protesters ends up
dominating news coverage.
You saw it in Berkeley.
By any measurement, nine injuries in a protest of 4,000 people is an outlier.
But headlines fixated on antifa violence instead of the vast majority of protesters.
Berkeley’s mayor says it is time to confront the violent extremism on the left.
In other cities, images of clergy and peaceful protesters are overshadowed by images of isolated
violence played on a loop.
I would compel you to air the three hours of footage where we marched through the streets
with literally no violence.
A lot of this is about ratings.
Images of violence and property damage create a spectacle, which makes them really hard
to look away from.
What’s more interesting to watch: a bunch of smiling protesters banging on drums, or
antifa fighting Nazis?
Yeah, agreed.
But for a lot of reporters, it’s also about convenience.
Protests are kind of a nightmare to cover.
They're leaderless, disorganized, and often focus on big issues that are hard to reduce
to quick soundbites.
A lot of journalists are really trying to get a story straight and they’re trying
to get it out there.
But they’re operating under a lot of constraints.
You’ve gotta find something, you’ve gotta get back, and you’ve gotta tell it quickly.
Those time constraints mean a lot of journalists rely on official sources for quick summaries
of what happened.
Gotta get a quote from the police chief.
Which means that a lot of protest coverage gets told from the perspective of law enforcement.
Who broke the law, who was arrested, who are police worried about?
The police chief is concerned about today’s influx of anarchist protesters.
That outlier bias has a big effect on how viewers at home think of protesters.
As audience members, we make inferences based on that small appropriate sample.
And it really creates this sort of false sample of who those protesters really are.
That false sample creates an unwinnable situation for protest movements.
In the age of Fox News, images of violence and property damage get played on a loop to
demonize protesters as dangerous and illegitimate.
Left-wing thugs have been smashing windows, burning buildings, beating people up who disagree
with them.
It’s the normalization really by the left of police hatred, and there is a war on cops.
But this happens even without Fox News’s help.
Media fixation on the most extreme members of a protest can make the public turn on protesters
as a whole.
This is not populism, this is maybe anarchism.
So that can turn off viewers where people become angry and hostile and kind of averse
to protest.
That kind of coverage can also build public support for aggressive police crackdowns,
like the ones we saw in Ferguson and Baltimore.
What is stopping Michael Bloomberg from enforcing the law and cleaning up this health hazard
called Occupy Wall Street.
If they’re going to assault cops and try to kill them, the cops will use deadly physical
force and do what they have to do to bring peace back to that community.
We have police who are not doing their job.
They’re allowing antifa to enter this park.
Oppositions will start calling for the police to take some action.
“It’s time to start restoring order to our communities and stop this lawlessness.”
That can kind of embolden the police who were initially passive into being more active combatants
in the conflict.
But the most frustrating thing about this kind of coverage is that it shifts focus away
from what protesters are actually organizing about.
It forces us into an endless debate about tactics over substance.
What does that get you?
Smashing the windows of a Starbucks, of a Nike store.
What’s the point?
Aren’t you becoming a public nuisance?
There’s no excuse for that kind of violence, right?
Are you at all concerned, though, about the rise in violence?
That violence begets violence begets violence?
And it tends to shut us down to ideas.
So instead of confronting big issues like globalization or police brutality or white
supremacy.
We get think piece after think piece about whether protesters are going too far.
When you think you’re punching Nazis, you don’t realize that you’re also punching
your cause.
Groundbreaking.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t care about violence or property damage.
But you should be wary of how you’re reacting to a biased sample.
News cameras are always looking for the worst, most radical people who decide to show up
to a protest.
But those outliers don’t offer you meaningful information about who most protesters are,
what they’re protesting about, or whether they’re right.
Those are the questions that actually matter.
And they’re the ones that get lost in endless debates about fringe groups like antifa.