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NBC News Trivializes Blaze Reporter’s FBI Arrest To Legitimize Police State Tactics
The Federalist ^ | MARCH 04, 2024 | SHAWN FLEETWOOD

Posted on 03/05/2024 6:44:15 AM PST by lasereye

As part of its undeclared role as a mouthpiece for President Biden and his administration, NBC News is trying to whitewash the FBI’s arrest of a Blaze Media reporter for covering the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol.

After the FBI informed him early last week of its warrant for his arrest, Blaze investigative reporter Steve Baker surrendered himself to federal authorities in Dallas, Texas, on Friday, and was charged on four counts related to his coverage of the Jan. 6 riot. As The Federalist previously reported, Baker has been at the forefront of counter-narrative reporting on the events that day.

Rather than highlight the Vladimir Putin-like behavior of the Biden administration arresting a journalist for exercising his First Amendment rights, NBC’s “news” division attempted to delegitimize Baker by referring to him as a “libertarian writer” and “musician,” who “led a David Bowie tribute band” and just so happens to write for The Blaze.

“Musician and libertarian writer who works for ‘The Blaze’ arrested on Jan. 6 charges,” the NBC News headline blared. The article’s author, NBC News justice reporter Ryan J. Reilly, waited until the 22nd paragraph to inform readers that Baker is the first Jan.6 defendant “who was working for an established media company at the time of his arrest.”

Before disclosing facts showing the Biden administration arresting journalists who report facts the government dislikes, Reilly undercut Baker’s role as a journalist during the Jan. 6 demonstrations by claiming “[o]ther Jan. 6 defendants have tried to avoid convictions by pointing to their media ties.”

For Reilly and NBC News, Baker’s arrest is nothing to get upset about because no reporter who works for an outlet that questions the government party counts as a journalist.

According to corporate media outlets like NBC News, you’re only a real journalist if you push debunked hoaxes like those claiming Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election; or characterizing Brett Kavanaugh as a serial gang rapist, who was able to get away with his horrific crimes for years without anyone knowing about it. The objective isn’t to report the news but to manipulate it in a way that advances the Democrat Party narrative.

NBC News’ whitewashing of Baker’s arrest and obvious disdain for news organizations and reporters who hold government agencies accountable for their barbaric behavior isn’t all that surprising, either. As Tristan Justice previously wrote in these pages, the outlet admitted in 2020 to colluding with a foreign leftist disinformation group to pressure Google into preventing The Federalist “from profiting off ads generated by the company’s search engine.”

The U.K.-based, Center for Countering Digital Hate, was sued by X owner Elon Musk in July for “scaring off advertisers with allegedly baseless claims of rampant ‘hate’ speech on the platform, otherwise known as content with which left-wing censors disagree,” Justice reported.

For all their pearl-clutching over Republicans’ criticisms of the media’s propaganda for Democrats and hyperbolic rhetoric about how “democracy dies in darkness,” corporate “journalists” don’t care about ensuring freedom of the press. They only care about carrying water for Democrats, even as Democrats mimic authoritarian countries in abusing government power to squash free speech and dissent across the globe.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: doj; fbi; jan6th; nbc; policestate; politicalprisoners; ryanjreilly; ryanreilly; stevebaker

1 posted on 03/05/2024 6:44:15 AM PST by lasereye
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To: lasereye

NBC gives Trump the green light to arrest and prosecute every member of the media present on Jan 6 as soon as he is re-elected...


2 posted on 03/05/2024 6:49:54 AM PST by eyeamok
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To: lasereye

Recently watched the 1943 film “This Land Is Mine” about the Nazi occupation of a fictional European town during WWII. Censorship, arrest without trial, suppression of free speech, hostage taking, and murder. It struck me as the plot unfolded that I was watching what America is becoming — a tyrannical police state. Au secours!


3 posted on 03/05/2024 6:56:09 AM PST by twister881
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To: lasereye

The police state will stop once the police are targeted.


4 posted on 03/05/2024 7:00:56 AM PST by nonliberal (Z.)
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To: lasereye

As long as the Roberts family owns NBC, it will remain a marxist propaganda platform.


5 posted on 03/05/2024 7:16:12 AM PST by allendale
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To: eyeamok

NBC gives Trump the green light to arrest and prosecute every member of the media present on Jan 6 as soon as he is re-elected...

Nancy Pelosi kid was there filming. Somehow they just knew that things would happen......
Same deal, same treatment, that’s Justice.


6 posted on 03/05/2024 7:30:02 AM PST by Pete Dovgan
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To: lasereye
GGYZ50y-Xc-AAUm-Ig
7 posted on 03/05/2024 8:05:09 AM PST by cuz1961 (USCGR Vet, John Adams Descendant , deal with it.)
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To: nonliberal

“The police state will stop once the police are targeted.”

Reminds me of this sage advice:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956


8 posted on 03/05/2024 8:20:14 AM PST by MeganC (Ruzzians aren't people. )
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To: MeganC

Yup. I have that quote too. I got flamed on this site for suggesting that any cop that enforces lockdown, mask and vaccine mandates during Covid deserved to be shot.


9 posted on 03/05/2024 8:21:39 AM PST by nonliberal (Z.)
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To: twister881

[Censorship, arrest without trial, suppression of free speech]

.........good thing it was only a movie and not real life.........

oh......


10 posted on 03/05/2024 9:35:55 AM PST by SaveFerris (Luke 17:28 ... as it was in the Days of Lot; They did Eat, They Drank, They Bought, They Sold ......)
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To: lasereye

Just wait until the FBI, aka GBU, arrests Lester Holt durin in this broadcast for something they didn’t like.


11 posted on 03/05/2024 9:50:15 AM PST by DownInFlames (p)
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