A friend sent me this USAToday article, He's a Trump supporter who threatened officials over 2020 election. I asked him why. This article was a summary of the reporter's interview with Mark Anthony Rissi, who is headed to prison for 2 1/2 years for threatening two Arizona election officials. After reading the article I had to calm myself down a minute. I have written about the abhorrent state of American media many times, so it would be easy to ignore just another example on another day. But, with the inconsistent approach, stereotypically poor journalism, political narratives, obvious preconceived notions, bias, media opinion and total disregard for truth, perspective and balance included within, I decided to comment in detail. I organize my comments in the following areas. Political narratives bolded throughout. - Mark Anthony Rissi, the guilty man - the reporter, William Proctor - dialogue - total disregard for truth, perspective and balance Mark Anthony Rissi - The guy being interviewed, Mark Anthony Rissi, who made the threatening calls, obviously has problems. None of what he did was necessary. Even if you understand and agree with his position on the election, and the frustration that goes along with that position, this was an extremely poor decision on his part. He deserves what he got. -Mr. Rissi offers no apology and really no excuse for what he did. While there is no acceptable reason to make such threatening calls, Mr. Rissi does offer a few. The reporter calls them excuses. If a reporter were truthfully looking for why this happened, he would have listened to what Mr. Rissi said.

-he has personal problems & health issues -he had a death in the family that greatly affected him -he was angry at the election results -he was frustrated in that he believed the election was stolen by the Democrat political apparatus -his situation created a short fuse for his election related frustration

For perspective, those same reasons apply to the George Floyd, 'summer of love riots', in 2020. People angry & frustrated taking to the streets. People threatening, stealing, fire bombing an historic church, setting fire to a federal building, attacking the White House, destroying public statues and other images of the US, assaulting people in restaurants and other public places, and taking over cities and making demands (some still occupied). For all this the media excuses the rioters and justifies their actions. Even attempted murder and murder are not prosecuted but defended. Witnessing this, also fuels frustration and rage, but no media justification for the reaction. Just media attachment of this frustration to a popular political narrative, racism. Why? The preferred political narratives must be supported! Reporters are dispatched to look for ways to support preferred political narratives. And, thus, they include no truth, perspective or balance in their reporting. When you challenge them on this, they offer two other newly developed narratives; Bothsiderism and Whataboutism, as if to say if you provide some realistic perspective, then you mess up my narrative, so I will exclude it. the reporter, William Proctor - The reporter doing the interview, William Proctor, is a experienced, stereo-typically biased, liberal reporter. The reason I say that is his questions aren't designed to get the answer his headline states, why? His questions are designed to let the reporter present a standard right wing nut, democracy threat image to the reader. The reporter focuses on his (Mr. Proctor's) need for Rissi to be contrite and not provide excuses (which would be anything Mr Rissi says). That’s because the reporter already has a caricature of Rissi in mind, and will not allow him to have any justification or even accept his comments as important enough to consider. Different than if he was talking to a left-wing extremist, in which case he would highlight their actions as justified and mostly peaceful. Rissi's medical issues don’t seem like excuses. I see them as reasons why his fuse was so short. That’s not a justification, but it provides some insight. It was included in the way reporters looked at some of the left-wing extremists during the 'summer of love' 2020 riots. Those reporters tended to justify their actions for broad social justice reasons. Like protests trying to justify Hamas' actions against Israel as justified freedom fighting, that is transparently false & political, and  hidden by the media. - Mr. Proctor, refers to people wearing long guns, threatening those they disagree with, being violent, as traits of right wing extremists. While you can certainly find a right wing nut to highlight, this is not a national problem. This opinion added in supports the overall political narrative he as against Mr. Rissi. What Mr. Rissi is guilty of is not threatening election officials in Arizona, but having an opinion Mr. Proctor and the other half of the country don't approve of. He, like the media at large, ignore the overwhelming majority of main stream left-wing progressives who dress in dark assault style clothing, attack people in the open who they disagree with, control their free-speech, deny others the ability to speak in public places, and college campuses. All of this is considered justified protest or 'counter protestors', instead of riot and violence and hatred. Democrat operatives call local school districts, conservative board members, on obvious robocalls from DC, to threaten their lives.  None of this is reported either. - The lens they use to identify political violence, should really be a mirror, pointed back at the accuser because the issue is the opposite of the one being portrayed. The hatred, and all the attacks on people with a different opinion, comes regularly, daily, hourly, from the progressive left. A current example is all the anti-Israel protests & antisemitism, which, by the way, over the last few years has been pointed disproportionately and falsely by the media at the political right, which is completely opposite from the truth. And, now that their antisemitism is out for everyone to see, the media, in the language it uses, tries to hide the source as being the left. If it was demonstrably the right, they would be using the narratives, ad nauseam, to help point out that the fear of antisemitism should be of people on the right, as with this article yesterday, Nevada man accused of sending threatening, antisemitic messages to senator.  