The Trump administration is working with right-wing influencers to shape the public’s understanding of protests against ICE in Portland, Ore.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Social media personalities are shaping the public’s understanding of a possible National Guard troop deployment to Portland, Oregon. Right-wing influencers are now working with the federal government to try to promote its message, as Erik Neumann of Oregon Public Broadcasting reports.
ERIK NEUMANN, BYLINE: On Tuesday, Benny Johnson, a pro-Trump social media personality from Florida, arrived here.
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BENNY JOHNSON: Yo. What’s up? We are on the ground in Portland, Oregon.
NEUMANN: Johnson and three other social media influencers met with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and toured the ICE facility, where there have been protests since June.
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JOHNSON: The Trump administration is here today. Follow along. The Trump administration ain’t going to have any of this. It’s going to be a rowdy day.
NEUMANN: Standing on the rooftop, Johnson and the other influencers filmed Noem for their millions of viewers online. But it wasn’t rowdy. On the street below, around 20 reporters from local and national outlets stood behind yellow caution tape, along with a dozen protesters. It was a sunny, fall day in Portland, far from the burning hellscape portrayed online. Still, influencer Nick Sortor warned Noem that she wasn’t seeing the real story.
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NICK SORTOR: This is absolutely nothing as to what it is at night, though.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: No. It’s at night that it’s bad.
SORTOR: It’s really bad at night.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah.
SORTOR: That sun goes down and it gets totally lawless.
NEUMANN: This kind of media access is an example of how the Trump administration is working with right-wing influencers to shape the public’s understanding of events. Local media have not been given the same access when they requested it. A.J. Bauer is an assistant professor who studies media activism at the University of Alabama. He says the current Trump administration is working with these influencers to justify the president’s actions.
AJ BAUER: The streamers are actually counterprotesters themselves who are going and documenting the protests that they disagree with. The government is actually working hand in glove with those folks in order to promote the government’s message.
NEUMANN: Bauer says right-wing influencers don’t follow the journalistic norms of balance and independence. Instead, he says, they start out with an ideological vision of the world and then narrate what they see in a way that fits that vision.
BAUER: The consequences are that we’ve got two competing visions of reality.
NEUMANN: There have been almost nightly protests outside of Portland’s ICE facility for months. Since June, the Portland Police Bureau has made at least 47 arrests, and federal officials have arrested dozens more, though, not everyone has been charged with a crime. The protests themselves span just one or two city blocks. But these influencers spin a story that chaos is rampant, and now they’re having the biggest impact possible by shaping how President Trump views the protests. They repeated that vision to him at a White House roundtable on Wednesday.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The amazing thing is you look at Portland, and you see fires all over the place. You see fights and, I mean, just violence.
NEUMANN: Oregon officials have rejected the need to send in the National Guard. Matt Tardio is a conservative podcaster who regularly livestreams these protests. On a recent night outside the ICE facility, he said he’s trying to capture everything that’s going on, not just the clashes between protesters and police.
MATT TARDIO: I do know that I’ve caught some coming-up streamers, or whatever they were trying to be, actually legitimately trying to start problems and having hidden cameramen off to the side, trying to capture those problems starting so that they can have their viral clips. That’s messed up.
NEUMANN: Tardio, who is a veteran, agrees that the online perception is exaggerated.
TARDIO: I can’t tell you the amount of times I said, I don’t feel the National Guard needs to come out here.
NEUMANN: But that hasn’t stopped other influencers from repeating the story about a war-ravaged city that gets amplified by Trump officials and repackaged across the conservative media ecosystem.
For NPR News, I’m Erik Neumann in Portland, Oregon.
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