The media response to the Normandale Park Mass Shooting

8:26AM Mar 9, 2022

Speakers:

Piper

Josh

Keywords:

people

police

homeowner

portland

shooting

protest

oregonian

march

shooter

local

protesters

specifically

talking

person

gun violence

media

framed

victims

narrative

story

Friends and neighbors here listening to Portland from the left, my name is Josh

and I am Piper and today we're going to talk about the media coverage of the Normandale Park shooting in Portland, Oregon.

We wanted to do a content warning before this episode because we're both going to be talking about far-right extremist violence at a protest a shooting a mass shooting that happened just a few weeks ago. And we're also going to be talking about the response to that. So there's a lot of reactionary commentary, people insulting the victims of the shooting.

We thought we would take this a little bit chronologically, because the order that these things happened and how long they happened for I think is a huge part of what we need to pay attention to in this story. How did you first learn what was happening?

I don't have this necessarily documented, because it was a pretty busy night for communicating with people and texts and direct messages and stuff. But I think I saw somebody I didn't follow, say, say there was a shooting. And so I don't remember the count either. If there was somebody that was there anything,

but when you say the account, like you're talking, are you just talking about Twitter?

I am just talking about Twitter. So yeah, so I was, you know, presumably sitting on my couch in my living room perusing Twitter,

the reason I started using Twitter a lot more in the past couple years, did have to do with the uprising. And that being a place where I could get sort of like really in the moment news from people I trusted. So if I wanted to know where were people right now, and where I should show up? You know, is there something really is there enough numbers somewhere, things like that, I sort of got into a habit of that being a source. So it's sort of like a breaking news thing, but from your friends.

Breaking news from your friends,

at least that's how I think of it.

I actually muted the words breaking news, because some of the most annoying tweets have breaking news in them. But it actually really doesn't work to my benefit when there's actual breaking news. So yeah, I mute a lot of stuff.

From what I remember. What I already knew, is that someone had come to this this march, which is a common march that happens twice a week. Usually in Portland, it is a very controlled march. It's very regulated, there's a lot of rules about it. In fact, like Josh, I think we were talking about the other day, like, we're not really we don't really even like rules that much personally. So like, we don't even really go to that march.

Yeah, it's named in the in the kind of group around it's named justice for Patrick Kimmons. And Letha Winston is the leader of this March. And Patrick Kimmons, of course, was one of the people that have been murdered by Portland Police Bureau, he was shot nine times in the back. And so Letha frequently says, you know, this is justice for Patrick Kimmons, and all others, affected by police violence. So there's like a real targeted group, a group that marches very consistently in neighborhoods all over the city, at different times of day to sometimes do evening marches. And as middle of the day stuff, of course, it's a group of people from all over Portland and the surrounding area. I think that's what is sometimes getting missing a lot of the coverage because I've seen a lot of like, especially in the far right stuff. It's like Antifa, shooting stuff like this. But this is a specific group of people that have been working on this project for years. At this point,

what I heard first is this march that I'm very familiar with its existence, and someone came up and shot people at the march. So that's all I knew, at the point that people were shot. And but someone had like, come to shoot them. That was the extent of it.

I think the second thing that I heard about it, you know, again, this is kind of just unverified friends of friends on Twitter, stuff like that. Piper and I both had friends at the march and then also like that were kind of relaying information a little bit. And so I think the second thing that I knew about it was that protesters who are armed had interrupted the mass shooting with return gunfire, again, very fuzzy details. And it was like, it just it seemed that the the shooting, the active situation was over.

And this is not the first time that this march has been targeted with violence from outsiders. I know Josh you were reviewing our recent other time that this has happened.

