Bill Barr: 'The American People Are Being Told a Lie by the Media'
Attorney General William Barr said the American people are being fed a lie by the establishment media that the rioting that has become a hallmark of the summer of 2020 is nothing more than peaceful protests.
Barr, during an interview with Mark Levin on Fox News, said the media are trying to undermine the evidence that is obvious to anyone paying attention.
“Anyone with eyes can see what’s happening. They see the violence,” the attorney general said Sunday on “Life, Liberty & Levin.”
“They see these groups of agitators in their black outfits and their helmets and their shields, which incidentally have the hammer and sickle on them most of the time, rushing the police, causing violence, throwing rocks. The people showing up with the rocks and frozen bottles,” he said.
Scenes of chaos in north Portland as #antifa rioters start fires all over. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/K4yLQKs9a1
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 9, 2020
But Barr said those images are only shared by some.
“You don’t see it on any of the national news, you don’t see it on the networks, you don’t see it on the other cable stations,” he said.
“And yet you hear about these ‘peaceful demonstrators.’ So it’s just — it’s a lie. The American people are being told a lie by the media,” Barr said.
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He said the root cause of the establishment media’s distortion of reality lies in its assumption that it exists to present one side of the story instead of chronicling objective truth.
“They are projecting a narrative. When the word ‘narrative’ came into currency, I knew we were in trouble, because the word ‘narrative’ really suggests that there’s no objective truth. There’s no real story of what happened, it’s just everyone has their own narrative,” Barr said.
When Levin asked the attorney general about the media being reliable, he said they were “reliable for being partisan nowadays, I think.”
Barr said that in the world of the big media business, dissent has been marginalized.
“As you and I know, the First Amendment applied to every individual citizen,” he said. “This was the day of the pamphlet and everyone’s speech is the same. What we’re talking here about corporations, corporations that are in the media business. And there are a few of them, and they all pretty much toe the party line.
“The difference in content in terms of the news reporting is all the same. I like it when Fox goes through some of the reporting of each channel, how they use exactly the same phraseology and same talking points. And that’s what you see. It’s become extremely monolithic, and it’s wedded in many ways to the Democratic Party. It’s a partisan press, largely.”
The consequences of distorted reality go far beyond politics, Barr said, and contribute to the deaths of black Americans.
“Take that recent example of us trying to address the upsurge in violent crime that has come along with the demonization of police forces,” he said. “We’ve seen throughout the city — the major cities — a surge in crime and many, many black deaths as a result.
“Those black deaths don’t seem to matter as much to the people who are proclaiming black lives matter.”
Barr said the Trump administration is committed to proving black lives matter through providing educational alternatives and a growing economy as well as strong public safety.
“These are the things that we should be providing to the inner city holistically,” the attorney general said. “But the media recently has looked at our efforts to bring some justice to the streets of these communities that are suffering the violence, and then they equate that with jackboot — what they refer to as jackbooted federal agents going in to crush protestors.
“They don’t — it’s either an amazing lack of understanding of what’s happening around them, or it’s deliberate.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
