CNN’s Brian Stelter said that despite the media’s “good faith attempts to separate peaceful protests from the violent,” the American people generally “don’t want to hear it.”

BRIAN STELTER, CNN: On one level, protests are always about images-about spectacle. You might even say it’s about theater. And we’re seeing that play out in L.A., and it’s valuable to have that perspective as we view some of these pictures. Especially when we zoom out and recognize that the unrest is isolated-it is not overtaking the entire city of L.A. L.A. is home to millions of people, most of whom are having a normal day here on Sunday. But in these pockets of unrest, images on social media have been spreading quickly and some very misleading. There have been sensational videos from today (2025), but there have also been old clips from 2020 resurfacing, misleading people on sites like X. For example, Senator Ted Cruz wrote, This does not look peaceful, linking to a video that is not from today but from 2020 in the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. We’ve seen conservative influencers sharing this old footage as if it’s brand new, lumping peaceful protesters together with violent rioters and arguing the whole thing is a mess-and thus President Trump is right to send in the National Guard. There’s a lot of conflation going on. But if I learned one thing during the 2020 uprisings, it’s that all the good-faith attempts to separate peaceful protests from the violent, bad-faith actors kind of falls apart. Many people don’t want to hear it; many Americans don’t want to hear it and don’t want to distinguish in moments like this. I’ve seen dialogue on social media tonight, including from those involved in the protests, saying that when cars are set ablaze-when Waymo cars are burning in downtown L.A.-that does not help the cause of these protesters.

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