Yeah, it was just a few months ago. And this this has been a recurring theme with their marches because they've been targeted by the far right. Particularly Andy Ngo and other propagandists like him. They post you know, where the march is coming up, they post the flyers, we've also got other, you know, anonymous and semi anonymous accounts, targeting these marches, specifically because they're consistent, and they're in the public. And specifically, there's one recent time a few months ago when somebody in a bright red truck was, you know, coming down the street facing the march. The march was on a pretty small, you know, in Portland is particularly in the neighborhoods and stuff. Yes, small side streets and stuff. It was a pretty small side street, not the kind of thing that could have two cars pass each other along with the cars parked on the street, and especially not with a march and a protest going through and the footage I saw from one of the live streamers that was at the event showed this person pulling up it showed them getting really aggressive immediately, kind of leaning out their car and brandishing a weapon, a firearm of some sort. And after kind of being being chilled out a little bit, he kind of got back fully into his truck, and then drove through the march. And so the protest kind of like put up with us, basically, and just dove out of the way tried to protect everybody. And as he was leaving, he then stopped again, got out of his car, with his gun stuck in the back of his pants and started to rush the protesters again. And it was just like a time after time after time, at that point, he was interrupted, somebody tackled him, you know, got a gun away from him. And that situation has actually been represented by Andy Ngo, and other people like him as though the protesters and the people there were attacking this random dude, who was just going about his business. But this is a man who had driven by the protest before, had done things like this before. And I believe he faced some charges for this event, I don't know where that is in the system, you know, cases are taking a long time and stuff. But this is not like a protest, attacking a neighbor that's just randomly there. This is literally some dude attacking a protest full of neighbors.

And there have been other instances at these marches of people coming after them cars, hacks, that kind of thing. And car attacks are pretty common in Portland, they've become increasingly common. So a few of the things that anytime there's a protest in Portland, of any scale or organization level, there will be people called Corkers, who block off the streets. So if you're marching from one place to another, folks on bikes, motorcycles, sometimes cars, sometimes even standing there, well go ahead of the march and block off the other streets. So the cars have to go around, basically, so that no one gets hit by a car, purposely or accidentally. And then also, there are folks that do have self defensive weapons that often are with the march carry them, that happens pretty much anywhere. It's legal in Portland,

the quick, specific notes about that will be helpful to understand this particular protest. And the people like adjacent to it is that if you have your concealed carry in Oregon, you can also carry a open, loaded weapon. So that that's kind of the requirement to carry a loaded weapon, there's more restrictions when you're in like federal property, or near certain buildings and stuff like that. But specifically, many of the people involved with this particular march do have concealed carry, they also have been training a lot with firearms and stuff like that, because they've been attacked with firearms. So there's some need for self defense. And again, we'll remind you, this is a very standard Black Lives Matter march, meaning that they're protesting police violence. So the idea that they they would have anyone else to call for help when being attacked, is just false. Like they have no backup, they have no defender or protector, so it is like imperative on them as a group to protect themselves. Part of that is people like Corkers, you know, blocking out the streets, and making sure other cars don't run into a part of that is people prepared to deal with, you know, other threats of violence. And all of that's working toward a whole of literally just walking down the street and saying, you know, police shouldn't kill Black people. Like it's we're not talking about something very complicated or something very aggressive.

They're just trying to gather and march and yell the names.

Absolutely.

So then the first stories start coming out in the local media, sort of in that more official Breaking News context.

Yeah, we started seeing updates, specifically from local reporters that we know

and those stories universally cited the police.

Yep.

Or someone familiar with the investigation, which is probably anonymous police most likely.

Yeah, I wanted to point this out. Because the some someone familiar with the investigation, I think the entirety of my life, I've read over that and not really noticed it. I sincerely don't know that I've ever like connected the dots that like clearly people familiar with the investigation, are going to be police or you know, somebody working for law enforcement or whatever. Just to highlight that, again, when you read something like "someone familiar with the investigation said," that is a off the record cop. And you know, you know, our position on the police. We don't need to necessarily reiterate that. But it's important to know where information is coming from, which is a big part of this media response.

What we heard from their story was, there was a homeowner in some kind of clash. There were shots. In the clash.

shots fired. Yeah.

And this stayed the totality of the information from the police for days. So we have a few days of the homeowner clash story going on being reported in all of the local media outlets. Some of them said allegedly, most of them did not. They said things like confirmed from the police, things like that,

especially in the headlines and then the the Twitter posts itself, because a significant portion of the public can't even read some of the Oregonian's articles as an example But also, just people don't click through past a tweet. So there's some kind of responsibility on local media to actually clearly portray the truth in even, you know, short form media like tweets or in other places like on Facebook or whatever.

