The Unrest in Los Angeles and the ‘Theater’ of Trump’s Response
CNN’s Brian Stelter on the performance aspect of protests and the need for context in the images filling our feeds.
In the middle of my kids’ dance recital last weekend, my Apple Watch lit up with a text. “The news out of LA is crazy,” it read. “Are you guys ok?”
The raids around the city by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are, indeed, deeply distressing. But the very real issue here — the attack on immigrants in our country — is being overshadowed by the larger spectacle President Donald Trump has created. In response to the people protesting the raids, Trump sent first the National Guard and then the Marines. California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the use of military forces “purposefully inflammatory” and later referred to it as “theater.”
It has made for a rattling disconnect between life as usual in Los Angeles, a sprawling city home to 3.8 million people, and the images of fires, vandalism and officers in riot gear filling the news. A headline in the LA Times summed it up well: “All of LA is not a ‘war zone.’”
Today’s newsletter is admittedly a departure from decoding fashion. But So Many Thoughts is about better understanding the visuals of any given moment. In that spirit, I wanted to explore what has unfolded in Los Angeles a bit more.
I reached out to my friend, CNN’s chief media analyst Brian Stelter, who is based in New York. He offered up some fascinating insights on the performance aspect of protesting and how Trump’s fixation on imagery has fueled the president’s military-heavy response. We also dug into the role of news outlets in covering — or spinning — the story and how we can all be more responsible media consumers (perspective and proportionality are everything). Keep scrolling for his predictions for coverage of this weekend’s military parade, marking 250 years of the U.S. Army, which falls on Trump’s 79th birthday.
How have you been consuming news of the ICE raids and resulting protests this week? What are your thoughts on the Army celebration — and its parallels to King Charles III’s Trooping the Colour, also this weekend? Click below to discuss in the comments.
For more, fellow Substacker of Emily in Your Phone has compiled the ways in which Trump is turning the presidency into a monarchy.
CNN’s Brian Stelter on the Performance of Protests
Please note: Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Brian, hi. How are you thinking about the images you are seeing out of the protests in Los Angeles?
Brian Stelter: I think of every public protest as a stage. Many of the participants also think that way. A lot of protesters know that they are performing and many of the authorities also are highly aware of the cameras. These events, these spectacles, they are performance stages with a clear intent. The protestors want attention, they want publicity, they want support. In many cases, they stage these events in order to gain that support.
When I think about the visuals, you can’t miss the theatrics. I say that not to take away from the meaning or the agenda or the issue at play, but just to recognize that people are playing their parts. And the press is playing a part. The television cameras play a big part.
In this particular case, the visuals come from three different sources: 1) The protestors themselves as well as the bystanders 2) the government officials and 3) the news media.
The dominant, memorable images of LA in the past week have mostly been news media images of fires and vandalism. There have not been nearly as many memorable images of the peaceful protests or the ICE raids that kicked this off. The most striking visuals — the pictures that are seared into people’s brains — are of the unrest. And ultimately that’s pretty misleading. It’s not that the images are false, it’s that they’re out of context.
Let’s talk about the media and its part in all of this. How are you thinking about coverage?
This is a replay, in some ways, of 2020 and of earlier periods of unrest before 2020. There was something real and serious happening regardless of the presence of the press. I don’t want to lose sight of that. The turmoil, the controversy, the pain — all of that existed in all of those spaces before television cameras rolled in.
But the television cameras do change every protest that they are present at. Television cameras affect behavior. I like the phrase that Jon Favreau has been using: “Anarchist assholes.” There are anarchist assholes who show up at these events to cause havoc, and some of them are attracted to the television cameras.
And television replay changes everything. The looping of certain images really has an impact. That’s the core complaint I’m hearing about the media coverage in this particular case, especially from Angelenos. It’s the looping of the same pictures over and over again, days later, out of context. Five Waymo cars burning on one street in one hour of one day feels like an ongoing emergency. We should be able to talk about that without sounding like we’re minimizing the vandalism. But we need to keep it in proportion.
How can we be responsible news consumers in these moments?
First things first, recognize that bad faith actors are always going to try to sow chaos. There will always be hyper-partisan, hyperactive media outlets that are lying and distorting about unrest.
There’s no perfect word, by the way, for what’s going on. “Unrest” doesn’t feel quite right. “Protest” does not feel sufficient because it doesn’t capture the graffiti and the looting. “Riot” is a highly charged word that exaggerates what’s happening. I wish there was a better word.
Bad actors are going to weaponize video clips and spread lies on social media no matter what.It’s up to the rest of us to seek out more reliable outlets and be constantly applying a layer of scrutiny to the news coverage that we’re consuming.
When I’m watching television coverage of the protests, I try to pay attention whenever the camera or the news chopper zooms out. The closeups are compelling and important. But I think the wide shot is more important because it gives you the context for how big this is — or isn’t. It gives you the scale.
For those of us who work in the news media, there’s only so much we can say because the images are often more memorable in the words. But it is important for the anchors and reporters to be saying that this is one small part of the city, that this is an almost entirely peaceful movement over the course of almost a week. It’s why I was saying it on CNN when I was on the air late at night for a couple of nights in a row, just to express what I knew residents were feeling.
Everyone who follows the news will likely admit that at some point they have been drawn to negativity. A car on fire, for example, can feel more compelling than footage of peaceful protests.
It goes back tens of thousands of years. We gathered around fire to survive.
How do we fight that instinct and get perspective here?
