For most people in Los Angeles, it was a run-of-the-mill weekend. There were kids baseball and soccer games, pleasant weather for getting outdoors, and Dodgers games on TV.
On cable and local news, though, as well as X and other strident quadrants of social media, the scene was far less idyllic, playing into the dystopian narrative the Trump administration clearly wanted to advance regarding demonstrations over immigration policy. To put it the way an alliterative TV news chyron might, think “CALIFORNIA IN CHAOS,” with President Trump stoking the fire by tweeting about immigrant invasions and rampant lawlessness.
TV news and social media excel at offering snapshots of what’s happening, but not the big picture. So the images emanating from L.A. (and the outlying city of Paramount, one many Angelenos likely couldn’t find on a map) fueled the distorted scenario that Trump and his acolytes pushed, capitalizing on the fact that those information conduits and their viewers are drawn to the conflict like moths to the (literal, in this case) flames.
Granted, more sober voices tried to clarify the overall dynamic — observing that Trump’s tweets, for starters, were untethered from reality. Yet given the power of his megaphone and the legions who parrot his claims, it’s hard to sway an audience that might have never been to California, or that lacks the media literacy to grasp a few hundred people taking to the streets — in a state with 40 million residents — doesn’t translate into widespread chaos.
“Most people in L.A. probably don’t even know that this is going on,” CNN national security analyst and Harvard professor Juliette Kayyem pointed out on Saturday. “It’s such a big city, and we need an administration that’s not going to get to Defcon 1 every time they see something on TV they don’t like.”
Expecting or even hoping for restraint from Trump, however, merely reflects naïveté, especially because he and his advisors so obviously relish the idea of painting a blue state as something out of a “Mad Max” movie, provoking confrontation and creating cover to try implementing a military response.
That’s all red meat for Trump and his base, playing into the stereotypes of California that Fox News pushes with regularity. Small wonder he’s been spoiling for a fight with the state and its leaders, threatening to cut off federal funding even before the weekend’s flare-up.
By that measure, the few protesters that engaged in violence are playing right into his hands, as his weekend social media tirade — “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!,” he said in one all-caps, three-exclamation-point salvo — made utterly transparent.
The onus for behaving responsibly thus shifts to news organizations and social media commentators with cooler heads, not to downplay or diminish what’s happening but rather to provide what’s so often the first casualty in the breaking coverage of such events: Context.
“There are a few protests downtown, and yesterday’s drama was in a suburb 30 minutes away,” Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau tweeted in response to Trump’s bluster, accurately capturing the geography of what had transpired. “We’re the biggest county in America, with 10 million people, and you wouldn’t know anything is up unless you read the news or happen to be downtown.”
So how has the media fared in the early stages of this manufactured crisis? Predictably, not terribly well.
On Saturday, for example, CNN cut away from its post-game coverage after televising a live performance of “Good Night, and Good Luck” to interview a reporter at the scene in Los Angeles. Then again, the panel assembled to discuss the Broadway show’s lessons in a town-hall-type setting represented the kind of journalism the play’s subject, Edward R. Murrow, almost surely would have hated, a bit of irony that seemed to elude everyone participating in the forum.
Ultimately, having a reporter going live at a chaotic, fast-moving event often doesn’t tell you very much. That’s certainly the case in a situation like the one unfolding in Los Angeles, where Trump’s ICE raids rounding up undocumented immigrants have unleashed anger and prompted fear within local communities, while playing to Trump’s xenophobic appeal and helpfully shifting the focus away from other topics, like the pending tax bill and breakdown of Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk.
Thanks to social media and satellites, the immediacy of information has never been faster, but the tradeoff is that the ability to digest and understand what we’re seeing easily gets lost in the shuffle. And unless you live in L.A., the images create powerful impressions that play into preconceived notions without knowing exactly what you’re seeing, in the same way footage out of Gaza or Ukraine can often turn out to be misleading once we’ve had a chance to absorb and sort out the details of the deeper story behind the pictures.
Murrow could have explained all this, were he still alive, but he’d need to find a sympathetic platform to amplify those views. Alas, as things stand right now, the odds are Fox News wouldn’t have put him on at all, MSNBC would simply let him preach to the choir, and CNN would have cut away from interviewing him to see what its squabbling, both-sides-ing panel of experts had to say.