And we know in retrospect that within two hours, the cops actually knew that it was not a homeowner. Now we know that so now we know for days, there was this, this terminology sitting out there in the world of there being a clash with a homeowner, when they actually, the only information they were giving they already knew was false.

There's actually even the following day. So Sunday, they attempted a press conference or something out out on the street for some reason, presumably, so people would show up in protest it, which we did. You know, people did, and then later on Sunday, they had like a zoom presser with the Public Information Officer and some of the press, and specifically, he wouldn't even commit to the fact that the shooter was not at large.

Mm hmm.

I remember there was one journalist who asked like, Can Can people is it safe out there? And he just said, like, people have guns, I don't know.

Yeah he's like, some people are safe with their guns. Some people aren't safe with their guns. Who knows?

Yeah, and this is after, like, the day after a mass shooting, this guy's not even telling us that the shooter is in the hospital, which is the thing that we knew

the police would not even confirm that and he had not been charged at this point, which I don't think is abnormal with him being in the hospital. But I think it's pretty abnormal to not say that he's in the hospital, just to be like, who knows where he is.

I keep oscillating between thinking that some of these decisions or some of the problems with the police response, are attached to low staffing numbers. But honestly, there's no reason to trust that because they've been slowing down work this entire time. So the fact that it puts the public in danger, like police kill people, so that's just more liberal bullshit in the back of my head, convincing me that people in power are good. If you need to hear somebody say that. There you go.

They knew where he was.

Right. Right. They could have just said no, though. The shooters in the hospital were good. Yeah. I mean,

he could have said something vague, like he's unable to harm anyone, we can confirm that.

Well, and we've we've mostly been talking about the police response so far. And specifically, I wanted to highlight one of the phrases we got out of I believe Shane Kavanaugh was one that posted it. And it was the kind of thing that was like, you know, a source familiar with the investigation said that this person didn't have any political affiliations, which had a pretty big impact on some of the like tertiary sources. And some of the far right conservative media, they really hung on to that specifically the homeowner, but also with the lack of political affiliation. So those are two things I heard a lot when kind of looking through that stuff.

So in this this period of a couple days where this narrative was just kind of floating around. And there was really no not much of a counter narrative just like literally our friends during this period of two days. That's when the national media started picking up the story you know, it is a mass shooting, there's something there it went out and a lot of different outlets, York Times actually was surprisingly better than others because one of the victims outed themselves in order to give some quotes so it wasn't quite as bad. But um, overall, it was very bad. Overall, that police narrative made it all the way to the national media in that moment that the national media was paying attention to this story. So I I wrote down kind of like what I consider like the peak of the narrative hitting the national which was the Reuters their headline was "clash between armed homeowner and protesters sparked shooting"

clash between

I'll read it again,

yeah, yeah please do

"clash between armed homeowner and protesters sparked shooting." So you don't even know who shot, for one, it assumes there's some kind of a battle happening before hand, there's a homeowner. So the only thing really true there is that there was a shooting, because it also wasn't protesters. It was Corkers, who actually are the people that are far away from the march just blocking the street.

This headline is so bad, I'm sorry, you kind of take me by surprise a little bit. So So number one, fuck them. And then number two, maybe as, as an outlet ourselves, let's take this moment to center the victims of this shooting. I will figure out a way to get the link out for their GoFundMe. There's two of them. There's one for the folks who received gunshots and also for a friend that was murdered T Rex. And then also there's a separate fundraiser for the person that was able to interrupt the shooting. They also need help with security stuff and health care stuff. So we'll make sure those links are there. And and Absolutely, in doing this podcast and talking about the media response, our hope is to make fewer victims what we have actually seen is an immediate response really feels like they're trying to inspire more shootings like this. So just just want to mention that this is their deal that the people were there that night and the people who got shot. This is their trauma and the thing that they're holding, and we want to like extend whatever reach we have to try to fight back against the bullshit and lies that are surrounding this.

