Headline Roundup • June 10th, 2025
Are Conservatives Overstating the Violence in LA or are Liberal Media Outlets Downplaying It?
Media Bias,Media Industry,Politics,ICE,Unauthorized Immigration,Migrants,California,Defense And Security,National Guard,Protests,Gavin Newsom,Donald Trump,Police
Summary from the AllSides News Team
As immigration operations in Los Angeles have led to protests and violence, media from left and right have offered very different framings. Many outlets from the left have suggested violence has been minimal, while outlets from the right have accused liberal media of downplaying the situation.
For Context: California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) and President Trump have been involved in a public dispute over the handling of the situation, with Newsom arguing Trump’s decision to send in the National Guard made things worse.
From The Left: ABC News (Lean Left bias) and the Los Angeles Times (Lean Left) offered a similar framing, emphasizing that violence has been isolated to a small part of LA and highlighting President Trump’s framing is different from that of California officials like Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass. ABC wrote that the two “have accused Trump of making sensational public claims about how widespread the violence has been” and “said the Los Angeles police and sheriff's departments could handle the unrest on their own.” Associated Press (Left) similarly wrote, “Much of the city saw no violence.”
From The Right: Some outlets on the right criticized liberal media’s framing of the protests. The New York Post Editorial Board (Right) published an opinion criticizing liberal media that opened, “Get ready for the 2025 version of ‘mostly peaceful protest.’ It’s ‘a small part of the city.’” National Review’s Forgotten Fact Checks (Right) referenced a prolific CNN (Lean Left) TV headline from 2020 that described police brutality protests as “fiery, but mostly peaceful” and suggested “major media outlets flipped back in their playbooks” to this “page.” National Review also highlighted TV coverage from ABC 7 Los Angeles, where an anchor suggested law enforcement had exacerbated what was “just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn” into a bigger confrontation.
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Featured Coverage of this Story
REUTERS
Get ready for the 2025 version of “mostly peaceful protest.”
It’s “a small part of the city.”
Even liberal media know it looks bad when Mexican flag-waving punks are wearing skull masks and setting fire to cars. It’s hard to paint President Trump as a fascist when protesters from another country are inciting violence and looting. They’re desperate to minimize what’s going on, to suggest that it’s Trump who is inflaming the situation and not the rioters themselves.
President Donald Trump defended his decision to send the National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quash protests that turned violent, saying in a social media post on Sunday that "if we had not done so, Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated."
Trump alleged the nation's second largest city, which covers more than 500 square miles, had been "invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals" and that he had directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi to coordinate with all relevant agencies to "take all such actions...
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