Journalism is dying because journalists do not tell true stories. They look for angles that benefit the left and print them, true or not.
“Preschool Teacher, 22, Arrested on TV After Condemning Trump” read a scary-sounding headline. The scary-sounding subheadline read: “Cops moved in with handcuffs while the teacher was still on camera.”
It’s not until the fourth paragraph that the truth comes out: Jessica Plitcha wasn’t arrested because she is a preschool teacher, or 22, or even because she did a TV interview against Trump.
She was arrested for organizing a protest against Venezuela regime change that blocked traffic and refused multiple direct orders to use the sidewalk instead.
Protesting is not a crime; it’s a First Amendment-protected activity. But blocking traffic and leading others to block traffic is a crime.
Journalists carry two tools in their hands: Credibility and the ability to influence events. But too often they do what the Daily Beast did here: toss aside their credibility to influence newsmakers and the public.
A story about a protester blocking traffic and being arrested for it is not that interesting. You wouldn’t read that—nobody would.
But if you make her a preschool teacher, and 22, and say she was arrested during a TV interview, you might make it sound like speaking on TV against President Donald Trump was her real crime.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as soon as I finished an interview speaking on Venezuela, I was arrested,” Plitcha told a news outlet named Zeteo.
Never do Plitcha or the Daily Beast wrestle with the facts of the matter, or the actual cause of the arrest. Facts have a way of making a sexy story less sexy. The left needs a narrative promoted: People are being snatched off TV interviews when they criticize Trump.
A few rare souls who actually read news stories will learn the truth. But most people? They’re scanning headlines and maybe subheads, and that’s it. All they know about a story is what the Daily Beast editors tell them.
They don’t know that the Daily Beast is in the business of leftist politics, not neutral news. And they’d be horrified to learn how much of what they read is slant, written by political actors with press badges.
It’s not until the 14th paragraph that the Daily Beast’s Tom Latchem does any reporting of his own, securing a statement from the Grand Rapids Police Department. For the first 13 paragraphs, Latchem was rewriting other people’s work.
The statement from Grand Rapids police did not help his narrative of a young teacher whisked off in handcuffs after daring to speak against Trump. In GRPD’s telling of events, it was Plitcha’s behavior that got her arrested, not her politics, and not her TV interview.
Latchem wrote: “A spokesperson said more than ‘25 announcements were made from the PA system of a marked police cruiser for the group [of protesters] to leave the roadway and relocate their activities to the sidewalk,’ but that they had ‘refused lawful orders’ to move to the sidewalk and ‘began blocking intersections.’”
But the narrative was too sexy to part ways with. Latchem was not about to let the facts get in the way of a good story. So the headline stayed, and the three people who read all the way to paragraph 14 learned the actual truth.
This way, Latchem can tell media critics that he printed the truth, even as the story and its presentation are misleading.
Worse than Latchem’s rewriting of the facts is the idea, in his story and others, that doing a TV news interview is somehow a forcefield protecting an interviewee from consequence.
Jessica Plitcha is not a martyr. For a few hours on Tuesday, she was just another citizen living with the consequences of her actions.
James David Dickson is host of the James Dickson Podcast. Join him in conversation on X at @downi75.