There's a piece in the Intercept where the headline is "survivors of a deadly attack on a Portland protest were victimized twice, first by the gunman, then by the police." What I wanted to add was that they're also victimized by the local media, who are people that they share community with like this. These are people that live in our city they’re people we talked to, they also victimized the survivors again. So I think we don't want to leave out their culpability in this because they don't have to report this way. And I think that's a big part of the story.

It really, if you think about the reporting in your local newspaper, on the TV, even in some of the, you know, local alt weeklies and stuff like that, a massive chunk of the information comes from the police, when you're talking about TV news, specifically with crimes or something that happens quickly. Frequently, their only source is the police. And so as much as you know, we can say as, as a community or group of people or whatever list you want to put yourself on that's like anti police, anti policing, the structures and the media all around us are repeating police narratives constantly.

I want to talk about what happened next. Because I think it also presents like an alternative way things could go. There were these couple days of this narrative hanging out there. In the meantime, there were people trying to learn the identity of the shooter.

Yeah, so probably starting, I actually saw some of my friends that are researchers and stuff in town, talking about the details of the scene and what to be looking for as far as trying to figure out the information about the shooter, also what happened, because again, really what we have are the kind of, you know, what the, the victims of the shooting are actually comfortable with publishing at the time in the moment, combined with a police narrative. So having additional sources, additional people looking, looking into things, you know, pulling up information, that kind of stuff is really important. Specifically, I remember that that same night, within a few hours, somebody mentioned that there weren't a lot of like properties you could own nearby that it was mostly rentals and stuff. It was just like kind of one of these immediate oh, wait a second, they're saying homeowner, but we already know that there's not tons of owner occupied units nearby. So extending off of that there was a bunch of people that were working on the identity of this shooter specifically, I think they actually found out then a name and had a patial ID within the night. And we're just confirming it the next day. And the shooting happened Saturday evening. And then by Sunday evening, a local Antifascist, John the Lefty had actually published kind of the results of this research and information and documentation, which combined both the research from local antifascists that were just kind of getting involved in and just participating in this shooter story because of the shooting and because the relationship to folks that were protesting, but it also had years and years of research done by Antifascist furries. So it turns out the shooter was formerly part of local furry communities in Portland had had already been kicked out, you know, furries are famously Anti Fascist and like, really pay attention to the community really pay attention to the dynamics and watch out for, you know, far right people and extremists and stuff. So this is the person who had been kicked out of the furry community who had been sent information to both ppb and the FBI, on death threats and Doxxing and other like harassment and stuff like that his neighbors all had known him as someone who had brandish weapons or otherwise, you know, make threats and stuff, particularly about Black Lives Matter or about protesters and things like that

Antifascist researchers, through like, worked together and published through John the lefty, who wis well known to local journalists. He has his face and name, he's not an anonymous account, like, people know who he is, he goes to many events, he shares information with them. And I believe I don't really have like concrete evidence of this. But I believe it pushed outlets to publish sooner. So they had also been gathering this information, but the police had not yet released the identity of the shooter. And I believe it probably pushed them to publish sooner. At minimum, what it did was, it gave a counterweight to this overarching narrative, there is now a different story out there. And it stopped the ability of the story to continue growing like the false story to continue growing within the local media.

So along with the homeowner narrative that really was ended by John the Lefty's thread, which is again, publishing research from a bunch of other people we did a little bit of, we talked to a few people that were involved and just talk to them about the process and stuff. Because one of the things we really think there's some opportunity for is for new sources that are, you know, open to the idea. I really think that there might be some opportunity for local researchers local, like antifascists to support local news media and not necessarily give them a narrative or really feed them anything but just kind of if we could develop a relationship where there's a little bit of communication we could potentially like just provide them information.

Sometimes it's just as simple They don't know who was present at an event and antifascist researchers absolutely do.

Yeah, and I don't even necessarily, I think there's a lot of things to know in town, I continually find out new stuff that I had no idea about before, and then realize that it was like very obvious to a lot of people. So I think this is just an extension of us wanting better information to be out there. The story that this person was a homeowner was false. And the reason that it's important for us to keep repeating that is because local local news media and then also as an extension, the national media, they would consider a homeowner as someone that is, you know, a part of their community. They're a dedicated neighbor, someone that cares about the surrounding area. And when you say renter, they think temporary person, someone that's not connected to their neighborhood, someone that's not kind of devoted to an area long term.

