A model of this text first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” publication. You can sign up for free here.
As the Department of Homeland Security floods social media with “propaganda” movies, and pro-Trump commentators flock to Portland and Chicago in search of a “rebellion,” native residents are responding with… hen fits and intelligent jokes.
Thursday evening on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel tossed to a “special report” from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, “reporting from war-torn Chicago.”
Pritzker, sporting physique armor, performed a TV reporter in the video clip. “We’ve seen people being forced to eat hot dogs with ketchup on them,” the governor quipped.
While Kimmel’s present was airing, an actual reporter for The Oregonian was recording a video outdoors the ICE facility that has lengthy been a magnet for protests in Portland. The subject: “Protest frogs are multiplying.”
The video showcased how Portlanders are sporting inflatable costumes to mock what one in every of the frog cosplayers referred to as “insane government overreach.”
The dress-up “dismantles their narrative a little bit,” Jack Dickinson, often known as the “Portland Chicken,” told Willamette Week. “It becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.”
Pritzker and Dickinson have one thing in widespread: They’re utilizing the instruments at their disposal — sensible telephone cameras, social media apps and satire — to show “war” rhetoric right into a punchline. “The Daily Show” did it too, with this clip labeled “REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.”
Conservative journalist Andy Ngo pushed back early Friday morning by claiming the costumes in Portland “serve the function of masking the violent extremism to make the direct action appear like a family-friendly gathering on camera, and to whitewash the past ultraviolence.”
So, as at all times, it comes all the way down to which movies and posts individuals select to imagine.
However, “in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s ‘hellscape’ — as the White House described Portland on Wednesday — and the narrative that the Trump administration has wanted has been supplied by a coterie of right-wing influencers elevated by Mr. Trump himself,” The New York Times’s Anna Griffin and Aaron West wrote in a new piece this morning.
Trump’s anti-Antifa roundtable is only one instance. “Right-wing podcasters, writers and pundits are flocking to Democratic deep-blue cities to document the scene for their massive audiences but also, in some cases such as Portland, to spar with left-wing demonstrators,” NBC’s David Ingram and Jo Yurcaba reported.
It’s usually useful to think about pseudo-events like these anti-ICE protests as phases, as a result of then you’ll be able to observe the performers accordingly.
Take this quote, for instance: Local TV reporter-turned-MAGA poster Jonathan Choe told NBC, “This is now a full-blown information war that we’re in, so being on the front lines is more important than ever…”
Sometimes a easy picture montage can function the strongest fact-check.
Earlier this week, when President Trump resumed his insistence that “Portland is on fire,” I logged onto Getty Images and looked for photographs from Oregon.
Photographer Spencer Platt had simply printed dozens of beautiful day-in-the-life-of-the-city photographs. A person sunbathing in a public sq.; a lady ordering espresso; a pair strolling by means of a park; this was the actuality in the metropolis Trump referred to as a “hellhole.”
Yes, Platt additionally took photographs at evening of officers standing in formation whereas protesters gathered outdoors the ICE facility. But the photographs confirmed the disconnect between Trump’s “Portland is burning to the ground” rhetoric and the on-the-scene actuality.
Oregon Public Broadcasting did one thing comparable final weekend, producing an Instagram video with timestamped photographs that contradicted Trump’s hyperbole.
“Our OPB team is reporting the facts on the ground as they unfold with as much context as we can offer,” stated the community’s CEO, Rachel Smolkin. “When the facts diverge from statements about the city, we note the discrepancies. Video and photos are powerful reporting tools in this type of news coverage.”