By Tanya Sakzewski
Depending on your media of choice, the protests in Los Angeles and the violence that followed either engulfed the entire city and required a military presence or were mainly peaceful, and clashes were restricted to certain areas.
With misinformation, disinformation and fake news about the protests going viral, it’s hardly surprising that so many people believed in conflicting narratives.
So, what role did the media play in either countering or promoting those false narratives?
While there was some good reporting and fact checking, according to Rob Leavitt, President of ABM for Good and a former media educator, the media attention was generally what he calls “bad”. He points to coverage by the conservative right-wing media ecosystem, including influencers, which was “extremely biased” and mainly focused on incidents of violence. He says they framed it as an uprising in Los Angeles that required Trump to bring in troops, as opposed to a set of protests, which then were escalated by Trump bringing in the troops.
“On the right, you had this very distorted coverage with a lot of deliberate misinformation. There were fake images that were flooding social media and mainstream right-wing media,” Leavitt told MDI.
One of those fake stories, which fact-checkers have highlighted, focused on images of police cars ablaze in LA, which were posted on X. Those pictures were actually from a 2020 protest.
David Tuller, senior fellow in public health and journalism at UC Berkeley’s Centre for Global Public Health, says when we talk about media, it is an expansive concept. “Now the media is everything. So, someone posts a blog post and that’s media.”
He says ideas or information posted on blogs, including those considered fringe or extreme, get picked up by other media and are often considered factual. “We do have a real problem in that nobody really knows anymore where information is coming from. So, it’s really hard to disentangle one thing from another and to find out what actually is going on.”
Leavitt says the mainstream media, which the right accuses of being radical left-wing, covered events extensively and there was some very good reporting on the ground. “It was very much oriented towards the small incidents of violence, the numbers of arrests, and the politics in Washington around it.”
He says the media wasn’t focused as much on the people in Los Angeles. “Who are the immigrants being detained? Why were protesters going out and hitting the streets? What were their motivations? What was their background?”
He would like to see more attention paid to these questions. “So, the tone of it was more neutral, but the framing and the amount of coverage were, to me, distorted and not serving the public very well.”
The impact of polarisation
The latest YouGov Trust in Media 2025 poll finds that the US media landscape remains polarised by political party identification. While both Democrats and Republicans are generally more likely to trust certain television news sources, they prefer different ones. PBS, BBC and NBC are more trusted by Democrats, while Republicans favour Fox News, Fox Business Channel and Newsmax.
“We’re in a situation now where people are living in different realities, and media drives that. Literally huge percentages of the American public believe in entirely different realities. You know, facts,” said Leavitt.
“So absolutely, media is a driver of public opinion and beliefs, and that has become much more polarised. And with the fragmentation of media, we’ve also seen a decline in trust overall. And so there’s a great sense of, ‘I don’t know what to believe, I don’t know who to believe. I’m exhausted. I’m tuning out.’ And that’s awful. It makes it incredibly difficult to have any kind of civil discourse, any kind of rational dialogue. Everything has become politicised,” he added.
Both Tuller and Leavitt say a decades-long attack on the media, especially by politicians, that aims to undermine credibility has helped erode trust.
“I think the single greatest change would be if you stopped having Republicans constantly calling everything they don’t like fake news. This is partly why we have polarisation,” said Tuller.
Media under attack
The protests started in L.A. on June 6, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided workplaces to arrest people who allegedly violated immigration law. The protests, which included both peaceful marches and some violent clashes, prompted the Trump administration to deploy National Guard troops and Marines to the city. California’s leaders have been in a battle with the president over his decision.
At least 27 journalists were among those injured during the protests. The Los Angeles Press Club and Status Coup, an investigative reporting site, have filed a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in federal court, alleging journalists’ rights were violated.
So, is it becoming more dangerous and difficult for journalists to do their job in the US?
Leavitt says there has been “enormous concern” in the media about what happened in L.A. “There’s been outrage, there’s been a lot of dialogue, discussion, and argument about how journalists are being targeted. Again, this isn’t new, but it’s an escalation. Journalists have always been at some risk historically, but especially over the last 10 years with the constant repetition of ‘fake news’, ‘fake media’, ‘the enemy of the people’. All this rhetoric enables and to some extent encourages violence against journalists doing their job. Not surprisingly, it has led to an increase, and it’s incredibly alarming.”
So, where does that leave the media and its future?
Leavitt is concerned, but he says there is still hope. Tuller says the concern isn’t limited to the media, as other institutions are also under attack.
“I’m encouraged by the very, very good reporting that continues and by the flourishing of more and more independent voices around the media. But it’s an uphill battle that they’re facing. So, you or I have access to more good information than ever before, but it’s overwhelmed by disinformation, misinformation, and distorted information, and we haven’t even talked about AI,” said Leavitt.