There's also the the piece that by saying homeowner, like by identifying the shooter, as a homeowner, you make it seem like their home was somehow part of this event, right? Because why is it a relevant thing to call them a homeowner, if you're just like the shooter, it's like, well, yeah, they're the person that shot the that's the relevant, noun to give them, the homeowner makes it sound like ah, there's something going on with their home, maybe they like came up to his home. And they were doing something there, which did not happen at all. So it's like a homeowner, a clash with a homeowner makes it sound like it's a clash in their home,

then also the description of it as being a clash, I saw shoot out. This is one person doing a mass shooting and then being interrupted by another person. This shooter killed one person and then put a bunch of other people in the hospital, they are the attacker, they're the person, the aggressor. And so any description like clash or shootout, it's just it's, it's number one, not factual, and also it frames the situation as though there's like two equal parties going at it or being combative when this was an attack that was stopped. In any other situation where there was a mass shooting and someone stopped it with their gun, they would be celebrated. The NRA would be doing you know commercials with them, all that kind of stuff. But because these are protesters in support of Black lives, they're targeted and framed with this kind of nefarious malicious intent as though you know, they were doing something wrong when these are literally civil rights activists that are trying to stop policing from murdering people.

They are people who are there to stand in the way of traffic so that no one gets run over. They are not armed. A stand in the way of traffic. That's what they do. They were wearing dresses, like they're just they're there to protect people and not they're not even participating in the march. And the person who stopped the shooting actually had to come over to them to stop the shooting.

Yeah, these are people providing safety, not people in a clash, not people fighting Corkers aren't picking fights right they're there to chill people out and encourage people, hey, we'll be out of your way in a second. Just going through here.

So then the local media finally did did report on the identity of the shooter.

Mm hmm. Yeah, there's a couple things I wanted to note about that the first thing I actually think was a positive, we did mention that Ben Smith was kicked out of the local furry community, because I think our audience, like understands what that means, and can take that in context and understand that the furry community and furries are not by by default, you know, extremists are far right, or whatever, they actually kick out people like this, they monitor for people like this. Whereas I think probably a broader audience might not be able to catch that right away. It might be framed poorly, for instance. So I was actually pretty happy that especially local TV news didn't really mention it. They did talk about his harassing posts, and and him like, you know, threatening people with guns and stuff like that mentioning anti Black Lives Matter stuff on the internet, but they didn't go into detail about his relationship with the furry community. So as long as we're saying bad stuff about them, I actually really appreciated that. I think that was the right call.

So there were some things that were fine about their coverage, for sure, there were still some major problems, one of which, in my opinion, was that it still was framed as sort of this like recent radicalization kind of thing. And sort of like, this is an existing narrative that I that really bothers me when it's like all radicalization is the same just like extremism, like things are getting more extreme. Polarization, the way they framed it with sort of just like this recent radicalization, not a long standing set of views he holds kind of reinforced that view, which because they do so much reporting where they're like the radical far left, putting it in the context of their overall storytelling is still that like extremism sort of a frame, they certainly did nothing to challenge that frame.

reinforcing a radicalization in 2020 really reinforces the idea that the uprising was somehow like wrong or bad, you know, redirecting it from other things, redirecting it from his lifelong harassment and you know, threatening people and stuff, I think is really again, one of the things that is a little bit subtle, but also something that I think that people really trying to do the best reporting should be paying more attention to

police this entire time have had better video of the event, actually, there was a GoPro video that they took into evidence. They've had video of it the whole time. So this is a few days later, other people broke the identity of the shooter. The police did not.

