kenosha church burned
A church burns during the August 2020 Kenosha riots
The mainstream media were unquestionably biased about the August 2020 officer-involved shooting of Jacob Blake, the Kenosha riots that followed, and the story of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people in self-defense, killing two of them after he went to a Kenosha Black Lives Matter protest to protect a car dealership from rioters as well as to render medical assistance if needed.

It's just nuts how much misinformation is out there about what happened in Kenosha, and much of it has come not just from Democrats and the Biden White House directly but also from the MSM - something even some liberals have admitted in recent weeks after they watched the trial and learned the actual facts of Rittenhouse's case.

Related to all of this is a tidbit of information former New York Times tech reporter Nellie Bowles wrote in a recent newsletter regarding a November 2020 story about how the Kenosha riots devastated communities of color.

Before I get to what she wrote last week about her former employer, I wanted to note her background, which is interesting as it relates to her Kenosha story. Bowles admitted earlier this month that when she started at the paper in 2017 that she was a raging liberal with an agenda to push, but said somewhere along the way she woke up and started pushing back, which was not appreciated by her colleagues.

Last month, apparently she and the paper parted ways, something she indicated was liberating to her.

On the Kenosha piece, Bowles noted Thursday that an article she had written on the devastating aftermath of the Kenosha riots was held until after the 2020 election:
A note on Kenosha in light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial: Until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild.

When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots. It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered. Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.

Something odd happened with that story after I filed it. It didn't run. It sat and sat.

Now it could be that the piece was just bad. I've sent in bad ones before, and I'll do it again. A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn't be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.

There were a variety of reasons given — space, timing, tweaks here or there.

Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore. The old man who tried to put out a blaze at a Kenosha store had his jaw broken. The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign in June 2020 amid staff outcry for publishing a piece with the headline, "Buildings Matter, Too."

If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.
Though she says she doesn't know for sure why they prevented the story from publishing until after the election, the insinuation was very clear: It's not the kind of story that would have endeared people to then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Remember, Biden had already suggested Rittenhouse was a white supremacist and murderer at that point, so it wouldn't have done his campaign any good to have a story out that showed the type of people (rioters) Biden was in essence defending.

In other words, we have yet another example here of more media manipulation of the Kenosha riots and the Kyle Rittenhouse case not just to their advantage, but to the advantage of a candidate for higher office.

I should note that this isn't the first time the paper has manipulated their coverage of a hot-button topic in order to help a Democrat. In fact, they admitted as much in April 2020 after their biased coverage of the Tara Reade rape allegation against Biden raised eyebrows.

In response to an interview NYT media reporter Ben Smith did with executive editor Dean Baquet, the question was brought up about why the paper chose to delete a line from their original report which stated that "the Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable."

Baquet point-blank told Smith it was because the line made the Biden campaign uncomfortable.

"I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct. And that's not what the sentence was intended to say," Baquet said.

The New York Times. Full-blown Democrat apologists 'til the bitter end.
Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym "Sister Toldjah" and can be reached via Twitter.