Britain’s Sky News has embarrassed itself with a new report, this week, on the U.S. antifa movement.
It’s a shame, because Sky News is normally a provider of honest, objective reporting and well-informed analysis.
Alas, not this time.
The report begins with correspondent Hannah Thomas Peter visiting antifa in Portland, Ore. The antifa activists start their show-off for Sky by posting papers around Portland and describing their “necessary reconnaissance” of what they describe as a local alt-right activist. The Nazi-esque quality to this “beware, political opponent” campaign is apparently lost on Thomas Peter, who happily endorses antifa as they would wish to be described: “anti-fascists.”
Next, the crew follows antifa as they accost a group of immigration control activists. Peter’s narrative is absurdly sympathetic to antifa as its members surround a group of teenage boys, take away their campaign literature, rip it up and throw it in the boys’ faces. Watch from the 4-minute mark here. There is something exceptionally unpleasant about a group of masked men threatening a clearly intimidated group of boys for practicing their right to peacefully assemble and petition in support of their beliefs. Indeed, it is un-American.
Instead, with the context of shock and dismay at the campaigners rather than the antifa, Sky’s reporter remarked that “they’re so young!”
Then comes a truly vintage antifa activist, who explained, “[The alt-right] have to be quashed when they’re small and by any means necessary.” Again, this is the language of the Nazi, and any serious reporter would push back against it with a simple question: “but what about free speech?”
Insanely, however, Peter only interviews one of the alt-right activists for about 30 seconds.
And then we’re back at it again: Sky News decides to link the alt-right to Jeremy Christian, a racist killer who took the lives of two honorable men who tried to defend a group of Muslims against his harassment. It’s moral blurring of the most unpleasant and unjustified form: and true proof of the reporter’s missing objectivity.
Don’t get me wrong, I am no alt-righter. But I believe in the founders’ democracy: of free speech and the right to say things that are unpleasant to many. In contrast, antifa believe in intimidation and violence against anyone who dares exercise such rights.
If nothing else, they should always be challenged in their interviews. That didn’t happen here, and Sky News should be ashamed.