So yeah, in the wake of this in the next couple of days, we didn't see any kind of official information from the police. We didn't see a lot from the mayor's office. But on Tuesday, he had a press conference that included him. Police Chief Chuck Lovell, the district attorney, Mike Schmidt, and then a few other state level people. And the press conference seemed to be about combining all of the gun violence from the previous weekend. So that included this mass shooting that we've been speaking about at length, it also included a police shooting, excuse me, a police murder. The police killed somebody that same weekend, in fact, that same day, and then there was a separate shooting that happened the next day where a woman was killed. And then also two children were shot. So three very serious incidents. But one was at an anti police protest. And one was the police murdering somebody. So in both of those cases, you know, police wouldn't help much the police were hurting people.

We fundamentally believe that police won't stop any gun violence. But specifically, they won't stop gun violence they committed or against their enemies.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think I think that's very clear. Will they stop the other kind of gun violence? We don't think so. But definitely not the other two.

So yeah, they had this press conference. And they're actually some pretty good questions from the reporters there. But yeah, like I said, they're trying to tie all of this together as though gun violence is this one problem, and it's encapsulating all of it. And by making it vague enough, they can move the numbers around to say whatever they want, they can say the gun violence went down, they could say the go, miles went up. And they can communicate the message they need to in order to get the funding or make the decisions, they want to as far as controlling power and doing whatever they want in the city.

And they use, they used this as their narrative. They use this to justify increased policing, of gun violence, which we know would not help 100% In two of those situations, for sure.

You don't even have to go into the research, right? We can just talk about that weekend and be like, Well, would you have helped at the protest? Probably not. It would have been very difficult to get there in time. And it's not like you've ever protected anti police protesters. And then in the other situation, you killed somebody. So we're thinking fewer police. What do you think Piper

Fewer police, I think would improve the situation. This is an instance where we know for sure the police lied, like they knew he wasn't a homeowner, they were telling the news media homeowner, it was getting repeated and got repeated so much it made it into the national story. But this person who was not a homeowner, and the police knew was not a homeowner, and was the shooter. So they made it all the way to the national media. And so we have all the local media having reported this incorrect story so badly that it told the national story and they are unable to correct it at that point, right. Because it's done. The national media has moved on. Local media basically failed to Portlanders. So I think in this situation, because they took the cops at their word. So what did they do? Did they did they reassess their standards publicly? Did they print retractions? We know that the Oregonian. You know that the Oregonian and others did do updated articles, but they didn't say they didn't like undo their old articles.

Yes, this is the thing that we're seeing now in thinking about the media reaction and thinking about how we could do this better how we can help. Is that the initial story that gets told, and particularly the details that I'm thinking of it as an anti woke agenda, but it's just broadly like anti leftist anti Black Lives Matter. This is the stuff you know Andy Ngo, Tim Poole, Steven Crowder, Glenn Beck, if you want to go old school, Tucker Carlson, right, those are national figures. And these people they'll grab on to the early story and repeat those details and then when you go search on YouTube for you know Normandale shooting, the first thing you're gonna find is a video from Tim Poole talking about this homeowner and how he was defending himself. Or you're gonna have you know, maybe something on Twitter from Andy Ngo talking about this murderous JFP march

The following Sunday the Oregonian put out this editorial.

I just want to add a little note here. The Oregonian is we've mentioned this before, is written into our city constitution, which is called the city charter as our paper of record, and there's a standing contract. So they're like, the official paper.

You can't really get more official than than the Oregonian, right.

So after this happens, and there's all the misinformation the Oregonian reflects, what do they have to say after their reflection Josh?

Well, specifically in in this op ed, and the byline is just the Oregonian Editorial Board, which has a few members that we know and have Twitter accounts we love to talk to, and specifically the two things that this op ed talks about. I'll just quote a piece of it. "It starts with the inexplicable failure by Mayor Ted Wheeler and Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell to provide a visible presence before the weekend was up." So their first contention is that the mayor wasn't on camera quick enough.

So remember, we were framing like victims, survivors of a deadly attack were victimized twice, first, first by the gunman, then by the police. The Oregonian, so we're positing they were also victims of the local media. Oregonian is positing that they're victims of a lack of a good PR presence from our mayor.

