Paul Cantrell
One of the thousand surreal things about living near the epicenter of the George Floyd uprising was watching how international coverage and public conception did and did not match what I was seeing with my own eyes.
The reporting by and large was…not great. Some of it was the sort of Sinister Oligarchic Propaganda a cynic would assume…but mostly it didn’t even rise to that level of competence. It was thin, flat, facile, easy.
And then there was Unicorn Riot.
Paul Cantrell
@UnicornRiot ran a live feed into the wee hours, night after night, with a report just sticking a mic into people’s faces.
A moment that stands out:
A young Black man, maybe 20-ish, offered the reporter wandering and impassioned reflections on the moment: years of suppressed injury and frustration bubbling up, thrilled at the feeling of being heard, sensing the historical scale, clearly uncomfortable with the destruction and grapping with the ethics of it.
And then…
2/
Paul Cantrell
@UnicornRiot
…all of a sudden, a sloppy-looking white guy comes barging between them carrying an entire stop sign and wearing nothing but a pair of underpants, visibly high out of his mind.
Not missing a beat, the reporter puts the mic in his face and asks for his thoughts. He freezes, unable to process what’s happening or even find a single word, them stumbles off camera.
•That• was the uprising.
3/
Paul Cantrell
People had so many easy stories they liked to tell, based on the slimmest knowledge, about precisely •who• was out on the streets that summer.
Those stories are all too easy. There were so many people there, so many •kinds• of people there, for every conceivable reason, all at once.
The only reporting that captured that was Unicorn Riot: not trying to tell their story about who was there, but simply showing us by giving every person a moment for their own voice to be heard, as it is.
4/
Paul Cantrell
There was a similar moment when Minneapolis Public School students occupied an admin building during the 2022 teachers’ strike. Press quoted admin extensively — “students are being ‘used’ by the teachers, blah blah” — but it was really hard to tell from coverage precisely •why• the students were there.
You know what Unicorn Riot did? They •asked them•.
5/
Yeshaya Lazarevich
@inthehands
I used to know those people back in my antifa days. They're good, conscientious journalists. Sometimes I wish we could still talk to one another.
Paul Cantrell
Unicorn Riot ran long, minimally edited video interviews with the students about who they were, why they were there, and what they wanted. Their humanity and individual complexity was nothing like the impression that mainstream press coverage gave — even good coverage! They were intelligent, thoughtful, messy, diverse, powerful, inspiring.
6/
Paul Cantrell
As we all ask “Whither the press?!” in this moment of widespread media failure, Unicorn Riot offers a shoestring-budget model for one kind of success:
Just share people’s voices, as they are. Lay off the reality TV treatment.
Yes, the reality TV treatment: that’s what most press coverage has become, especially political coverage. Is it any wonder a reality TV star thrives in this environment?
There is another way.
/end
Paul Cantrell
@alter_kaker
They do a great service — and per the thread, I think they’re at their best when they simply show up to document and amplify. It’s a grossly undervalued activity. The press is so obsessed with packaging.
Paul Cantrell
@michael_w_busch @UnicornRiot
Yup. Glued to it through the night — both to understand the moment, and to learn whether the chaos was moving our direction.
Michael Busch
After moving back to Minnesota in 2022, I heard from someone in local government that they had been watching @UnicornRiot during the 2020 uprising because that was one way to understand what was actually happening in the Twin Cities.
Robert Link
@inthehands "Whither the press"? How the press was withered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine#Revocation
Jamie McCarthy
@inthehands That is a great contrast to draw, and great analysis.
Media coverage, when it’s not looking for shocking footage to rerun a hundred times, just wants to find a narrative. It has to be one sentence long. Whether it’s accurate doesn’t much matter.
The goal is to make viewers think “I understand this thing now” so they can view ads, and talk to their friends about what they saw, without being distracted by nuance or cognitive dissonance.
Paul Cantrell
@phaedral
Certainly one ingredient
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