Though The Daily Caller’s reporting on a Black Lives Matters activist’s questionable finances was a “legitimate” and “totally valid” story, the Washington Post’s Callum Borchers criticized it anyway as an attempt to distract people from the anti-police brutality movement.
BLM activist Shaun King used several charities to raise money for anti-law enforcement brutality efforts, The Daily Caller reported this week. However, the report revealed, the charities King used to raise money were never registered as nonprofits.
That means that people who gave King money with the expectation that it would be put towards anti-brutality efforts didn’t necessarily get what they paid for, the Post conceded, referring to the Daily Caller report as a “legitimate watchdog story.”
King, the New York Daily News’s “senior justice writer,” later owned up to the story, assuring his supporters in a Facebook post that he had already returned “every single donation that we’ve ever received (all the way back to September of 2014).”
But while the Caller story was “totally valid,” and there are questions surrounding King’s fundraising efforts, it seems clear conservative media has it out for King and the whole Black Lives Matter movement, the Post suggested Thursday.
As proof that the Caller report was being used to discredit the BLM movement, the Post sited a handful of tweets from obscure social media users.
“The thing is, Black Lives Matter isn’t really about Shaun King — or any other individual. He’s a prominent figure, making his actions newsworthy (and undeniably a bad look for BLM),” Borchers, whose beat is described as the “intersection of politics and media,” reported.
“But whether he’s a con man, a poor manager or just overly ambitious has no bearing on whether he and tens of thousands of others raise valid issues about the way black people are viewed and treated by law enforcement,” he added.
He explained that it’s unfair to write off all of BLM because of the questionable actions of one player. “Yet, that seems to be the aim of highlighting King’s problems,” the Post added.
Borchers then contrasted the way in which politicians are vetted by media with how conservative news outlets like The Daily Caller have “gone after” King.
“King isn’t running for anything. And no one needs to trust him before engaging in meaningful discussions about race relations. The charity story, while totally valid, really is a distraction when it comes to the broader political debate,” he wrote.