Yeah. And I don't, I don't like disagree that having you know, the leader of the city, quote, unquote, on camera, saying reassuring words is nice, particularly when people are upset. But number one, Ted Wheeler has no connection with the community of people in the groups represented. At this protest, we actively hate him, tried to recall him voted against him. I have multiple pieces of clothes and say, Fuck Ted Wheeler, like it's clearly not a good situation for him to involve himself in. But the useful thing he could have done for the for the city is to actually publish the information about the shooter. Make sure the police publish that, hey, he's in the hospital, he's not going to hurt anybody else. That's pretty useful. Maybe publish some information about the shooter when they found out his ID just as eagerly as they you know, published a mug shots of protesters during the uprising. Let's see, you know, a little eagerness for this. Fucking murderer, right? This is a coward that shot up a protest. Like if Portland is not known for things. It's known for protesting if you go shoot up a protest, you shooting a Portlander and then secondarily, there are other suggestion is that we should fire the police chief like the mayor should fire the police chief, which is an interesting suggestion. I looked it up. We've had about five police chiefs in the last like decade or so. And there have been like incredible problems with each of them. There have been a very, very consistent situation with the police chiefs, and particularly in chief Lovell's case. You know, this is the police chief that's been the police chief since the beginning of the uprising. He was put in place that Yeah. And so for the Oregonian to suddenly decide that the police chief is a problem because there was a mass shooting and he wasn't on camera soon enough is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard.

It's bizarre.

It's it considering like he is the person like at the top it underneath Mayor Wheeler, of course we blame Mayor Wheeler for all of this. But as far as organizationally he is the next one responsible for those 6000 assaults. We experienced

For tear gassing babies

for the shots fired

For tear gassing journalists

the murder that happened that same weekend, we're talking about

violating restraining orders against journalists.

So this is the same police chief that did all of that. And now Now it's gotten too far. And the Oregonian says enough is enough. We need to get rid of the police chief who, as I'm trying to indicate is really just a figurehead and does not matter at all the police before Chuck Lovell were the same as the police under Chuck Lovell. Though we have experienced no difference in policing in the City of Portland underneath this guy's reign.

We should also remember that the Oregonian, very recently came under fire because of receiving information from police leaked information that was false about JoAnn Hardesty, so they received false information from ppb they printed it turned out it was made up and this just happened. The member the police responsible for it, although there was more than one person responsible, but the one that's taking the blame was just fired recently. So I wonder Josh, since they just had this high profile time where they were had by police lies, and then again during the shooting, they were had by police lies they printed them uncritically in headlines, in their paper. They call them a homeowner even though the police knew he wasn't a homeowner. What did they think about that? Did they reflect on that in their editorial?

No, in this piece, there's not a lot of self reflection. They did suggest that protesters should talk to police

interesting.

I just I my notes I just wrote Armenio in all caps next to that because you know, we've done that before.

Yeah, busy You think that, um, if protesters talk the talked to the police, the police would have known that he wasn't a homeowner, even though they went to his apartment themselves,

you know, it's a mystery, because the protesters probably wouldn't have known that. They just knew he had guns. Yeah, this motherfucker.

Anyway, fuck the Oregonian.

Oh, so there's one more thing about this paper that I want to mention. So you mentioned that they got bad info from from ppb before. And they had to publish a retraction because it was a lie.

And this isn't the first time this has happened many times

and then this time at this mass shooting, of course, they got bad information from ppb and they had to put a little retraction at the bottom of the article very subtle one. You know, they blame the police and not the people that repeated the police's misinformation. The following weekend, a driver killed somebody with their car and and the person the victim who was murdered. The article reposted that the police said they were associated with nearby homeless encampment. Number one, not a problem, right? Lots of people living outside lots of people camping, there's not enough housing, so they need to live somewhere. And also, this person wasn't associated with the local homeless encampment, they were actually just a neighbor, a Portlander, who was walking and the association, they even reprinted it in the article, and connecting it to Wheeler's narrative about people being on, you know, camping and otherwise being near busy streets. And he said, "a recent report found that 70% of pedestrians killed and Portland traffic crashes last year we're experiencing homelessness." So again, repeated and repeated situations where they're printing police lies, and then having to do a really light retraction later, I assume because there's no one to hold them accountable. I'm sure there's like right journalistic entities or whatever, but they all agree with them.