The only reason this was published is to highlight that the culprit was apparently right leaning. Yet none of this violent antisemitism is so clearly highlighted in the left wing media. The reason being to present the political message the left wing politicians, and their political allies in the media, want the public to have. Not the truth. - Mr. Proctor uses the term 'MAGA' disparagingly to assist in that objective. MAGA has been given a negative connotation by the media & President Biden, and that’s why the media uses it. MAGA is a shorthand political narrative now, designed to represent other political narratives like Trump, right wing extremism, and the threat to democracy from the right. Those are all opposite from the truth, but the media doesn’t operate in truth or fairness. They operate in political narratives. Narratives and support for narratives permeate this article. This is a problem because we expect more of the media than from the rest of us political hacks. - Good example of Mr. Proctor's immersion in political narratives and left-wing messaging is his personal comment when Rissi talked about 'they needed no reason to impeach Trump twice'. The reporter added, 'why, didn’t you listen to the hearings?' If you really listened to either or both of the impeachment hearings, you didn’t hear any evidence, you heard opinion. Similar to the Russia hoax investigation. These are all political narratives. Decision made. The objective being, mention the narratives as many times as possible, tying them to other narratives as much as possible to create the desired negative message of the political opposition, as much as possible. - The opposite is always the truth in these scenarios. For example, when he talked about Rissi, he was a conspiracy theorist, programmed and trained to a particular mindset. That is exactly the hypnotic circumstance that affects the radical left. They are conspiracy theorists (Trump is in cahoots with the Russians), programmed (Trump led a coup to overturn the 2020 election), and hypnotized to respond a certain way (racist, sexist, homophobic, ant-science, ...) to a specific trigger stimulus. This week, if you say something about the murderous terrorist group Hamas, you are Islamaphobic, according to President Biden. And, so on... -  'A lawless revision of America'. That is the reporter's description of his view of Rissi. In reality, since we are now talking about the reporter's opinion, in my mind, that phrase describes what inter-city Americans face every day when we walk outside or down the street, 'A lawless revision of America'. Defunding of police, no arrest for theft under $1000, no prosecution of criminals arrested. That is not a fear of so-called MAGA extremists, but a fear of violence from the left, or people, motivated to, and allowed to commit violence by the left. This includes FBI raids on the homes and families of conservatives who do nothing violent, only disagree with the approved government opinion/narratives. - When the Mr. Proctor talks about the need to trust in our voting and other institutions, he is pushing another political narrative, threats to our democracy. He seems to conveniently forget what Al Gore did to election integrity in 2000. What Hillary Clinton did, and still does, to election integrity in 2016. What Stacey Abrams does every time she runs for governor in Georgia and loses. - Mr. Proctor connects Rissi's crime in Arizona to the Jan 6th political narrative. Rissi did not attend the Jan 6th rally. Yet the reporter desires to tie the two together and include his opinion anyway that Jan 6th was 'a coup attempt'. January 6, 2021 was not a attempted coup d’état, period! All you have to do is watch the actions of the people who were trespassing that day and you can see that. There was riot, broken doors and windows when 700 out of 80,000 protestors acted ignorantly. If this was a progressive riot the media would call it a 'mostly peaceful protest' and the person who shot Ashli Babbit would have been in jail. But, because the media objective is to create negative political narratives focused at their opposition, the narrative is now 'a coup attempt'. If Jan 6th was an attempted coup, it was a laughable attempt. The riot on January 6 was not justified, it was ignorant, disheartening, and significantly damaging to the future of the United States. Why? Because of the negative optics and it arms the media and the radical left with these false and inconsistent political narratives. Dialogue - I agree with with Mr. Proctor that dialogue is critical. I don’t know anyone on the right who doesn’t want to have a anger-free, true dialogue with somebody on the left. But, it is people on the left who shout down everyone on the right who wishes to engage in such dialogue. Also, the left fails in that dialogue in other ways as well, as they will give no ground in a negotiation. If you want to talk to them about how we can find common ground, the common ground exists only in agreeing with the left. Otherwise you are 'on the wrong side of history', which is another false narrative. And, of course the reporter doesn’t talk about any of that. It’s not a popular political narrative in the media and creating a picture that includes perspective and balance on an issue is not the media's objective. And really, Mr. Proctor doesn't want to have a true dialogue with Mr Rissi. He is just trying to get points he needs to support the narrative of a dangerous right wing conspiracy nut, who represents half the country and you should be afraid of. total disregard for truth, perspective and balance - All of the above points to a media, evidenced by this reporter, who is interested in only political messaging. That reporters are political operatives occupying a supposedly virtuous American press corps That's why it is so harmful and why Trump says the current American media is 'an enemy of the people'. If they were an asset to the people, or a reliable information source to the people, they would offer perspective, balance and truth on issues, no matter which political side is the focus of a story. They would pursue these principles and not pursue political narratives. -The majority of the American public, even though they realize the bias and limitations of the media, are still heavily influenced by the narratives and opinions they are served on a daily basis. Thus, sending out these false & incomplete messages to the public works. It is a problem because we expect more of the media than from the rest of us political hacks. And unfortunately, they deliver nothing more.