This article by the Daily Dot details the ridiculous reactions by people on the internet to a New York Times article profiling Kyle Rittenhouse. Essentially, people are outraged that the article is only slightly biased against Rittenhouse, as opposed to extremely biased against Rittenhouse. “Its tweet and the article have been resoundingly panned,” the Daily Dot article gloats, while falsely characterizing the riots during which Rittenhouse was attacked as “civil rights protests.”
The reactions detailed in the article range from people canceling their NY Times subscriptions to calling the article “BS” to derisively putting the words “news” and “journalists” in quotation marks to suggesting that the paper change its name to the “New York Enquirer” to accusing the paper of “lionizing a predator.”
“Kyle Rittenhouse was just a little boy playing cops & robbers when a whoopsie happened,” read one tweet.
“Kyle Rittenhouse breaks down his most iconic racist murders with the New York Times,” read another.
All of these sentiments are false, logically unsound, and offensive. The article about Rittenhouse is actually a news article by journalists; there is no reason to put those words in derisive quotation marks. It is not “BS” and does not “lionize a predator,” as it is not even biased towards Rittenhouse, let alone lionizing him, plus Rittenhouse is not a predator.
To refer to Rittenhouse as “a little boy playing cops & robbers when a whoopsie happened” is moronic.
Additionally, Rittenhouse’s actions were neither murders, as he acted in self-defense, nor racist, as it was the people who attacked him who were rioting in support of a racist ideology.
What makes the reactions to the Rittenhouse article even more inappropriate is the fact that these same people have demonstrated no outrage whatsoever in response to actual bias from the New York Times. Over the past two years, the Times has demonstrated egregious bias, more times than one could possibly count, against Donald Trump, against people who oppose totalitarian Covid restrictions, against people who value history and heritage, against people who support the Second Amendment, against people who protested at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and generally against anyone who holds dissenting, non-conventional, anti-establishment, or right-of-center political views. The fact that people are in an uproar and are canceling their subscriptions, not because of the Times’s repeated, blatant bias, but instead because the Times had the audacity to actually not be horrendously biased in one instance, is appalling and demonstrates the ridiculous amount of prejudice, intolerance, and lack of logic present in our society today.