I'm thinking about like, even like, if I think about all the news outlets in Portland, I'm the best case scenario that we have currently, is that some folks will publish with the police say and put the word allegedly in front of it, if that's our best case scenario. And instance, John, the Lefty's reporting on who the shooter was, wasn't printed with an allegedly in front of it. Even though he's a known reporter, he doesn't have a history of lying to the to the local reporters like PPB does. He can't even get in there with an allegedly

I can see how journalists would, you know, convince themselves that police are a reasonable source, and a good place to get information, I can see how they would say, I need to repeat this stuff, because it's part of the story, I could just add allegedly or otherwise, make it seem less important. But what Piper's pointing out is that just adding allegedly and only printing police lies doesn't really give us anything, because there's still just the police narrative out there. And the fact that you're throwing allegedly on it just doesn't matter. It just seems like legalese.

Why is a source that has a pattern of lying to you, particularly about certain groups of people, which in this case, are people they would lie about because they are enemies, Why would you print only their story, their version of the telling of events, only facts from them, and not facts from people who do not have a history of lying to you. It just, it just the standard doesn't actually make any sense if what you're doing is seeking truth.

One of the things I want to mention too related to this and part of kind of the whole narrative of the story is that once things kind of get out initially and once confirmed by reputable sources, those things get repeated by far-right media basically, almost immediately. Tim Poole specifically had a 27 minute solo video out by Monday, which didn't include any information about the shooter only really had the initial sources the information about a quote unquote homeowner which is untrue, and he just ripped on it for 30 minutes and just made this really terrible scenario where and antifa come in and get you and what are you going to do your homeowner you want to protect your property, all based on a bullshit narrative all based on lies. And that's video and media that's going to stay out there and be informing people's perspective on this event for years to come. You know, even at this point, already over a million people have seen the clip. So when we talk about not only kind of misinformation from the police, but this kind of language, this kind of framing as it gets to far right media becomes inspiration for mass shooters. You're encouraging people to do things. This is like when they talk about stochastic terrorism they're just talking about people encouraging kind of quote unquote lone wolf events because there's no direct connection with between Andy Ngo, and this guy that shot up a protest only the fact that he followed Andy Ngo on YouTube

Just Just to mention and give a maybe a slightly more well rounded view of this event and the following days and weeks, there was actually a really beautiful vigil setup at the park we can you know, candles and they put up some art and put up T-Res's name and stuff like that. And it was, it has been a really nice place for people to come and have a moment and really connect with other people and kind of offer some solemness and some some seriousness to the event that we really didn't get from Portland, Portland treated this like nothing. It was it was barely a story. We didn't really get that moment from Portland. We didn't get it from the authorities or anything. So I found it really beautiful that, you know, people created it for ourselves that we said, you know, a vigil belongs here that this moment belongs here, and it's a really important sincere moment, grieving moment, something that really was significant for Portlanders,

and then again, local media people who we share a town with, um, covered vigil, and their coverage of the vigil this was KGW positioned it as a threat. And so the people camping there that they didn't know if they were associated with the vigil, talked about there being fire and how it was against city code. They actually tried to report the vigil to the parks department, even after all this even after, you know, the the stories that they've been telling about Portland for the past couple years, longer, but intensified in the past couple years, probably contributed to his hatred of BLM and Antifa and how he kind of talked about them together. And then even after all this, and even after they victimize people with their police lies, there's continuing to victimize the victims of a mass shooting. It just, it's it's a really, it's really dark.

Yeah, they're they were really framing it as though this is an invasion, as though they weren't just Portlanders being at a park. And I certainly know that there's some rules about graffiti and fires and whatever. But you know, the park rangers in their response to this person reporting it said, Yeah, we're gonna take care of it when we take care of it. We're following the instructions of the commissioner that's in charge of parks thanks for your report. Which I that's not a quote. I have no idea. You know, they said something like that, but I thought was kind of cool. I said, Hey, Park Rangers, you're slightly less of a cop today. Only slightly watch your step