The most relevant parts of this account of an Asian reporter being attacked during the Milwaukee hate protests may be the revelation of just how much the media knows it's motivated by racism and how much it covers up.
Consider this very telling paragraph...
Shortly after I arrived, I saw the beginnings of a shoving match between a line of policemen in riot gear and the distraught residents of the neighborhood. I was the only non-black person there at the time—the other news crews had left—and my presence was soon questioned: Some pointed me out as an interloper; others, like the reassuring activist, told me I would be fine. I brushed off the more hostile comments as much as I could: They were angry, and anger doesn’t always hit its intended target.
That last sentence is fantastic. This is the kind of thing that the media sees on a regular basis and then spins as "peaceful protest suddenly turns violent." Even in a piece discussing the violent attack on him, Mak starts out by providing justifications for the attackers.
Another intern, a white man who had arrived later on to take photos, huddled beside me. After the gunfire ceased, he emerged from behind the car to take more pictures while I stayed behind.
“Get your white ass out of here!” he soon heard. “You better not let me fucking catch you!”
After trying unsuccessfully to defuse the situation, my colleague was flying down the street with a group of men chasing him. Wanting to help, but not knowing how, I decided to run after them. In order to run faster, my colleague dropped the two bulky cameras hanging around his neck. When I tried to retrieve them, and yelled at him to get out of the area, some in the group of rioters started chasing after me too. As a former back-of-the-pack runner in middle school gym class, I wasn’t surprised when they caught me. When they threw me to the ground, I reflexively curled up into a ball. Blows landed on my back, head and torso.
“Stop! He’s not white! He’s Asian!”
I wasn’t sure who said it, or how they knew my race, but within seconds, the punches stopped. Someone grabbed me by the arm and lifted me up. As my vision came back into focus, I saw a group of concerned black faces and heard someone repeating, “Don’t fuck with Chinese dudes.” My attackers had run off. Those who had intervened escorted me to safety.
This is what a Black Lives Matter hate rally looks like. It's blatant racism. We're talking about an incident of purely racially motivated violence. Yet the truth has to be spun and spun.
But as an Asian-American who’s concerned with systemic racism, it would be naive for me to pretend—especially in moments like this, when anger over the treatment of African-Americans bubbles over into violence—that race wasn’t part of why people came out to protest in Milwaukee, or part of sifting out who belongs there.
As race and police violence become a higher-profile issue in America, many Asian-Americans are still trying to figure out where—or if—we fit in to the movement. Black Lives Matter is the highest-profile effort to push for minority rights in America right now. It was born of grievances just like those we’re seeing in Milwaukee; at each killing, whether Milwaukee or Baton Rouge or St. Paul, BLM emerges as the voice pushing for police accountability, for the full dignity of Americans who’ve been deprived of it. It’s also, explicitly, an African-American cause. Should Asian-Americans like me count ourselves part of the same effort to fight for minority rights, or are we at odds with it?
This is a "journalist" discussing whether he should be supporting a news story that he's covering. Journalism is dead. All that's left is parsing the degrees of acceptable left-wing advocacy.