Seattle Times fact-checks Trump, gets blown out on social media

Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, September 12, 2024 Contract With Our Readers

Remember the infamous video clip of a CNN reporter saying the Minneapolis Antifa/BLM riots during the summer of 2020 were “mostly peaceful protests” as a building behind him was engulfed in flames?

The Seattle Times could top that in online mockery.

In a “fact check” from Tuesday night’s presidential debate, The Seattle Times contended that “Trump falsely claimed” that “protesters took over a big portion Seattle” during the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) or Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in 2020.

Urgent: Support Free Press Foundation

For the record, CHAZ or CHOP consisted of the takeover of six blocks of Seattle for three weeks. In that time, five black teens were shot and two died while other crimes reportedly spiked 250 percent. Along with the violent crime in the so-called “autonomous zone,” businesses and livelihoods were destroyed.

During the debate, “moderator” David Muir pressed former President Donald Trump to take more responsibility for J6, at which point Trump brought up the protests of 2020, saying “When are the people that burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted? Or in Seattle, they went into Seattle, they took over a big percentage of the city of Seattle. When are those people going to be prosecuted?”

Seattle Times staff writer Vonnai Phair appeared to take issue with Trump’s description of the size of the deadly autonomous zone as a “big portion of the city,” noting that the illegal occupation “initially occupied six city blocks surrounding the Seattle Police Department East Precinct and Cal Anderson Park.”

The Post Millennial noted that Phair “omitted that the occupation followed consecutive nights of rioting that then-Mayor Jenny Durkan responded to by ordering Seattle Police to abandon the department’s East Precinct. The outlet also omitted that the Seattle Department of Transportation spent over $1 million installing barricades for the armed occupiers.

Phair also claimed: “The zone eventually shrunk to be even smaller.”

The article cited only three cases of individuals being charged with violent crimes in the zone and neglected to mention that the hundreds of people who participated in and organized the deadly occupation, including the zone’s “warlord” Raz Simone have yet to be arrested or charged.

Here’s the Seattle Times’ post to X and the blowout ratio:

Help Wanted

  , ,

Seattle Times fact-checks Trump, gets blown out on social media added by on
View all posts by Editor Two →