As a viewer, I am constantly looking for clues about proportionality. They’re not impossible to find. The camera zooming out is the best example. But when the curfew was announced, the mayor [of Los Angeles, Karen Bass] was super smart about expressing how limited in scale the curfew was. That is a clue about proportionality right there. She was upfront about it. Looking for those data points is a big part of it.
[EH note: The New York Times offered this in its report about the curfew: “The mayor emphasized that the area under curfew was around one square mile, in a city of around 500 square miles.”]
We have another spectacle on the books for this weekend, a military parade marking 250 years of the U.S. Army. It falls on Flag Day as well as the president’s 79th birthday. What do you make of those visuals?
Take it from [Kentucky Sen.] Rand Paul, who has said that these images are normally associated with North Korea. He said it’s not necessarily the best image to show for the United States. The fact that Republicans are among the chief critics of this is something notable.
My biggest question is about the amount of television coverage. There will be a government feed of live shots. We know that C-SPAN will show all of the parade. I am guessing that Fox News will show almost all of the parade. But we don’t know what other networks are going to do.
And it may be a game-time decision. I have a gut feeling that the biggest story in the United States on Saturday is not the parade. It’s the protests. Back to thinking about this as a stage, as a form of theater — again, not to take away from the message — but there are a lot of people who feel energized by what’s happened in the past few days and they live nowhere near LA, but they want to be heard.
I think Saturday is going to be a split-screen day. It’s going to be the parade on one side and these protests on the other.
What do you think Trump is trying to accomplish with the parade?
During his next three-plus years in office, the U.S. will host the World Cup, the Olympics in Los Angeles and the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Army birthday can be added to that list. It’s another spectacle. Trump is drawn to spectacles. He’s drawn to the television imagery.
A lot of what he thinks he knows about LA is shaped by the television imagery of the protests. You can tell when you look at his Truth Social feed that his feelings about LA are influenced by right-wing TV coverage of LA. Fox’s exaggerations and hyperbole about LA are feeding into Trump’s reactions. It’s not a helpful loop. I remember covering this loop a lot in Trump’s first term, where he would be misinformed by Fox News and then he would misinform the country.
These ICE raids have been made-for-TV raids. It’s not just Dr. Phil McGraw being embedded with ICE. Trump’s administration believes it is not enough to enact the policy. They have to show themselves constantly enacting the policy.
It is an approach for the cable television era, for the TikTok era. It is a very effective approach. Trump and his cabinet secretaries try to show their work the way we were taught to do long division and show the way we came up with the answer. Every day on Fox, those cabinet secretaries are trying to show what they are doing. We get the visual spectacle of the National Guard as a direct result of that approach to the job.
“The protests feel more real when we see them. And very isolated acts of vandalism feel a lot more widespread when we see them.”
Do you think the American public believes something more if there is a visual? The late Queen Elizabeth II famously said she needed to be seen to be believed.
To Trump, this is a form of leadership. But it’s also deeply misleading. All of the misperceptions about LA right now prove how misleading it is. Always ask yourself: Who benefits from this impression being cemented or this video being looped?
You and I come from print newspaper backgrounds, so I say this with a tinge of sadness. People are visual creatures. We watch so much more than we read. The average American spends several more hours a day watching versus reading, and that’s only becoming more true with our phones serving us up endless streams of videos. With that in mind, yes, the raids feel more real when we see them. The protests feel more real when we see them. And very isolated acts of vandalism feel a lot more widespread when we see them.
We’ve been suffering the consequences of this for five years. Some really horrible looting and vandalism happened in June of 2020. It took place for a few days across the country, but Republicans still talk about the “summer of riots” as if it was a months-long ordeal that we still have not recovered from. I lived in Manhattan during the uprising in 2020. The bodega on my block was defaced. It was upsetting to see and then, the next day, the store opened and we were all back in line buying what we needed. But if you didn’t live in Manhattan or you didn’t live in one of the cities that suffered from the looting, then all you know is what you saw on television.
I am not trying to fault the consumer in that case. I’m faulting the people that are writing the banners and looping the video on screen. It was very evident to me in 2020 that Fox was playing videos of fires that were set nearly a week earlier. I remember writing a story for CNN about how dishonest it was to be replaying the fires a week later. We may well see that happen again this week. The disruptions on Saturday and Sunday are still being re-racked, as we say in the control room, and replayed.
I began my career as a television reporter and remember the palpable sense of relief I had when I returned to print, knowing that I didn’t have to come up with video footage for everything I wanted to write about.
That’s a good and sympathetic point about television. It’s not that the producers are necessarily trying to manipulate public opinion. Sometimes they’re just trying to make the screen look interesting. I’ve been guilty of that over the years. Television feeds on the best possible pictures at any given time.
What can we all do in a moment like this?
There’s real value in having people share their own lived experiences — meaning people who live in and around LA logging onto their social network of choice and telling the truth, telling what it’s really like, pushing back on the viral lies.
I love the folks who are just posting videos of their normal day in LA, showing what it’s actually like in their neighborhood. That is not a waste of time. We are all members of the media now. We all contribute to this thing called the news media whether we realize it or not. Those contributions are not in vain. They make a difference.
My thanks to Brian. You can find his work at CNN here and follow him on Instagram at @BrianStelter.
I appreciate your decoding of the ICE activities and "protests." Mr. Stetler's insights about showing their work were also helpful. I appreciate the analysis!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us in this important moment and for this insightful interview. As a fellow Angeleno, I am discouraged by the way some of the news outlets have reported on our city. The City of Angels is a wonderful community full of good people. The bad actors shouldn’t be dominating the news feed. I’m planning to peacefully protest at my local No Kings gathering on Saturday, but not in front of the cameras I hope.🙃