SETH MICHAEL MEYER
Staff Columnist
Over our fall break, I had a chance to head back home to Erie, P.A., on the same day the president was also visiting Erie for a Congressional rally. With crowds gathering and helicopters buzzing I did what any sane man would do and stayed far away from that mess. I also did so knowing that I would get the highlights of the event later that evening.
The first of the details spilling out of the event were from high school friends on my Facebook feed, all on the side of the protestors. There were claims of rocks being thrown and overall incivility coming from the empowered republican base.
To my surprise, I heard that Kaitlin Bennett was at the event interviewing protestors. If you don’t recognize the name, I’m sure you will recognize the story: Bennett came under scrutiny in May of this year when she posed for graduation pictures with an AR-10 rifle and a graduation cap with the words “Come and take it” pasted to it.
Bennett was in Erie that day with microphone in hand and camera rolling to interview left-wing protestors for Liberty Hangout, a self-proclaimed “media outlet” with a libertarian tilt. Bennett was doing what is indicative of most independent media by engaging in this type of “gotcha journalism” with the people they are aiming to delegitimize.
Seeing this type of journalism repeatedly can cultivate the belief that everyone who adheres to the party you oppose is just as moronic as the next person. Taking it in with a grain of salt can be quite revealing and even humorous, but Bennett misses the mark in a couple crucial ways.
First is the egregious sin of video editing. In Bennett’s five-minute video on Liberty Hangout’s YouTube channel, she starts off by saying she will be asking protesters about Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.
From there, we watch her interview seven different people (with roughly 10 seconds of footage each) before there is any more mention of Kavanaugh and even then, it’s hardly discussed. Whatever substantive dialogue did take place obviously did not make the final cut. To make her viewers feel intellectually superior, she certainly would not want to show the opposition providing any rational arguments.
For her to do this is sad because, as a matter of fact, there was productive conversation between Bennett and the protestors, according to some of my peers who did engage with her. Other conservative bloggers and journalists like Steven Crowder of “Louder With Crowder” and Owen Troyer from “Info Wars” pride themselves in providing uncut, unedited dialogue with people who disagree with them. At the very best, what Bennett spoon-feeds her audience is illegitimate journalism by cropping out potentially valuable dialogue. (If you really do believe that she is showing the extent of her opposition’s intellectual capacity, you have already succumbed to such mental cultivation. There’s no return. Sorry.)
The second sin, which I find more atrocious than the first, is using her go-to motto: “You know I carry, right?” Within Bennett’s Erie segment, she mentions having a concealed weapon about four times and I’m sure that number goes up when you add the omitted footage. Her mentioning that she’s packing was hardly provoked and extremely irresponsible as a “journalist.”
Look, I don’t care if you carry a concealed firearm. It is your right to choose to carry as much as it is someone else’s right to choose to not carry. It is shameful to use that as a pre-programmed response to contention, especially when you very much chose to dive in to contention.
Bennett engaging in dialogue with protesters, no matter how framed it is, is not provocative of violence, but unwarrantedly mentioning being armed is, at the very least, irresponsible, even for a non-mainstreamed media reporter, like herself.
If there is one thing to take away from Bennett’s unfortunate performance in Erie, it’s that there is a whole story and a whole truth, of which only half is ever shown.